Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-05-21/Technology report

I know I'm going to regret asking this, but how does the WMF growing larger reduce the risk of a meteorite strike? Kaldari (talk) 04:37, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Expanding to multiple locations reduces the possibility of a natural catastrophe or other major disruption in one location resulting in permanent major data loss... AnonMoos (talk) 05:29, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Ah, I was thinking people rather than servers :) Kaldari (talk) 06:54, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
 * AnonMoos, that's an annoyingly logical answer. How terribly disappointing. :)  You couldn't have trolled Kaldari just a little?  Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 07:07, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Totally agree Philippe, it should have been evident to Kaldari that the extra glow from the servers with more electrons spinning faster at different places is obviously going to cause a small percentage of meteorites to be deflected by this increased charge; alternatively they will have a committee meeting, note our increased vigilance and after weeks of debate, an RFC and a vote, reach a true consensus and decide to bombard some other planetoid. I really surprised that the two obvious scenarios needed to be better elucidated. — billinghurst  sDrewth  13:42, 23 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Expanding the dissemination of knowledge increases societal preparedness against meteor catastrophe by increasing the likelihood that the world will produce the educated sorts of people who could avert or lessen extraterrestrial crisis. When anyone contributes anything to any WMF project, world access to information increases, and thus the educated base from which meteor experts come also increases.  Blue Rasberry    (talk)   18:50, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
 * As Wikimedia projects expand with ever-increasing quantities of cruft, discerning meteors will turn their attention elsewhere. ~ 66.81.244.216 (talk) 19:35, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Simples. Per WP:NASTRO we are redirecting many of the minor planets. Rich Farmbrough, 14:24, 24 May 2012 (UTC).

I wonder, are these dumps/forks accessible to the public or just stored on the server cluster? --Nathan2055talk 00:02, 23 May 2012 (UTC)
 * http://dumps.wikimedia.org is the (publicly accessible) Wikimedia site; I tried the HTTP versions of the dump mirrors and they seem to be public too (as one would expect). Not sure about older dumps nor FTP accessible credentials but I suspect both are conducive to public access. - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 10:44, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

I'm going to speculate that the encyclopedia written by humans, for humans, won't be much use if there aren't any humans around. Still, this does raise the idea that we should see if we can get a full Wikipedia dump placed on board the next moon landing mission. That way the survivors may be able to recover the information in a few millenia. Or is that just too daft? Regards, RJH (talk) 18:43, 23 May 2012 (UTC)
 * You may also want to look through WP:TERMINAL for some ideas. Kaldari (talk) 18:53, 23 May 2012 (UTC)
 * someone should send a dump to Millennium Seed Bank Project. SYSS Mouse (talk) 21:29, 23 May 2012 (UTC)


 * The idea that WMF is "safer" as it gets bigger is fallacious. When it was an $800k per annum organization it was unlikely to fail to raise the required funds, it was not a viable target for lawsuits designed to make money, and the whole system was amenable to being "phœnixed" for pocket money sums. Of course this idea that large is strong is long-standing, but we can cite (recently) GM, Ford, Fannie Mae, Enron, Telewest, many large banks and even sovereign governments that have either gone bust or needed rescue. The good prognosis of the projects as they exist is probably primarily due to the open licensing.  Rich Farmbrough, 13:13, 24 May 2012 (UTC).


 * So are there also regular offsite dumps of Wikimedia Commons? This might be the achilles heel, many templates rely on images and most articles will look spartan without images and sound and video files. Targaryen  speak or forever remain silent 18:20, 26 May 2012 (UTC)
 * It says "all Wikimedia wikis", so I expect that Commons, all the Wikiversities, Wikiquotes, Wiktionaries, Wikipedias, etc. are all included. Nyttend (talk) 15:08, 27 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Commons pages are, but Commons images aren't right at the moment due to the potential filesize of such dumps. It is being worked on though (and quite high priority too, IIRC). - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 15:38, 27 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I checked when the last dump of enwiki was and unfortunately the last one was done in 2010. I think we should raise the dump creation interval for enwiki to, say, once a year or so. --Nathan2055talk 20:39, 29 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Hmm? Or did you mean images? - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 20:43, 29 May 2012 (UTC)