On Fri, 20 May 2005, Fred Bauder wrote:
The issue is always download speed when we serve a
diverse international
audience and at least make noises about serving the poor and the third
world. Serving up articles over 100kb long with several images each over
200kb will basically stop a slower computer with limited memory operating
with a modem in its tracks, sometimes even requiring a reboot. Essentially
the site becomes unusable.
It's not only the third world that needs to rely on dialup; the majority
of Internet users in the US -- which, last I checked, was still counted as
one of the developed countries -- still have dialup connections (like
yours truly).
And the primary problem I have with accessing information from Wikipedia
is not the article length (although a concise well-organized article is
always better than a long discursive one, no matter the amount of detail
contained), but the size & number of images.
Maybe I ought to squawk more about those pages where someone has stuffed
into it as many images as they can find about the subject. After all,
EN-Wikipedia isn't the only archive available for usage-free graphics --
even on Wikimedia.
Geoff