[WikiEN-l] Re: April 1st 2006, IRC, the mailing list, and the Cabal

Thu Apr 7 18:18:02 UTC 2005

Tim Starling wrote:
> Next year we should switch the wiki to read-only mode for 48 hours and
> take the opportunity to clean up the database schema a bit. Remember
> it's not just admins messing with articles, there's plenty of anonymous
> users too, and not all of them are careful to clean up the next day.

This has got to be the best idea on how to deal with 1st April. Normally 
I am quite opposed to downtime, but this time I think we have a pretty 
good excuse.

I can already see the message going something like:

	On 1st April, 2004 and 2005, we experienced significant troubles
	due to attempted April Fool's jokes which turned into
	disagreements and eventually edit wars. As a counter-measure,
	All Wikimedia projects are read-only from 30th March 12:00 to
	2nd April 12:00. We are pleased to use this opportunity to apply
	considerable improvements to our software architecture.

We have 1 year to agree on the exact wording of the message and to 
translate it into the 70-something languages we have wikis in. Depending 
on when you start planning the actual improvements, you have something 
between 1 year and 48 hours for them. :-)

Timwi