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Yahoo! Orders Wikipedia Hardware
Edit This Page writes "Jimmy Wales announced today that Yahoo! has ordered 23 HP servers for the Wikimedia Foundation. The three database servers are model DL 385, and will come with dual Athlons, 8GB of RAM, and 6x 146GB 15K RPM drives each. They will also provide rackspace and bandwidth. The announcement comes four months after Google's announcement of support, and two months after Yahoo's own. Google has not yet made their intentions clear. You can read more about the specifications of what will soon be a 100+ server cluster at the Wikimedia Servers wiki article."
All Google has done is hand-waving so far.
On the other hand, Yahoo has been one of the earliest Wikipedia supporters according to TFA.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Only on Slashdot would Yahoo's donation be compared unfavorably to Google, when Yahoo has actually provided something, and Google has merely mentioned it.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
Out of curiosity, why are you switching to 1.5 yet when the last release is still listed as "not recommended for use in a production environment"?
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
That is not an example of a bad article at all. It is not a GNAA troll, but rather a descriptive an informative article on what the GNAA is. Wikipedia has many faults, but that fact that it covers topics that other encyclopedias don't is one of its strengths. If you are doing serious work, Wikipedia is not the place to go, but neither is Britannica.
English is easier said than done.
If Yahoo is a "me too" move, Google was a "look how good we are" move.
Regardless, it's good for not only the administrators, but obviously for their large user base too.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Have you looked at the MediaWiki features? There's tons of dynamic features. What doesn't hit he cache, goes to the DB. Wikipedia is 67th in the Alexa ratings (Slashdot is 1,441th, of course not too many slashdotters use Alexa, but check some of the other sites, CNN is in the 20s, and Wikipedia gets more traffic in a day than /. gets in a month).
Additionally, Wikipedia's lag is a dampening factor to its popularity. As more servers are added, it becomes more responsive, servers go to capacity again, and yet more hardware is needed.
I mean, I've yet to see this in the Britannica yet, and that's why I use the Britannica more often than Wikipedia for serious work.
So you use Britannica more often than Wikipedia for serious work because Wikipedia contains articles on things that Britannica doesn't? That doesn't make much sense to me. If your "serious work" doesn't have anything to do with the GNAA, then you're not going to type GNAA into Wikipedia's search field, and you're never going to see that page in the first place.
Sounds like Yahoo! has decided to go above and beyond Google's "do no evil" pledge by actually making good.
True, but think about it, what is the truth for non technical things?
Before wiki and the 'net in general made content become alive, and coming from whatever source, all such discussions were lost. The winner of the argument, or more likely, the one with the arguments that were more pleasing for the ones in charge, would win and get published and later become part of what is taught in schools.
With wikipedia the argument is part of the content and being critic of what you read is a good exercise for the mind.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Much of it seems to be ego boosting more than truly contributing to the breadth of mankind's knowledge.
The goal of Wikipedia doesn't have to do with contributing to mankind's knowledge. Like all encyclopedias, really, the purpose of Wikipedia is to organize knowledge, not to create it. In many ways, Wikipedia is another form of search - you've got search engines, then you've got directories, then you've got Wikipedia.
As for much of it being ego boosting, I don't how that matters, really. Whether someone is editing Wikipedia for ego or not as long as they're not deleting anything or adding things in completely irrelevant place, Wikipedia is getting better at doing its job.
The whole point of a Wiki is that people can write about what they feel is important. This is what makes Wikipedia so good -- many articles are written by people who know what they are talking about first-hand, and not English majors trying to explain how something works. The quality of the writing isn't as good as a commercial encyclopedia, but the quality of the information is much higher.
Considering that the GNAA has been trolling slashdot (which is one of the most popular sites on the 'net) for the last few years, they may as well have an article of their own. If someone took the time to write and update it, it's important enough to be in there. Plus, that page is hilarious!