[Foundation-l] Re: Information flow

Tue Aug 23 01:54:05 UTC 2005

Lars Aronsson wrote:
> What does matter is how the Foundation selects which products and 
> features to use on the Foundation's own servers. This is really 
> not a development issue, but one of operations. This is where the 
> 5-15 seconds response times of 2002-2003 were a real failure, that 
> caused real damage to the project, as editors were leaving, or at 
> least unable to convince their friends to join the project.  New 
> features were taken into use as soon as they were developed, and 
> nobody seemed to monitor the performance.  Every enthusiastic 
> developer could introduce new bottlenecks.
> 
> If Wikipedia had had a board in 2002-2003, it could have appointed 
> an "editor satisfaction officer" or a "productivity officer", with 
> responsibility to question the editor community what slowed them 
> down, and how productivity could be improved.  I believe many 
> editors would have put the blame on the slow response times.

In 2003 the problem was lack of hardware. We disabled every
non-essential feature: just about every query page, search, even
watchlists at times. A number of innovative performance features were
developed, which kept our backs off the wall. We would have been better
off at that time with a financing officer than a productivity officer.

-- Tim Starling