Hey, we badly want to be open to the world! But it's expensive!
I can make a little announcement. Wikis are huge resource hogs, so to grant just read access to wiki pages indiscriminately will require more resources than the big souped-up but single server we have at present. Quite frankly we have been holding out for an infusion of funds for sixteen servers. It's clear now that we can launch with less than that, with a number that we can afford with our very limited present budget. So we'll be bravely forging ahead with an only temporarily adequate number of servers!
The Citizendium wiki [citizendium.org] will be launching for public read access as soon as (1) we get a few new servers set up (it'll be a small enough number to be within our budget), and (2) we make a few technical changes (e.g., change the "Citizendium Pilot" namespace to "Citizendium"; and lots of other stuff).
Now, when will that be? Not sure; now it's a matter of getting and setting up the equipment and making those software changes, and it's impossible to predict how long it will take to do this, as we are mostly relying on volunteers (and one part-time contracter) to work on our software. But on the order of weeks, not months. If you want to help us with the software stuff, I bow to your geekiness and invite you to our forge [citizendium.org].
So, you decided against calling it Nupedia this time? Perhaps "Just As Good As Wikipedia Except I'm In Charge" next time? Or "Sour Grapes-o-Pedia"? I kid, I kid. Honestly, variety is good (insert Gnome/KDE flamewar here); we already have enough problems with Wikipedia articles being replicated around the internet so that it becomes hard to find anything else. There's a serious free-encyclopedia vacuum out there, and it can only help to have another batch of people doing work independently of Wikipedia.
Cubia [dawnofthegeeks.com] is a lightweight Wikipedia mirror running on a $7 GoDaddy account along with a bunch of other sites. I'm still importing the articles (2-3 million of 4.5 are already there) but it should be done today.
Until your project maxes out 1000GB of transfer per month and/or 100GB of space there's no reason to pay more than $7 a month to run your new project. I'm amazed at the ignorance that prompts people to waste 10's of thousands of dollars on equipment they won't possibly have a need for, for years. Mean
You posted that same shit last week, too. Yeah, its a static mirror, slow as hell (even with less than 1/100s of a percent of the real wikipedias load), no version history, no search, no editing. => its not even worth the 7$
MediaWiki is slow and therefore demands more resources than are actually necessary to do what they are doing. This new project (Citizendium) is being developed on a fast server which hinders the ability to optimize code. Smart people start with low cost equipment and optimize the heck out of it to make it work for as long as possible. Only then do you start spending more on faster systems and more bandwidth. You don't spend rediculous amounts of money up front for resources you have no use for. You first
The slower the target system the more you have to optimize to make it fast. A fast server can decieve you into thinking your code is fast when in fact the system is just a crutch for your bad code. MediaWiki looks fast running on Wikipedia's servers but that's only because of their servers. When it's run on a PIII 900Mhz system you realize very quickly what a bloated piece of garbage MediaWiki is.
Sure it does a lot of stuff. It's just very inefficient at doing it.
I can make a little announcement. Wikis are huge resource hogs,
If they are, why do you use PHP and MySQL? I'm a PHP developer myself and know that if "huge resource hog" support are requirement of the project, I should look towards a serious application server platform.
Also... the percentage of "Wikipedia sucks!.. Hey check out Citizendium (wink, wink)" articles on Slashdot is suspiciously rising last couple of weeks.
Is this some FUD marketing campaign going behind the scenes? Either way, it certainly look
As it happens, we don't use MySQL; we use Postgres, courtesy Greg Sabino Mullane, and that is helping. We're using PHP of course because Mediawiki is written in PHP, and rewriting it in any other language would take a while.
No marketing campaign that I know of; I certainly don't have any special deals with or personal friends at Slashdot. There have been two CZ-related stories on Slashdot that I know of. Maybe they just find the idea intriguing, that's all.
Are any of the Citizendium people active contibutors to MediaWiki? Seems that an effort to supplant Wikipedia ought to deal with the need to develop and maintain the software that runs it
Wikis are huge resource hogs, so to grant just read access to wiki pages indiscriminately will require more resources than the big souped-up but single server we have at present.
If that's the case, your software is badly designed. Have you considered having a static HTML version of the most up-to-date version of each page spat out whenever it is modified, and just directing read traffic at that static cached copy? That way, readers shouldn't use up any more resources than readers visiting any static site.
You know you can have the static articles be publicly available for relatively cheap. (On each write, save a copy to a second server. Get the second server from $CHEAPO_HOSTING_COMPANY for $5/month if needed.) A read-only Wiki is entirely equivalent to a normal static web site.
Anyway, good luck with the project. You're in an excellent position to fix a lot of the things that Wikipedia didn't do right when it started.
Well, since I have to create an account with Citizendium just to look at the articles, I'm not too worried about it overtaking the Wikipedia just yet.
Yup. From the information I've gleaned from the outside, it's having all the same problems as Sanger's original Nupedia project (in which I participated for a while), including a dysfunctional server/software setup, and a lack of transparency.
Well, since I have to create an account with Citizendium just to look at the articles
I was somewhat amused that the edited sample article on biology that is publicly available is full of editorial errors. Capitalization of the topic word "biology" isn't even consistent in the section headers, let alone the article text.
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
-CGP [colingregorypalmer.net]
We will be launching as soon as possible (Score:5, Informative)
I can make a little announcement. Wikis are huge resource hogs, so to grant just read access to wiki pages indiscriminately will require more resources than the big souped-up but single server we have at present. Quite frankly we have been holding out for an infusion of funds for sixteen servers. It's clear now that we can launch with less than that, with a number that we can afford with our very limited present budget. So we'll be bravely forging ahead with an only temporarily adequate number of servers!
The Citizendium wiki [citizendium.org] will be launching for public read access as soon as (1) we get a few new servers set up (it'll be a small enough number to be within our budget), and (2) we make a few technical changes (e.g., change the "Citizendium Pilot" namespace to "Citizendium"; and lots of other stuff).
Now, when will that be? Not sure; now it's a matter of getting and setting up the equipment and making those software changes, and it's impossible to predict how long it will take to do this, as we are mostly relying on volunteers (and one part-time contracter) to work on our software. But on the order of weeks, not months. If you want to help us with the software stuff, I bow to your geekiness and invite you to our forge [citizendium.org].
Hope that clarifies our situation anyway.
Re: (Score:1)
Best of luck with that. (Score:3, Insightful)
I kid, I kid. Honestly, variety is good (insert Gnome/KDE flamewar here); we already have enough problems with Wikipedia articles being replicated around the internet so that it becomes hard to find anything else. There's a serious free-encyclopedia vacuum out there, and it can only help to have another batch of people doing work independently of Wikipedia.
I thin
Mirror of Wikipedia on a $7 GoDaddy Account (Score:2)
Until your project maxes out 1000GB of transfer per month and/or 100GB of space there's no reason to pay more than $7 a month to run your new project. I'm amazed at the ignorance that prompts people to waste 10's of thousands of dollars on equipment they won't possibly have a need for, for years. Mean
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, its a static mirror, slow as hell (even with less than 1/100s of a percent of the real wikipedias load), no version history, no search, no editing.
=> its not even worth the 7$
What does that have to do with anything? (Score:3, Interesting)
This new project (Citizendium) is being developed on a fast server which hinders the ability to optimize code. Smart people start with low cost equipment and optimize the heck out of it to make it work for as long as possible. Only then do you start spending more on faster systems and more bandwidth. You don't spend rediculous amounts of money up front for resources you have no use for. You first
Re: (Score:2)
That is a completely inane statement
A fast server skews your definition of "fast" (Score:2)
MediaWiki looks fast running on Wikipedia's servers but that's only because of their servers. When it's run on a PIII 900Mhz system you realize very quickly what a bloated piece of garbage MediaWiki is.
Sure it does a lot of stuff. It's just very inefficient at doing it.
Universities should teach courses that req
Re: (Score:2)
If they are, why do you use PHP and MySQL? I'm a PHP developer myself and know that if "huge resource hog" support are requirement of the project, I should look towards a serious application server platform.
Also... the percentage of "Wikipedia sucks!
Is this some FUD marketing campaign going behind the scenes? Either way, it certainly look
Re: (Score:2)
No marketing campaign that I know of; I certainly don't have any special deals with or personal friends at Slashdot. There have been two CZ-related stories on Slashdot that I know of. Maybe they just find the idea intriguing, that's all.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If that's the case, your software is badly designed. Have you considered having a static HTML version of the most up-to-date version of each page spat out whenever it is modified, and just directing read traffic at that static cached copy? That way, readers shouldn't use up any more resources than readers visiting any static site.
Language strategy? (Score:2)
--
.nosig
Re: (Score:2)
Anyway, good luck with the project. You're in an excellent position to fix a lot of the things that Wikipedia didn't do right when it started.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Yup. From the information I've gleaned from the outside, it's having all the same problems as Sanger's original Nupedia project (in which I participated for a while), including a dysfunctional server/software setup, and a lack of transparency.
Re: (Score:2)
I was somewhat amused that the edited sample article on biology that is publicly available is full of editorial errors. Capitalization of the topic word "biology" isn't even consistent in the section headers, let alone the article text.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)