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

Twenty new servers ordered
On 15 November, 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 22 November 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:


 * 23 November — Routing problems involving certain Cogent IPs fixed.
 * 26 November — 'Srv5' breaks, taken offline.
 * 27 November — 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.