Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Needs $20K
TaranRampersad writes "Wikipedia's server is crashing off and on, and Jimmy Wales has posted a letter requesting some assistance from anyone out there with a dollar burning a hole in their pocket. Let's face it, you really don't need that candybar anyway ..."
I'm too cheap to donate, and I'm only 16 anyway...
But Wikipedia is a really good resource-- I've contributed to it myself.
SomethingAwful recently raised a lot of money in a short amount of time for some army people going to Iraq. Even Sharereactor.com, a great, um, edonkey search engine thingamjig, was able to raise more than $5,000 for a faster connection.
It's really interesting how much people donate online. If I had the money and the means, I'd donate to Wikipedia myself.
I think Wikipedia may be able to reach their goal. It appears to be popular enough to be able to raise the money....
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Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
Wikipidia is a great website, though! If I had $20,000 (or any money, for that matter) I would definitely donate to this organization.
Wikipedia contains a wealth of information on a myriad of subjects, nearly anything you can think of, and all the documents are covered under a GPL-like license. The information found there is very useful and in-depth. I can't count the times I've been aimlessly browsing the web for a certain piece of information, only to find it right away on Wikipedia (that is, assuming the site wasn't down, which seems to be quite frequent of late).
C'mon guys, let's help support this site, and the spirit of open source documents.
OK, the servers are crashing because they can't distribute the load properly. Story asking for donations gets posted on Slashdot. Servers suffer a coronary.
I can't help but wonder if that 20k figure goes up after slashizens romp on Wiki.
The problem with something like this becomes an issues of whether or not one believes the guy for one, secondly many will think "Oh well such and such amount of people use it, and I know they'll send something so I won't" which translates to little money being sent. (that's for starters)
Now 20,000.00 is a lot of money for a 'server'.
e4500 w/8 400mhz cpu's 1gb ram under $1500.00 (15 hundred)
e3500 w/8 336mhz 4 gigs ram 72gb space... $2200.00
IBM AS/400 9406 820 with 2395 Processor, 1521 Interactive Card isn't even $20k
Sun CobaltRAQ 4i (10 UNITS) RAQ 4i 256MB 40GB NEW HD 7200ROM total? $5,500.00
What is it this guy is supposedly running for $20k certainly piques my curiousity, and I'm not trolling. Hell I'll send him $5.00 and I don't even use his product
MoFscker
Hehe slashdotting the site doesn't help it, but it made me wonder...
A quote from the letter:
"The essential problem is that we do not currently have enough hardware to cope with routine failures of any kind. When any one of our machines goes down, we experience cascading problems due in part to the excess load on the entire system."
If their servers are crashing under user load, its not exactly hardware related. I would start by looking to see *why* its crashing, as I would say its more software configuration related. Plus, if you have alot of servers serving one website, a single crash of one of them shouldn't affect the main site in any way shape or form, more over, it should just drop the connected users, much like a netsplit on IRC.
Dunno. I'm not knocking them, but now they are getting slashdotted, I would start to look at the config, and fast...
NeoThermic
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
Heck, wikipedia helped me pass my CSET exam for English. That certification entitled me to a US40K$ job which I'm enjoying today. It's free and it's a decent resource for the cash strapped info hungry. The best part is that if you see an error in your domain of knowledge you can fix it. :)
When you look up the Vietnam War in my mom and dad's encyclopedia, it says that is is small conflict in that the US is winning.
Does anyone have the details of what their system is architected like, what thet expected load is, and what hardware they want to buy? We don't even know if their problem is networking equipment, cpu power, disk speed, bandwidth, we have no idea about anything! This information is available nowhere and the link to get more information - the mailing list - tells you it's down.
Anyway, at the end of the day, if a community of people needs a service, and they themselves support that service, isn't that, by long-standing definition, a collective? Wouldn't it be more profitable for Wiki to call a spade a spade, call itself a collective, and get on with raising money from its community and providing them with the service?
I'm an independent web publisher producing 3 web sites that generate a fairly large amount of traffic. One thing that I've noticed is the surprise on people's faces when I describe details of my sites and how much they cost to operate in terms of hardware and backbone connection.
...
Most people are under the impression that it costs a lot of money to handle the physical requirements of high-traffic web sites. The surprise always comes when I tell them that it costs me less than $99 per month to operate the physical equipment... with 1TB allocated transfer on a REAL dedicated server at a colo.
My opinion is that most web operators either aren't resourceful enough, or simply overestimate the costs of operating a web site.
I don't know what WIKIpedia's web traffic looks like, but I tend to think that they could manage to solve their problems on much less than $20k for hardware. Perhaps they should share some info and take a few suggestions from other web operators.
Companies like UnitedColo offer really great service at unbeatable prices! For a couple hundred dollars per month, WIKI could easily go the rented/dedicated server approach rather than worry about building a custom server for the same job.
My $.02
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
> I realize how many times I've either checked something on wikipedia, or Googled for something only to find myself reading the best general purpose article on a subject on wikipedia.
Yup, I'll second that. Wikipedia articles can be inconsistent -- but when they're good, they can be very good indeed. On some topics, I have found Wikipedia to have the best short survey article I can find on the web.
As time goes on, it will just keep getting better and more comprehensive.
Projects like Wikipedia represent the very best of the potential of the Internet.
I for one think donating to a church so they can build another wing to the church is a complete waste of money. Makes the Mozilla => Amiga look like an inspired deal in comparison, but you do not find me bringing that up. ;-)
Help fight continental drift.
Why don't the Wikipedia people allow their site to be mirrored? A lot of people have some extra bandwidth and disk space to share. It could be hosted in multiple places similar to the way the Jargon File is distributed?
This would be a great problem for a wiki grid or something.
The problem is that the peers reviewing it are often not experts in the field either.
And worse yet, because the articles are written by individuals in accordance with their preferences, some subjects are short of some basic information that a more well rounded article would include.
Note that the same rough edges often exist in free software projects.
You might consider Wikipedia's (meta) page titled Making fun of Britannica before holding it up too much as an absolutely authoritative reference.
Now you may say what would this have to do with your post, much. For the typical user who's using DSL it may not be a problem, but on information based material, I would be skeptical to have a slew of file sharing going on due to authenticity issues. What if some retard decides to redo documents? What would be viable would be again, to check with some educational institute to see about using their resources, or starting writing to some of these foundations, e.g. Gates Foundation, to see if one of these ultra rich businessmen/women would be willing to donate to an extremely good cause.
MoFscker
Ok, I've never used wikipedia myself, it's a shame it's down right now because I wanted to give it a try.
I have seen other wiki sites and noticed that ANYONE could come in and make changes to existing articles.
How does wikipedia protect the integrity of GOOD articles? What's to stop some bozo from going in and wrecking a 10 page biography of an important historical figure with goatse links or other nonsense?
We finally ended up with a medium priced Britannica set - including the index on CD and the Britannica Junior. Note that at the time I was working in the budding Internet at the time - gopher and WAIS being just getting going and the Web only just starting to find its way out of Cern.
The books ended up in a separate room in our new house that we lovingly called the Library - and I actually got our two boys to use them once in a while for the first couple of years.
Of course we had full time connection to the budding 'Net during this time and I also helped them learn about it too.
We ended up donating the books to the High School - no tax write-off or anything - and giving the Juniors to my brother/sister-in-law for their younger kids to try. Our boys have found anything they've needed in the intervening years on the 'Net - but have had to have help to colate and interpret it. Nothing like what is in this project.
I wish I had the money now to give to Wikipedia. I've given some, and will try to give more in the not too distant future - and will continue to add articles as I see a need (and can fulfill it).
Even now that the major encylopedias are available via subscription on the 'Net, they lack the depth and immediacy that I've seen in WikiPedia. In some areas they are still ahead - but I expect that to change in day or weeks, certainly within months.
In the mean time - this is one of the best projects I've seen in my 15+ years connected with the 'Net - give if you can, please!
Keep up the great work - all of us/you :)
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
If I'm to understand correctly from the pages I'm getting from Wikipedia right now, the two dual-processor 2+ GHz servers are down and I'm seeing cached, static pages being served off a comparatively lowly P3/866 server.
And it's handling the load just fine.
So am I to understand that the two other servers -- which based on the hardware specs sound like they should still be covered by support contracts of *some* kind -- are there for "redundancy" and for a database that should only get hit when an article is published or a generated e-mail is being assembled? How many millions of emails are being generated per day? I remember 6 or 7 years ago building an app that sent 25,000 database-driven multipart mail messages an hour, on four Pentium 133-class machines. One of which was the database server, and the others were running a creaky 1.1 version of Java.
Please don't tell me Wikipedia normally generates every single page dynamically or that wiki code is getting executed with every page view. That would be mighty stupid.
Have a look at this about IBM and Wikipedia, pretty neat
While you have every right to have whatever opinion about me you want, you've made this "tax dodge" accusation numerous times. You do realize that you're accusing me of a crime, don't you? And that you don't have any evidence of your accusation, nor does it even make sense. An organization that has not yet been incorporated can't function as a "tax dodge."
All of your facts are wrong, but that's just stupidity. I think that when you accuse me of criminal activity, though, you cross a line. I'd really like you to stop unless you can demonstrate even a hint of evidence.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.