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The Wikipedians Who Make it Happen

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the slightly-less-bent-than-noders dept.

Phoe6 writes "Many of us might have wondered who these crazy people are, spending lot of time at wikipedia and presenting us with such an invaluable information. Wired has decided to give some credits to the most active wikipedians, in their article titled Wiki becomes a way of life"

7 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. Link to the first page... by Stradenko · · Score: 5, Informative

    page 1 of the article.

    The link in the post goes to page two for me ... not very nice.

  2. Re:Wiki by dkf · · Score: 5, Informative

    That sometimes happens (e.g. the page on Dubya at the time of the last US election). When it does, the page gets locked for a while so people can cool off and focus instead on conveying facts and balanced opinions.

    --
    "Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
  3. Re:I love the wikipedia, by Jon+Chatow · · Score: 5, Informative

    Bandwidth isn't the problem (or the cost, really), but the servers. We spend $4k-ish a month on bandwidth (off the top of my head; ICBW), but we spent about $65k in just the last 6 months on servers (see the server list).

    BTW, we prefer that people just call it "Wikipedia", without a definite article.

    --
    James F.
  4. Re:Wikipedia is too biased to be useful by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Your comment is utter bullshit, as anybody can verify by looking at the actual page.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Eagle_Scouts

    Also, there is no "they".

  5. Re:Wikipedia is too biased to be useful by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why is this comment being moderated up? A quick glance at the article's history shows that "Charles Manson" has never been added except for today, and has never been removed.

  6. Re:WTF? Why would you /. Wikipedia? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    talk of /.ing wikipedia kinda makes me laugh

    maybe it has happened in the past but wikipedia hardly notices /. now

    its a noticeable but small blip in the squids traffic to the squids and pretty much nothing at all beyond that

    there are two types of slashdotting:
    1: bandwidth slashdotting: wikipedia has a gigabit link that is not exactly heavilly utilised so this just isn't going to happen.

    2: server load slashdotting: (that is where a badly designed dynamic site can't keep up) squid pretty much takes care of making sure this doesn't happen (/.ers are very much a flash crowd they come they mostly view the same pages and then they go again if your site does seperate dynamic rendering for every pageview with no caching you are in trouble)

    the main reason the /. effect is so infamous is because of the types of sites /. targets wikipedia long ago passed the point where /. looks big

    http://www.alexa.com/site/site_stats/signup?site _u rl=wikipedia.org+slashdot.org&range=1y&widget=g&st yle=c&submitted=true&mode=graph&range=3m&amzn_id=

    wikipedia has had problems (power currupts power failure currupts absoloutely) and more recently some problems related to the software keeping transactions open too long whilst purging the squids and to a lesser extent hardware shortages. HOWEVER bandwidth and /. are NOT problems currently.

  7. Well, we do get spikes, they just don't hurt by Jamesday · · Score: 4, Informative
    Really obvious spikes are caused by Yahoo Japan. Extremely fast onset, 300-500 hits per second in less than a minute, then fast decay time over a few hours. One page so the Squids do an excellent job of caching it. The apache web servers/page builders don't normally show a spike at all from that. Slashdot has obviously slower onset, though it's still quite fast. TV also seems to cause fast spikes but we havne't seen enough while we've been able to chart it - previously had the caps set too low for a good measure. Newspapers are far more gentle in their load properties. The Tsunami coverage caused a general rise throughout the day for several weeks.

    On the Slashdot/RSS thing, RSS is getting quite a reputaton for really unpleasant surge loads. Something we're factoring in to anything we doing relation to RSS, designing for caching. Not really a surprise if Slashdot has had to do some tweaking.

    We were suffering a bit today from the combination of Slashdot, Wired News (Wikipedia Becomes a Way of Life) and Spiegel Online with an overloaded image server. Image server was bouncing around 100% utilization, kept some pages in the queue too long and that hurt overall apache capacity. We've seen far worse and we're getting rid of that bottleneck. As a temporary measure we've asked people to remove some pretty but not content images from a few places. Won't last long, though.

    On the fund-raising side, the drive ended early after exceeding its $75,000 target. It's currently at around $95,000 probably with some data still to arrive, close to reaching $100,000, my initial thought of a target. Really good news for those of us doing the capacity and reliability work but it'll take a few months for it to be visible. Thanks to everyone here who helped!

    Anyone who wants to spend a bit of money on another useful project might consider sending a bit to Freenode.net, the IRC host. Among other things they host our channels, including our offsite 24/7 IRC NOC and a superb MySQL channel, regularly inhabited by MySQL employees. Providing good service to lots of other open source projects.