User talk:Dbroadwell

Status

Distributeapedia is eyond my current programming skill. But will implement other things to head towards this goal. Among these are documnet importing (crosswiki and namespace copying) ... eventually. Currently this is help for linkbot.

Distributeapedia

The goal is this; Being able to distribute static articles will reduce the load on wikipedia servers. Having something that a secondary server CAN serve as well as having pages for anyone desiring offline media, will help wikipedia take a stab at Britannica's market share.

Many elements similar to User:Hawstom/Wikipedia reputation and some of User talk:M.e/Production Wikipedia. I make no arguments about a paper version, it's needed too, but this goes further, looking at implementation of the maintenance tools that NEED to be implemented to support a form of distributed articles system. Some form of ratings WOULD make this trust build easier, however; the trust can start with the paper version if it hasn't started before then.

If there is a section of the database that only changes every week, then this data can be used as a starting place to search. It is a Distributed computing idea, wikipedia is slow becasue of lack of cpu resources and bandwidth, moving some of the non editing non-identifying info, like psudo 'static' pages out should reduce the load some. Taken one step further secondary servers can share updates amongst themselves (p2p) making wikipedia a free decentralised system, for the portions of the data that it is approriate to share this way. In the event of temporary outages, while the editing ability will be lost, any form of distributed static articles system will maintain some wiki functionality.

Baseline Implementation (aka; non-forking-fork)

I think the best way to go about doing this is to take baby steps and actually DO something. I had an idea on Wikipedia:Baseline revision. I'd like to give my idea a shot and incorporate it into your plan. I'm not fussed where it goes, I just want to see some ideas put into effect (I'm being totally selfless here - and I don't mean that in an arrogant way. I want to see what's good for the wiki and its reputation). - Ta bu shi da yu 14:36, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Good, that is the goal. Put ideas into effect ... Frankly I'd rather leave it as is stands, but to ever take a stab at Britannica's market share with our FREE info, we have to have something akin to a baseline (or trusted) version. The method so far, is to brainstorm our way to doable implementation ideas that will scale. Feel free to pull in any bits or chages that I missed from your page. -- Dbroadwell 17:08, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Ha, distributeapedia! -- Dbroadwell 16:36, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I think the key to preserving the wikipedia life yet allowing solidity is this; the 'edit' link should reffer back to the living version of the page if the person doesn't have the access to modify the 'static' version of a page. -- Dbroadwell 19:21, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The name of trusted pages;

Need wikinames for <stamp>, <stamped>, <stamper> those are just placeholders used on this page. I have seen; Baseline, Static, Stamped, Acredited, Printable, Approved and Trusted. What should we use? -- Dbroadwell

Proposal ideas to implement;

• article/baseline index to migrate to the UI element eventually
• the ability to copy articles across namespaces
• <stamper> bit voted like <admin> for accounts
• a procedure to know when a <stamp> is warranted
• a way to fix badly/update/correct <stamped> documents
• a UI element <stamped> along side <article> and <discuss> (mediawiki)
• a database place for <stamped> body and history
• some user preferences for view order or mode

Trusted articles creation

Let's go with the wikipedian style of a largely decentralized committee. Like 'Admin' voting in, do the same to set user as a <stamper>. And by design make 'Admin' supersede <stamper>. -- Dbroadwell

The purpose here is not for someone to say 'I think it's good', but to say 'we think it's good'. This may be ratings or some other form ... this page is mostly about what happens once it is good enough to call stable. -- Dbroadwell

Temporary location

A temporary start to baseline revisions would start off with a subpage called /baseline with a numbered list of baselines, with the current baseline in bold. Hopefully in new versions of MediaWiki this could be built into the software and user interface of Wikipedia itself. -- TBSDU

I'm against user interface complexity but I can see demand for such a feature. -- foobaz

Ok, I'm going with the article/baseline design for now. But to get the articles from the article/baseline to a full namespace, the ability to copy the articles across would be good, so that is something to develop. That will be a step towards a UI for 'static' pages. (idea credit to User:jamesday) Call it the first concrete bit of this, article copying. -- Dbroadwell 17:38, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Trusted articles interface

Need; Database field for <stamped> body and history, syntax as yet undefined. Just as 'edit this page' on <article> or <discuss> edits that page. So too should 'edit this page' on <stamped> page along with the rest of the stuff inherited from the wiki. -- Dbroadwell

I'll have to <div> something up so that we can see what I am talking about. But yeah, this is a 'future' thing. For now /baseline sounds like it could be done ... and migrate in the future. -- Dbroadwell

User prefrences

Add preference (for all users) to view <article> <discuss> <stamped> or if exist <stamped.data> for that article; <stamped> <discuss> <article>. -- Dbroadwell

It’s also tempting to make anon view the static version first and any logged in user by default see the live version, but we aren't to that point yet. -- Dbroadwell

Review and consensus

Use these resources to get a community consensus on an article:

1. Half-decent article candidates (WP:HAC) - For good becomming brilliant
2. Peer review (WP:PR)- currently underutilized but still very useful
3. WikiProject Fact and Reference Check (WP:FC) - it needs a certain level of correctness
4. Forum for Encyclopedic Standards (WP:FES)- it needs to be an encyclopedia article
5. Featured article candidates (WP:FAC)- which allows articles to become featured (WP:FA)- or that they are the best articles on Wikipedia.
6. RATINGS ?!

Fixing badly <stamped> documents

Need; WP:VfUS redirect to: Wikipedia:Votes for unstamping + /PAGENAME in the WP:VfD style.

VfS;

How about 'Votes for <stamp>' or VfS? -- Dbroadwell

Doing an individual case by case 'Votes for Stamping' will be far more labor intensive. -- foobaz

And not a guarantee of better quality. And everyone seems to agree that committees just can't handle the number of articles that need or will need to be handled. (search for nupedia for the data to back this) -- Dbroadwell

Notes;

Possible; Category:static

Need; [[Special:Recently <stamped> articles]]

Give digital signature (if available) to go with <stamped> creation as a way to retard the trolls?

See also

• Wikipedia:Association of Pedantic Wikipedians
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check
• User:Andrewa/Wikipedia approval mechanism
• Category:Wikipedia 1.0
• Category:Editorial_validation
• meta:Category:Article_validation

Dev workflow

The core mediawiki devs generally use test machines at home for anything substantial. I'm usually working on scripts related to bulk batch jobs and I do that directly on the main production servers, though sometimes there's enough bulk editing that I do that at home because I have nicer tools there. Any of us with root server access can at times directly patch the production Mediawiki source code on the live site to deal with a problem. We can use a test wiki and/or confine changes to the code to specific servers when we need an isolated test setup. Similarly, for new release rollout, that is set to affect a gradually increasing number of projects as it's rolled out, not all at once. I expect that everyone uses SSH and SCP to copy things back and forth - SSH (Putty on Windows) is mandatory for access to the servers, for security reasons. We simply don't connect without it unless it's completely dead on all servers we can use to get in. And even then we'd likely want to connect via an SSH shell to the console server to get to a plain login prompt via it. Jamesday 02:52, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Ranking

We can work on it together. :) --Cool Cat ^{My Talk} 03:01, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Anything else we should consider? --Cool Cat ^{My Talk} 10:01, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)