456:. In 2010, however, only 30% of the world had any access at all to the so-called "World Wide Web", even when the high rates of availability found in the developed world are allowed to skew the data (source: CIA World Factbook). Since the Wikimedia Foundation's aim is to "encourage the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content", it is clear that either the remaining 70% will have to be supplied with the Internet so they can access the online versions of Wikimedia wikis, or the Wikimedia wikis will have to be provided in an offline-friendly format (in contrast, 50% of the world has used a computer, according to Pew Research). The "Knowledge Offline" project, then, is a WMF initiative aimed at spreading its flagship product freely to the two billion people who use a computer but cannot access the Internet.
90:
468:). The second challenge is the technical one of supplying the information. A current strategy of the Foundation is to continue to make the raw data of Wikipedias available via so-called "dumps", while simultaneously supporting open-source programs that can process these files. In combination, this will allow whole Wikipedias to be either downloaded when an Internet connection is available, or to be shipped on DVDs or other portable media. This runs alongside the Foundation's existing project to select the most useful articles from a given Knowledge, hence condensing an encyclopedia onto a single CD.
909:. If you calculated it yourself based on statistics in the cited source, it is a little misleading to cite that as the source of your conclusion. (Sorry if this seems like nitpicking. Unclear statistical writing is a pet peeve of mine because it is so widespread, even among professional writers. I highly recommend the book linked in my previous edit summary for all journalists (and encyclopedists) who use or report statistics. Despite the tongue-in-cheek title, it is very illuminating about what ought to be common sense but is commonly done wrong.) ~
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169:, Wikimedia wikis underwent a scheduled downtime of one hour on Tuesday 24 May at around 13:00–14:00 UTC. The downtime meant that the Foundation has already missed previous aired targets of limiting downtime to just 5.256 minutes per annum (equivalent to 99.999% uptime) and 52.6 minutes (99.99% uptime) for this calendar year. However, the work does appear to have been successful at reducing the quantity of out-of-date pages served to readers and other similar problems.
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839:" — what is that supposed to mean? It's the nature of an average to take both areas with high(er) and lower availability of Internet/WWW access into account. Areas with higher-than-average penetration rates aren't "skewing the data" any more than areas with a lower-than-average penetration rate are. Perhaps a "pure" average is not a good metric here, though. --
526:). The problem was traced to a complexity in Google's spidering system, which does not equate ordinary characters (such as ":" and "/") with their encoded forms ("%3A" and "%2F"). As a result, effective blocking requires a number of additional variants to be listed. Within 50 minutes the Foundation's operations engineer
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of anything. Perhaps they calculated it using a population weighted mean of availability rates by country, which would be an informative statistic, but then calling it an average would only characterize the method of derivation, not the nature of what the statistic purports to represent. The fraction
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refers to the spread of data. Here, a small number of advanced economies with very high penetration rates drag up the mean, but would not have touched the median. 30% is the mean average, which is not altogether appropriate here, as (I think) you acknowledge. The "even when" was a warning that 30% is
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project) that can be read by some offline readers. However, ongoing efforts focus mainly on the second half of the strategy: the provision of a good-quality reader capable of displaying off-line versions of wikis. A number of possible readers were tested. The "Kiwix" reader was selected in late 2010,
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While "dumps" are largely tried and tested (though recent work has focussed on improving their regularity and reliability), there have also been efforts to enable the export of smaller "collections" of articles, for example those relating to major health issues faced by developing countries. This was
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More direct citations would be more useful. To dig up *where* in the
Factbook this could be found would take a bit of searching. "In 2010, however, only 30% of the world had any access at all to the so-called "World Wide Web", even when the high rates of availability found in the developed world are
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Downtime for the maintenance was well below a full hour. Also, planned maintenance does not count against the targeted downtime, as the targeted downtime is for unscheduled downtime (this is normal). That said, there have been a number of other outages that have put us past the 99.999% target, or
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on the
Foundation's "Software deployments" page to be expanded to all articles on the English Knowledge on 31 May. The lack of publicity given to the deployment raised criticism from some quarters, particularly in the light of recent controversies about the Pending Changes feature
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During the downtime, designed to allow the operations team sufficient time to "update the router software and tune the configuration", access to
Wikimedia sites was intermittent. The episode and associated issues was alluded to by cartoonist Randall Monroe on his comic strip
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that the page was in error, and instead announced that the tool would be rolled out incrementally over the next few weeks. In related news, a fix preventing the tool from appearing on redirect pages was pushed live to
Wikimedia sites (bug
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and the
Foundation has since devoted time to improving its user interface, including via the translation of its interface. There is also competition from other readers, including "Okawix", the product of the French company Linterweb.
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There are two parts to the challenge: firstly, in ensuring that there are
Wikipedias in as many languages as possible. The number of users for whom a Knowledge exists in a language they speak was recently estimated as above 98%
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Well, it's my average: I took the sum of internet users and divided it by the size of the population. 30% of all the people in the world accessed the internet in 2010, that's the important point. -
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In 2010, however, only 30% of the world had any access at all to the so-called "World Wide Web", even when the high rates of availability found in the developed world are allowed to skew the data
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that some deletion debates and arbitration pages were being indexed on Google (that is to say, appeared in Google's search listings, despite this being prohibited by the
English Knowledge's
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Thanks for clarifying Ryan. I'd never have guessed that was standard practice. Does the
Foundation have a target for limiting scheduled downtime too, do you know? -
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was updated, prompting a number of bug reports and some non-functionality during the transitionary period. It is now "gadget only", according to its developer
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To be fai, I don't even know why I used the word "average" in the first place...! Plain old "30% of the world" is more pithy anyway :P -
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I don't believe we have any targets listed for this. Obviously the ops team would like to have no scheduled downtime, and we rarely do.--
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not a useful metric for some uses because it hides the fact that some countries have very high rates but most have very low rates. -
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The logged onwiki deletions are "child porn" and "kiddie porn image". The files were both deleted in June 2006. Does that help? -
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Many
Knowledge editors can now access the Internet from multiple locations: at home, at work, even on-the-go with
765:"office action"? "legal request"???? Is that all the explanation we will get for the deletion of those images? --
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between the two. Which, if either, will become the standard is unclear, because it is such a fast-moving area.
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MediaWiki 1.20wmf01 hits first WMF wiki, understanding 20% time, and why this report cannot yet be a draft
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Wikimedia developers honoured a request from the
Foundation's legal department (one of what are termed "
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of people who had access is not the same kind of thing as the mean amount of access each person had. ~
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for more details). Wikimedia developers enjoyed dissecting the technical aspects of the cartoon on the
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538:) also began to add the directive to each page in turn to enforce non-spidering. Afterwards, bug #
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concerned one of the gadgets he has written for Wikimedia sites, "Commons Commander".
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The bugosphere, new mobile site and MediaWiki 1.18 close in on deployment
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The bugosphere, new mobile site and MediaWiki 1.18 close in on deployment
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Wikimedia Labs: soon to be at the cutting edge of MediaWiki development?
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Wikimedia Labs: soon to be at the cutting edge of MediaWiki development?
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Code Review backlog almost zero; What is: Subversion?; brief news
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Code Review backlog almost zero; What is: Subversion?; brief news
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Yes, that is the important point. It is not what is termed an "
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in part provided by a new export format (ZIM, developed by the
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I read that as a statement of percentile threshold, not an
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What is: agile development? and new mobile site goes live
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What is: agile development? and new mobile site goes live
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allowed to skew the data (source: CIA World Factbook)."
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Wikimedia down for an hour; What is: Knowledge Offline?
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Wikimedia down for an hour; What is: Knowledge Offline?
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Wikimedia down for an hour; What is: Knowledge Offline?
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Magnus Manske, one of the original developers of the
754:If your comment has not appeared here, you can try
553:software licence recommended to developers by the
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417:Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
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794:even the 99.99% target. --
960:18:03, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
950:17:48, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
514:On 26 May user MZMcBride
462:foundation-l mailing list
928:18:01, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
919:17:11, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
897:21:20, 1 June 2011 (UTC)
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555:Free Software Foundation
545:David Gerard launched a
485:the differences he found
483:blogged last week about
185:wikitech-l mailing list
747:. To follow comments,
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590:, which prevented the
581:Technical Village Pump
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179:(see also this week's
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969:What do you think of
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660:"Technology report" →
579:(English Knowledge's
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975:Share your feedback.
743:from this article's
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499:(as of March 2011).
734:Discuss this story
714:Arbitration report
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42:← Back to Contents
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371:12 September 2011
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699:In the news
681:30 May 2011
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