Isam Bayazidi wrote:
In the Arabic Wikipedia (as with other Wikipedias) we
suffer from poor
speed/performance, and a feature-stripped mediawiki (search-disabled and
so)..
It is my belief that the speed/performance/features for all the
mediawikis are currently equivalent. The only exception to that may
be some latency due to sheer distance and the speed of light around
the globe, but I believe that this is relatively minor.
(However, I do suppose that if a particular nation or area is not
well-connected to the new, a local squid would boost them a fair
amount.)
The best possibility, technologically, to do what your potential donor
wants to do, is to host a squid in your area, on an experimental basis
perhaps, so that we can see if it makes a positive difference.
The current performance/speed/status of Arabic
Wikipedia (and other
wikipedias) is not a very good one.. and sooner or later
Language-limited donations will come, and they will be have to be dealt
with..
I think that this is likely, i.e. that there will be language-limited
donation offers. And we do need to discuss what to do about that.
We are a global project, and I would like to encourage donors to think
globally as well. From the point of view of global efficiency, then
for the most part, language-specific donations aren't going to help
much -- the most efficient architecture is one which clusters, not one
which divides.
At the same time, of course, I do recognize that donors care about
what *they* care about, and frequently of course this would be their
own language wikipedia. That's not a bad thing, it's only natural.
And I don't want to discourage donors who want to help -- particularly
not if the alternative is to have them fund a fork out of frustration.
THIS PART IS IMPORTANT -- $20,000 of new hardware is ordered and will
be here within 2 week or so. This includes a more powerful database
server with faster CPUs, faster hard drives. Our existing database
server will still be here, so we will go from one strong machine to
two strong machines.
Additionally, I've order 4 1U servers which will be adapted and
customized for roles as apache's, squids, fileservers, whatever we
need. I also hope that 1 or 2 of them will be sitting idle as
"universal hot spares" so that we can quickly configure them to take
on a role while we work on any other machines that are down.
--Jimbo