Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-11-28/Technology report

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The Wikipedia Signpost


Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

By Ral315, 28 November 2005

Twenty new servers ordered

On November 15, twenty new servers were ordered. Ten of these servers will be used as cache servers, while the other ten will be used as multi-purpose application servers. In all, the server order totaled approximately US$50,080.00.

Currently, $114,436.00 has been spent on hardware during the fourth quarter; altogether, $285,676.00 has been spent on hardware in 2005.

Article citation feature created

Developer Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason has created a new page for citing articles, Special:Cite. Links to this page can be found in the toolbox when viewing pages in the article namespace. The page shows information about a given article necessary for citing articles, and generates citations in different citation styles, including APA, MLA, and Chicago.

New site status page

A new site status page has been created by Ambush Commander, in response to the 'unwieldy' nature of editing the current status page, hosted on OpenFacts. Rather than using a conventional wiki environment, the page allows a user to select a series of options to display the current status and leave a comment.

Amane installed

Images and image uploads were disabled for a time on November 22 while a new image server, 'amane', was installed. The outage was necessary to allow the copying of images from 'khaldun', 'bacon', and 'albert'.

Last week in servers

Other server-related events, problems, and changes included:

  • November 23 — Routing problems involving certain Cogent IPs fixed.
  • November 26 — 'Srv5' breaks, taken offline.
  • November 27 — Wikipedia-l, Wikien-l, and Helpdesk-l lists blocked in the Robots.txt file, following complaints that 'newbie questions', often embarrassing, were showing up in search results.


Also this week: New languages — ArbCom election — ArbCom input — Board activity — News and notes — Press coverage — Features and admins — B.R.I.O.N. — T.R.O.L.L.