Wikipedia talk:Announcements

2003-01-10 One million home page hits, but I just can't get myself to edit the Announcements page using it's horrific date format.

Could we get an update on the NYTimes article? It is still coming out, I hope. --KQ

I hope so too. --LMS

So is a Google PageRank of 7/10 good or bad? Where does that put us in relation to, say, msnbc, yahoo, altavista, etc.?

---

PageRanks of some importante pages:

• Wikipedia -- 7/10
• Recent Changes -- 7/10
• http://slashdot.org/ -- 8/10
• http://www.altavista.com/ -- 9/10
• http://www.yahoo.com/ -- 10/10
• Google -- 10/10

Joao

---

OK, think i am in favour of the ditching of subs. Will there be a new standard for /Talk page though? Page name Talk[?] ?-- AW

---

I'm feeling dense here... where is the Wikipedia plugin available for AbiWord? I downloaded the current version of Abiword and there's no mention of it, and I can't find any plugin dlls in the folder. I'm on NT, and it is version 0.9.6 that I'm using.---- On www.sourceforge.net at:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=15518

at the end of the page.

---

Can we declare January 15 to be Wikipedia Day?

--Chuck Smith, who also enjoys celebrating Pi Day (March 14: do the math), and Zamenhof Day (December 15, birthday of L. L. Zamenhof, initiator of Esperanto).

(How about Star Wars day - May the Fourth? -- Khendon)

---

We could, but no one but Wikipedians would care! --LMS

---

Anybody know why the front page has a different count to the stats page, and which is 'right'? user:Verloren

The front page counter counts "all pages without a ':' in the title that contain a comma in the text". The statistics page substracts some page types ("talk:", pages without a comma, "wikipedia:") from the total number of pages. Thus the different results. As far as I can tell, none of them is correct, as there's no definition of what make an article countable... --Magnus Manske, Monday, April 8, 2002

---

I really don't think it's necessary to announce when we hit every thousand article mark. I think every 5,000 and other important numbers (such as 33,333) should suffice... I mean, we write about 200 articles per day, right? --Chuck Smith

---

It makes sense to me as a way of keeping track of the rate of change for later analysis. Of course, I'd much prefer a page like log:Wikipedia statistics history 2002[?] or something, that was kept up-to-date automatically... The Anome

---

Well, why don't you use Wikipedia:Statistics history 2002[?] then? :-) --Chuck Smith

---

By the way, isn't 33, 333 / 100,000 ~= 1 / 3? Or are we talking in terms of time and estimating some kind of exponential or geometric growth model? :) --Robert Merkel

---

Somebody asked this question on the Announcements page:

How does Wikipedia work?

Is each article stored in its own file or is each article stored in its own record in a database?

The answer is: each article is stored in its own record in a database. For the nitty-gritty details on how the software works, see links from Wikipedia:PHP script. --Brion VIBBER, Friday, July 12, 2002

---

We hit 50,000 raw articles, but when was the last time the statistics were updated to reflect an estimated number of "real" (non-stub) articles?

---

Which article is number 100,000?

---

I am saddened on artilces mentionaing Wiktionary, they have not mentioned my name, o well c'est la vie. -fonzy

---

I understand the need to make archives for the past months; However, this page is not so long that it require immediate cleaning as soon as the month is over. Typically, the announcement of low german on the 30th of april could benefit not to be archived 6 days later. When the page is full, there is need for archiving. It is maybe not so urgent when there is a lot of room on the page imho. user:anthere

---

Moved from meta page:

• Individual page access counters (probably gone for good)
  • please why would these be gone for good ? These are important. I don't remember them being permanently disabled was discussed. user:anthere

They were disabled for performance; a database write on every pageview to our busiest table leads to a lot of deadlocks, and sssllllooowowwwwwssssss everything down. If anyone gets around to making a more efficient way of doing the same thing, they may be re-enabled. --Brion 01:32 May 7, 2003 (UTC)

---

"The new server is being configured so it will be able to provide a read-only mirror of Wikipedia on future occasions of downtime on the database server."

I thought the new server was going to be the webserver and the old faster server was going to be the database server (maybe it the other way around...). Or is the "read-only" mirror thing and interim solution? --mav

Separating the web and database servers doesn't help when the database server is dead as a doornail. :) The read-only mirror is meant to be a backup database, a slightly-behind current-revisions-only version which can be kicked online on the web machine if the database box dies. --Brion 22:25 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

But wasn't the whole point of the new machine to balance the webserver vs. database load? --mav

Let me explain: the job of serving the wiki has so far been performed by Pliny alone. Poor Pliny has to keep track of the database, and serve up web pages. We just hired Larousse to help him out by taking over the web work, so Pliny will only have to do the database stuff. But, Pliny is a hypochondriac. He gets sick a lot and misses work. When both Pliny and Larousse are doing their thing, each can do just one job with greater efficiency. When Pliny is at home in bed with a broken filesystem, Larousse either can't do ANYTHING and there is NO WIKI AT ALL, or Larousse can take up some of the slack by doing just enough database stuff to allow him to serve web pages, and people can still read the wiki until Pliny is back on his feet. --Brion 22:37 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

OK. So Larousse is not able to be all we want it to be just yet. --mav

Now I'm just confused. What is it that you think we want it to be? --Brion 23:14 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

Either the database server or the webserver. Isn't that what you'all been talking about? --mav

Yes. The point is that normally it'll do nothing but web, but if the database server is not working, it would be nice to have a backup mirror database we can kick into action to cover our asses temporarily. --Brion 23:43 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

Sweet! Best of both worlds then. --mav

---

The traffic spike today may have been because Wikipedia was mentioned in the most recent email newsletter from Earthlink to their subscribers. - It specifically mentioned the main page, the bus tour, and the sandbox. -- Marj 01:49 29 May 2003 (UTC)

---

This "Meetup" thing - is that 7pm local time wherever you're meeting? Or are we trying to do this so we're all there at the same time, and it's 7pm for some particular time zone, and if so, which one? I would expect the former, but it would be nice to specify in the announcement. Please? -- John Owens 09:43 29 May 2003 (UTC)

---

PageRank seems to have dropped to 6/10. Any ideas why? ... Hm, slashdot moved up to 9/10 and amazon.com dropped to 0/10. Odd. Koyaanis Qatsi 19:49 21 Jun 2003 (UTC)

---

Possibility of a Stubwikipedia which doesn't have such large articles in? (the Talk pages being the same length? -Adrian

---

What about letting an international alone for an announcement ? Is it so necessary to always compare any achievement ? besides, the english and the german are not working on the same count system, so comparisons are irrelevant. Horray for the germans :-) User:Anthere

At least for en.wiki the differences between the comma count and the link+non-zero were minor. --mav

very true. But perhaps not as true for very different languages not using commas, or for young wikipedias which may contain a bunch a very small articles. To a certain point, I think we should not put to much emphasize on nb of pages differences between the wikipedias. Numbers are great for press release of course :-) User:Anthere