John Tex wrote:
Recently, enwiki was apparently moved without warning
to a new server. This
caused the external toolserver to be unable to perform any analysis of
enwiki information. One of the major users of toolserver is Gmaxwell, who
performs several different beneficial processes using the toolserver.
He has posted to WikiTech-L explaining what happened and what the effects
are:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034904.html
There is also an essay forming at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Toolserver
I urge everyone to visit one or both of the above links to learn more and to
express your support for getting the situation resolved.
Johntex.
The tools at tools.wikimedia.de were not only used by the English
Wikipedia, however. Things like the user edit count and Duesentrieb's
CategoryTree tool were used by other language editions, as evidenced by
the number of translations for CategoryTree.[1]
At the Vietnamese Wikipedia, the most popular user infobox linked to
interiot's edit counter,[2] and the CategoryTree tool was even built
right into the category structure there,[3] via a "cây" ("tree") link
in
every category page that contained subcategories.
tools.wikimedia.org is currently timing out for me, but I hope that it
won't be down for any extended period of time. Although the English
Wikipedia certainly accounts for a large chunk of the Toolserver's
usage, other language editions -- which still worked just fine with the
tools there -- will find it odd that the tools have just suddenly vanished.
If it has been disabled, please consider restoring access to these
valuable tools; even though they don't yet work for the English
Wikipedia or the Asian cluster wikis, there are a number of wikis that
could still benefit from this service.
[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Duesentrieb/CategoryTree
[2]
http://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ti%C3%AAu_b%E1%BA%A3n:T%C3%B3m_t%E1%BA%AFt_v%E…
[3]
http://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%E1%BB%83_lo%E1%BA%A1i:T%E1%BA%A5t_c%E1%BA%A3
--
Minh Nguyen <mxn(a)zoomtown.com>
AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn(a)myjabber.net; Blog:
http://mxn.f2o.org/