Mailing List Archive

I'm all for it. I'm going to repoint all the .org domains to the new machine, and
we can start using them in a couple of days, after we are sure that they point to the
right place.

All the old .com urls must be supported forever, of course. But we can make the
default be .org.


Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 22, 2002 at 10:38:56AM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > (Moved this to tech.)
> >
> > Lee, what "many other things" will reassigning wikipedia.com affect?
> >
> > Fortunately, we have no wikipedia webmail, so that complication doesn't exist.
> >
> > I *think* I can change wikipedia.com, while leaving *.wikipedia.com to the old
> > machine. This is important until we move the Intl wikis over.
> >
> > We need a migration plan for those, too, of course.
>
> Shouldn't we switch from .com to .org or .net now ?
> .com url is bad for PR.

> Lee, what "many other things" will reassigning wikipedia.com affect?
>
> Fortunately, we have no wikipedia webmail, so that complication
> doesn't exist.
>
> I *think* I can change wikipedia.com, while leaving
> *.wikipedia.com to the old machine. This is important until
> we move the Intl wikis over.

It was the Intl's I was thinking of. If you can move "wikipedia.com"
without moving "*.", that's great. I haven't studied BIND that much.
Don't forget to explicitly put in "old".

BTW, it seems like some of the history records got lost in the
conversion. Fortunately, this can be repaired without a whole new
conversion process since we don't use the linked-list thing anymore.
This is just a heads up that I will need to get a new history-only
dump of the old database sometime soon.

Jimmy Wales wrote:
(re: changing DNS for "wikipedia.com" to point to the new server)
> Lee, what "many other things" will reassigning wikipedia.com affect?
>
> Fortunately, we have no wikipedia webmail, so that complication doesn't exist.
>
> I *think* I can change wikipedia.com, while leaving *.wikipedia.com to the old
> machine.

If you can, great!

> This is important until we move the Intl wikis over.
>
> We need a migration plan for those, too, of course.

I'd recommend converting the Esperanto, Polish, German, and French wikis
(those with message translations*) to the phase II software (what the
English wiki was running until this weekend) as soon as possible; then
work on adapting the message translations to phase III (what the English
wiki just upgraded to).

Once phase III is localized and tested, convert them again and start
looking into adapting the other languages.

Another possibility is waiting on _everything_ for direct adaption to
phase III, but that's just going to annoy a lot of people who've been
waiting months for an upgrade to phase II and put a lot of effort into
providing message translation files.

*(There's also a message file for the Spanish wiki; but I'm not sure
what the intended fate of that is. There have been murmurs from some
quarters that we should simply drop it, and treat enciclopedia.us.es as
if it were the Spanish Wikipedia insofar as linking is concerned.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

While on the subject of DNS and server names; could we make it so that
en.wikipedia.com (.org, whatever) actually points directly to the
English wiki? At the moment it's a separate usemodwiki which a sarcastic
note and a link to www.wikipedia.com.

(Also, I'm currently in the process of adding the rest of the languages
which have wikis or potential wikis to the list for inter-language
links. There's a lot of them...)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

> Another possibility is waiting on _everything_ for direct
> adaptation to phase III, but that's just going to annoy a lot of
> people who've been waiting months for an upgrade to phase II and
> put a lot of effort into providing message translation files.

But there's a great benefit of having less overall work to do
(even for the translators in the long run) and ending up with a
better product. The work involved in internationalizing the
Phase III software is minimal: Magnus produced a German version
in about two days (it's running now at
http://www.piclab.com/wikitest/wiki.phtml if you want to look).
If there are existing Phase II translations, it would not be hard
to use those as a starting point for the Phase III translation
to shave a little more time off the work.

I'm a big fan of skipping intermediate steps whenever possible.

Brion VIBBER wrote:
> Yeah, you're probably right. I just don't want another period of
> "testing" with an indefinite end...
>
> I'll get to work on adapting the Esperanto and French message translations.

The cool thing is that now the developers have access to the physical
machine where wikipedia runs, including root access in limited cases.
So I think that we're going to be much closer to the ideal of "release
early, release often" without me as the bottleneck in the process.

--Jimbo

lcrocker@nupedia.com wrote:
>>Another possibility is waiting on _everything_ for direct
>>adaptation to phase III, but that's just going to annoy a lot of
>>people who've been waiting months for an upgrade to phase II and
>>put a lot of effort into providing message translation files.
>
> But there's a great benefit of having less overall work to do
> (even for the translators in the long run) and ending up with a
> better product. The work involved in internationalizing the
> Phase III software is minimal: Magnus produced a German version
> in about two days (it's running now at
> http://www.piclab.com/wikitest/wiki.phtml if you want to look).
> If there are existing Phase II translations, it would not be hard
> to use those as a starting point for the Phase III translation
> to shave a little more time off the work.
>
> I'm a big fan of skipping intermediate steps whenever possible.

Yeah, you're probably right. I just don't want another period of
"testing" with an indefinite end...

I'll get to work on adapting the Esperanto and French message translations.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)