Alex,
Do you not see that we are having weekly outages? So
we hit 500k
articles and lo, it holds together. Where do we go from here? With our
one master database server. Somebody goes out and drops $100k on an
8-way 848 opteron. Somebody drops a further $100k on disk. Problem
solved until we hit 100M articles. Right, because every single power
ranger should have their own page, and every single villain, and every
single care bear, and every character from charmed, and every dicdef
that never makes it into the wiktionary, and so on and so forth.
You can't just say "let's just stick with what we're doing, it works
for now, and we'll just grow the architecture we've got by throwing
cubic dollars at it until it works properly."
You're wasting my and the foundation's money by doing so. FIx the
architecture and you reduce the cost of operation.
It seems to me that you are proposing consolidation of articles (or
specifically removing the ability for people to use multiple pages for
multiple things from a single larger topic) as an architectural change. It
seems to me that you are approaching this from the wrong side. As someone
else pointed out, this does take away freedom from the writer. Who is to say
that each villain from power rangers does not deserve their own page? What
if the person writing is able to go into pages and pages of mind numbing
detail about each character, and consolidation of these would take up a
books worth of space? Also, if you force consolidation, you still run into
the problem of characters that don't fit into "villain" or "good
guy".
If you want to talk about architectural changes, then lets talk about code
changes, or systems changes exclusively (lets try not to force users into an
organizational scheme).
I mean, have you actually ever designed anything near
as complicated
as the wikipedia? Have you actually ever been in a board room with the
program manager, project manager, VP, eight developers, and two
sysadmins when you all realize at the same time that the architecture
you've got just won't scale to the point you need it to?
How do you know he hasn't?
V/r,
Ryan Lane
NAVOCEANO