We've never lost external power while we've been at Tampa, but if we did, there are diesel generators. Not that it would be a big deal if we lost power for a day or two. There's no serious problem as long as there's no physical damage to the servers, which we're assured is essentially impossible even with a direct hurricane strike, since the building is well above sea-level and there are no external windows.
This isn't actually particularly unusual. The SEO folks have been using Wikipedia for content for years, along with various other sources of free keyword-rich text, such as open source software manuals. We've seen them swapping scripts for it on the SEO forums. They remote load because it allows them to set up a website on $10/month shared hosting. If they set up a proper mirror, they'd need gigabytes of hard drive space, which isn't practical when you intend to abandon the site the moment it's blacklisted by the search engines. Some operators have set up identical remote loaders on tens, maybe hundreds of domain names.
Some of the sites have gone so far as to remote load Wikipedia via an open proxy rotation script. This means that pages can take tens of seconds to load. They don't care as long as google keeps crawling it.
A few other people have said it, but you may as well hear it from the source.
That was the only time I published such lists. They were constructed by searching the database for password matches with the few most active trolls on Wikipedia at the time. People complained about the possibility that innocent users with weak passwords might have been affected. I conceded the point, apologised, and promised not to do it again. The issue was played up at the time by the trolls who were exposed -- not surprisingly, I wasn't winning any friends in that camp. Those same trolls still whinge about the existence of the page today.
At the time, some people wanted the page deleted to protect any innocent people who might have been listed. The majority wanted the page kept as evidence against the trolls. I had no opinion either way, and so let the page remain in accordance with community wishes.
Nobody has ever identified a non-troll account on that page. No innocent person has complained to me that they were affected. None of the accounts (aside from the known troll accounts) had any identifying information associated with them.
As a committed Wikipedian but a naturally pessimistic person, I have to agree with McHenry about most things. Wikipedia articles aren't necessarily accurate, and in my experience, they don't tend towards perfection either. Open editing is a process which allows a high rate of growth, but brings the price of variable quality. People constantly add their misconceptions, apply their idiosyncrasies and write articles based on speculation. This is balanced by further review and editing, but it might take months or even years before a misconception is noticed and corrected.
The big difference between McHenry and I is that he values accuracy, whereas I value information and knowledge. That's knowledge not just for the rich, not just for people who are able to buy conventional encyclopedias, but for everyone.
Everyone who reads Wikipedia should understand that it is not necessarily accurate. It would be nice if people would also understand that web pages, newspapers and conventional encyclopedias are also prone to bias and error. We should always be prepared to re-examine our beliefs. However if you're misled by an error in Britannica, at least you will have someone to blame.
In the past, Jimmy was responsible for banning users, so perhaps you could argue that that gave him the ability to impose bias. But that task has now largely been delegated to the Arbitration Committee, and the money is now controlled by the Board of Trustees. Jimmy's donations were important to get the project off the ground, but Wikipedia is now primarily supported by donations from ordinary people like you or I. His editorial power is microscopic compared to the control a newspaper editor or "media mogul" has. Wikipedia is independent of corporate interests. It is controlled by the people.
Anyone who complains about the slashdot effect obviously doesn't have a single P4 with 4 GB RAM acting as a squid accelerator cache. We've got three but my testing indicates one of them could have handled the entire media-generated over the last few days without slowing down.
Of course I should remember that our hats are in our hands. We constantly need to buy more database and apache hardware, but squids are great for anonymous page views.
The answer is we don't know. We really should have just picked one that was created around that time and declared it to be the millionth. Makes for a good story.
The million figure is for all languages, and statistics for all languages are only updated periodically. When we passed 300,000 on the English Wikipedia alone, we had an IRC bot spitting out article counts every few seconds, and a continuously updated number on the wiki. Someone posted about 50 pre-prepared stubs on English Footballers just as the number came up. Nothing of that kind happened this time, to my knowledge.
Apparently they can. I was talking with a computer-literate Mainlander on this subject in the Wikipedia IRC channel. He said that ordinary HTTP proxies are blocked, and that to access Wikipedia now, you need a secure tunnel.
When the article got the same treatment in E2 (nuked by the gods), I could understand. It's their sandpit and they set the rules. But in Wikipedia it was not done by an admin. No, instead some ordinary users covertly removed the portions of text they didn't like.
Wikipedia is everyone's sandpit and we all set the rules. If by general consensus your addition isn't up to Wikipedia's standards of quality and decency, it will be removed. The right to delete is part of the right to free speech.
If you want to be able to write whatever you want without being challenged, get your own website.
What stops people from clicking "revert" on a valid change?
Occasionally you see people reverting an article to an earlier revision as an attempt at subtle vandalism, hoping to go undetected, but the diff feature makes this blindingly obvious.
Speed-wise we've been coping fairly well so far. We put in a squid accelerator yesterday which seems to be helping. Squid support is still experimental and we've had lots of bugs and some temporary loss of service, but all in all I have to say: bring it on, slashdot!
As you can see, controversy crops up in odd places. Daniel C. Boyer is a little-known artist who tried to write an article on himself. Some people have criticisms of Mother Teresa, and a fight broke out about how much space to give them. Then of course there are the usual debates on religion and politics.
Every page must have a unique title, because we have to be able to link to it easily, in wiki markup. It's generally convenient to be able to refer to a page by title rather than ID. When unrelated titles clash, we perform disambiguation. See for example Mercury.
Slashdot Mirror
We've never lost external power while we've been at Tampa, but if we did, there are diesel generators. Not that it would be a big deal if we lost power for a day or two. There's no serious problem as long as there's no physical damage to the servers, which we're assured is essentially impossible even with a direct hurricane strike, since the building is well above sea-level and there are no external windows.
This isn't actually particularly unusual. The SEO folks have been using Wikipedia for content for years, along with various other sources of free keyword-rich text, such as open source software manuals. We've seen them swapping scripts for it on the SEO forums. They remote load because it allows them to set up a website on $10/month shared hosting. If they set up a proper mirror, they'd need gigabytes of hard drive space, which isn't practical when you intend to abandon the site the moment it's blacklisted by the search engines. Some operators have set up identical remote loaders on tens, maybe hundreds of domain names.
Some of the sites have gone so far as to remote load Wikipedia via an open proxy rotation script. This means that pages can take tens of seconds to load. They don't care as long as google keeps crawling it.
A few other people have said it, but you may as well hear it from the source.
That was the only time I published such lists. They were constructed by searching the database for password matches with the few most active trolls on Wikipedia at the time. People complained about the possibility that innocent users with weak passwords might have been affected. I conceded the point, apologised, and promised not to do it again. The issue was played up at the time by the trolls who were exposed -- not surprisingly, I wasn't winning any friends in that camp. Those same trolls still whinge about the existence of the page today.
At the time, some people wanted the page deleted to protect any innocent people who might have been listed. The majority wanted the page kept as evidence against the trolls. I had no opinion either way, and so let the page remain in accordance with community wishes.
Nobody has ever identified a non-troll account on that page. No innocent person has complained to me that they were affected. None of the accounts (aside from the known troll accounts) had any identifying information associated with them.
http://www.neutelligent.com/
As a committed Wikipedian but a naturally pessimistic person, I have to agree with McHenry about most things. Wikipedia articles aren't necessarily accurate, and in my experience, they don't tend towards perfection either. Open editing is a process which allows a high rate of growth, but brings the price of variable quality. People constantly add their misconceptions, apply their idiosyncrasies and write articles based on speculation. This is balanced by further review and editing, but it might take months or even years before a misconception is noticed and corrected.
The big difference between McHenry and I is that he values accuracy, whereas I value information and knowledge. That's knowledge not just for the rich, not just for people who are able to buy conventional encyclopedias, but for everyone.
Everyone who reads Wikipedia should understand that it is not necessarily accurate. It would be nice if people would also understand that web pages, newspapers and conventional encyclopedias are also prone to bias and error. We should always be prepared to re-examine our beliefs. However if you're misled by an error in Britannica, at least you will have someone to blame.
In the past, Jimmy was responsible for banning users, so perhaps you could argue that that gave him the ability to impose bias. But that task has now largely been delegated to the Arbitration Committee, and the money is now controlled by the Board of Trustees. Jimmy's donations were important to get the project off the ground, but Wikipedia is now primarily supported by donations from ordinary people like you or I. His editorial power is microscopic compared to the control a newspaper editor or "media mogul" has. Wikipedia is independent of corporate interests. It is controlled by the people.
Of course I should remember that our hats are in our hands. We constantly need to buy more database and apache hardware, but squids are great for anonymous page views.
The answer is we don't know. We really should have just picked one that was created around that time and declared it to be the millionth. Makes for a good story. The million figure is for all languages, and statistics for all languages are only updated periodically. When we passed 300,000 on the English Wikipedia alone, we had an IRC bot spitting out article counts every few seconds, and a continuously updated number on the wiki. Someone posted about 50 pre-prepared stubs on English Footballers just as the number came up. Nothing of that kind happened this time, to my knowledge.
Apparently they can. I was talking with a computer-literate Mainlander on this subject in the Wikipedia IRC channel. He said that ordinary HTTP proxies are blocked, and that to access Wikipedia now, you need a secure tunnel.
That's traffic rank, not traffic.
Wikipedia is everyone's sandpit and we all set the rules. If by general consensus your addition isn't up to Wikipedia's standards of quality and decency, it will be removed. The right to delete is part of the right to free speech.
If you want to be able to write whatever you want without being challenged, get your own website.
Occasionally you see people reverting an article to an earlier revision as an attempt at subtle vandalism, hoping to go undetected, but the diff feature makes this blindingly obvious.
Speed-wise we've been coping fairly well so far. We put in a squid accelerator yesterday which seems to be helping. Squid support is still experimental and we've had lots of bugs and some temporary loss of service, but all in all I have to say: bring it on, slashdot!
1. Talk:Main_Page: 1430
2. Talk:New_Imperialism/archive_9: 545
3. Talk:Daniel_C._Boyer: 509
4. Talk:Current_events: 438
5. Talk:Creationism/Archive6: 436
6. Talk:Mother_Teresa: 397
7. Talk:Anti-Semitism: 396
8. Talk:Jesus_Christ: 360
9. Talk:Main_Page/Layout_design: 356
10. Talk:Silesia: 313
11. Talk:People's_Republic_of_China: 305
12. Talk:List_of_French_monarchs/archive_4: 293
13. Talk:Jehovah's_Witnesses: 290
14. Talk:Scientific_method: 273
15. Talk:List_of_Canadians: 263
16. Talk:Rachel_Corrie: 253
17. Talk:Richard_Wagner: 250
18. Talk:New_Imperialism: 242
19. Talk:Main_Page/Temp: 239
20. Talk:Global_warming: 234
As you can see, controversy crops up in odd places. Daniel C. Boyer is a little-known artist who tried to write an article on himself. Some people have criticisms of Mother Teresa, and a fight broke out about how much space to give them. Then of course there are the usual debates on religion and politics.
Every page must have a unique title, because we have to be able to link to it easily, in wiki markup. It's generally convenient to be able to refer to a page by title rather than ID. When unrelated titles clash, we perform disambiguation. See for example Mercury.