Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2012-04-09

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2012-04-09. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Featured content: Assassination, genocide, internment, murder, and crucifixion: the bloodiest of the week (937 bytes · 💬)

I don't know about you guys, but I've never associated "Assassination, genocide, internment, murder, and crucification" with a picturesque row of Cotswold cottages. Is there some dark secret they're not telling us? :) ~~ Bettia ~~ ^talk 14:24, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

• 13th century Britain? You just know they've gotta be hiding something... probably the plague. Crisco 1492 (talk) 08:49, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
• Hmm, monks and sheep. That can't be good. Nice pics. Regards, RJH (talk) 20:59, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

Interview: Funds, fiduciaries, and the Foundation: the complex dynamics of scaling (1,842 bytes · 💬)

• Thank you for covering the Berlin meeting in such detail, and for caring about governance developments even though they are removed from everyday work on the projects. I am glad to have been interviewed about this subject, but concerned about giving readers only one perspective of what is happening! This is a controversial and emotional topic, and no single participant can provide a neutral summary of it. My views are my own, and you would get different answers from others involved in these decisions.

I understood that this was part of a set of interviews with other attendees at the meeting. As you continue to cover these topics, please make a point of interviewing voices from a spectrum of the parties involved including the auditing, fundraising, and local-programs specialists of the movement. Regards, – SJ + 00:00, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

• I suspect that most Wikipedia donors (the silent majority) are not involved in the chapters and do not want much of their money being funneled out to them. Can we point to specific improvements that these chapters have made to Wikipedia? With that said, I can't say I'm all that happy about how the Foundation seems to spend money either - it seems they hire a lot of "consultants" to say common-sense things rather than spending the money on developers to improve the remarkably aged technology. II | (t - c) 17:20, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

News and notes: Projects launched in Brazil and the Middle East as advisors sought for funds committee (1,014 bytes · 💬)

• I'm getting surprised that this EP will finally be successful and not a drama like the IEP... mabdul 14:43, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
  • I think between the cultural differences between India and Brazil, the fact that they're contributing to ptwiki instead of enwiki (in their native tongue), and the much smaller and more manageable scale of the program, there's a lot better chance of success. Dcoetzee 21:33, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
• Wikipedia gets a good shout-out here. -- Ssilvers (talk) 23:07, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Technology report: Next Wikimedia deployment already in the pipeline and details of recent performance improvements (4,676 bytes · 💬)

• A small correction about Labs and storage: Labs has two storage clusters. One we've had since the Labs launch, which is "instance storage". Instance storage is for storing instance images (virtual machine images). The second cluster was the one added recently, which we call "project storage". Project storage is accessible from within instances, and is divided from a security perspective by project (hence project storage). We had a couple outages due to the instance storage, not the project storage. A full outage of the project storage would cause issues with data access in Labs, but even a small outage of the instance storage will cause major issues for all of Labs, since the instances (virtual machines) would lose access to their local disks and would crash (like a server's disks dying).Ryan lane (talk) 00:58, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

  Ah, thanks for the correction Ryan. I admit I completely missed the project/instance division. I've tweaked the wording used above accordingly. - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 08:32, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

• Just a question: how many datacenters are there and where are they located? Night of the Big Wind _talk 11:46, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

  Unless I'm mistaken, there are two "proper" data centres: one in Tampa, Florida and one in Ashburn, Virginia, which is a relatively recent addition. There's also a caching centre in Amsterdam to help European audiences. There used to be additional caching facilities in Seoul and Paris for some years, though hosts at both locations were later decommissioned (presumably because their benefactors were no longer able to maintain them). - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 11:51, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

• Adjusted two instances of "Wikimedia" to "MediaWiki" when it was clear the reference was to the software. This includes the headline. Nathan ^T 14:23, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

  The headline is fixed at publication, so I'll have to change that back (it gets reprinted elsewhere). I'd argue it was merely ambiguous rather than wrong: "Wikimedia deployment" here being shorthand from "deployment of the latest version of MediaWiki to Wikimedia sites". I've preserved your clarification of the prose, naturally. - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 16:54, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

  I suppose... the point is that "Wikimedia" isn't something that gets deployed, and the software MediaWiki is used in a variety of other settings. MediaWiki to Wikimedia sites would be conceptually correct; Wikimedia to Wikimedia sites, aside from not making sense, promotes a misunderstanding of the relationship between the Wikimedia projects and the software platform. Nathan ^T 19:39, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

  I agree that "Wikimedia deployment" is hardly ideal, but nothing else proved short enough for a headline :) I'm not sure any regular reader would not understand the MediaWiki-Wikimedia divide, however. Anywhoo, not worth arguing over. T'is done. - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 20:32, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

• Regarding the proposal to replace gerrit, I fail to understand where "the initial reception was largely negative" comes from. Reading the thread, it seems that all but one of the responses were actually quite encouraging and commending (at most, somewhat cautious). --Waldir ^talk 16:40, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
  • Well, it depends what you describe as negative and what as positive. Personally, I would say that a positive response would have been "you've got my/our full support", and that the actual response was (rightly or wrongly) quite a long way away from that. But yes, perhaps "mixed" would have been better. - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 13:08, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

Wikidata: The next big thing? An interview with Wikidata (2,464 bytes · 💬)

In terms of logos, I much prefer the top one. ResMar 01:07, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

The middle logo is the symbol for chaos. Which has interesting connotations.--Jorm (WMF) (talk) 00:27, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I think it's weird that it's the chaos symbol (As someone who "practices" chaos). I'd take the top over the latter, primarily because if I rock my chaos gear I don't want people asking me questions I can't answer about Wikidata ;) Sarah (talk) 02:38, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Just to note that I just swapped the third logo shown on this page to one with a better aspect ratio - no favouritism involved :) Regards, - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 10:11, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. I like top best too. I'd like to see some permutations on the color scheme. Not 100% sure about the red center. Jason Quinn (talk) 14:18, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

• Finally a software update won't have to be updated on all projects, many pages on the same project already include templates, this can then luckily also updated to many project at once! mabdul 18:59, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
• One thing I always like to ask. How and why can this Wikidata initiative fail? 76.185.103.198 (talk) 00:08, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

There are a few ways but let's focus on making this not fail here? ;-) The most obvious fail would of course be if the community doesn't accept it in the end. However we're working hard to make this not happen with a really open development process that involves the community along the way. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:09, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

WikiProject report: The Land of Steady Habits: WikiProject Connecticut (489 bytes · 💬)

I'm a lifelong CT resident as well, and I just want to thank you all for doing such a great job. Keep it up!! The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 17:46, 10 April 2012 (UTC)