Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-11-22/Technology report
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
"Take me back" is no more
The "Take me back" links, which had been displayed at the top of every page for logged-in users using the Vector skin since its general rollout over six months ago, have been removed with (near) immediate effect. The links, which were designed to allow editors to quickly switch back to the Monobook skin, were originally to be removed in October, but their removal was delayed ("not for any particular reason", says developer Trevor Parscal). The change came into effect after the issue was raised on the English Wikipedia's Miscellaneous Village Pump, though by sheer coincidence it was also scheduled internally to be removed this week (bug #25850).
Account holders can still switch between any of a number of skins available to users – including Vector and Monobook – via their User Preferences. Vector remains the default skin for all non-logged-in users.
Pageview statistics corrected and expanded
A major error with the headline pageview figures for Wikimedia sites – which led to the accidental counting of a number of (largely US-based) web robots as though they were humans – has now been fixed. In addition to artificially increasing the total number of visitors per month from 10,658,000,000 to 13,100,000,000/month, "the share of page visits from the US was considerably overreported", noted analyst Erik Zachte on his blog. He added that "for many Wikipedia's readership from the US moved several steps down in rank. Example of a massive shift: before the fix 21% of page views for Hungarian Wikipedia came from the US, after the fix a mere 0.6%."
Zachte also announced the availability of additional reports grouping all languages spoken in a particular geographical region (Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, India, and Oceania) and one for artificial languages.
In brief
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
- A brief technical outage left visitors unable to access the sites for a significant period of time on Tuesday evening (UTC). The problem, caused by a surge in traffic related to "a complex interaction of factors" including the Fundraiser launch, particularly affected the European cluster of servers, and then overspilled onto the Florida cluster as traffic was redirected (Wikimedia Techblog). The Foundation is working on a five year plan to increase uptime from 99% (87.6 hours downtime / year) to 99.999% (5.256 minutes/year). On Monday November 22nd, an outage affected users accessing Wikimedia sites over the "esams" server in Amsterdam, according to CTO Danese Cooper.
- The team working on an update to the Mac OS X operating system say they have fixed their Dictionary.app to correctly interpret Wikipedia articles once again, after several months of its being broken (bug #bugzilla:23602).
- With the fixing of bug #25940, it is now possible for developers to comment on, and change the revision status of, code revisions via the API.
- A deployment of the latest version of the Pending Changes extension is scheduled for Tuesday. It will have a new reject button, some diff page load optimizations and many "under-the-hood code improvements" (Wikimedia Techblog).
Discuss this story
"...web robots as [...] they were humans." Augh! We're bing attacked by human web robots. HELP!!!
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) WikiCopter (radio • sorties • images • lost • defense • attack) 01:56, 23 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]