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phoebe ayers:
> Personally, I think a dedicated toolserver is a great idea for the research
> community, but I know very little about the technical issues involved and/or
> whether this has been proposed before. Please comment, and I can pass on
> replies and put the researcher in touch with the tech team if it seems like a
> good idea.
i don't understand what "research-oriented" toolserver means. what will the
research-toolserver provide that the current toolserver doesn't provide?
is the only issue the time it takes for accounts to be created? this is a
WM-DE issue; the more people who complain to WM-DE about this, the more likely
it is to be resolved. (so far, i've had zero communications from WM-DE about
how the only people able to approve accounts are so busy with other things
nowadays. on the other hand, i didn't ask them about it either; i suppose they
don't bother monitoring the toolserver most of the time.)
we recently conducted a survey of toolserver users, and account approval (not
creation) was generally felt to be quite slow. once i produce a report from
the results of that survey, we might be able to get WM-DE to do something about
it.
most of the issues with the current toolserver come down to money. we don't
have enough money to afford redundant databases, so any failure is a major
problem and creates inconvenience for users. we don't have enough money for a
paid admin, so it often takes a long time for things to get done. we don't
have enough money to upgrade hardware when we need it, so things are often slow
until the money is available. i think the only non-money issue is that the
Wikimedia Foundation won't allow us to add any more admins until they do some
internal reorganisation of their databases, which we've been waiting for for
several months now.
the more separate toolservers we have, the less efficiently the money is spent.
sure, every chapter and university could have their own toolserver, but i don't
see how that's a better situation than these people contributing to a single
toolserver in order to fix the problems that prevent people from using it.
i've lost count of how often i've heard "the toolserver sucks; let's start our
own". what i don't understand is why no one says "the toolserver sucks; how
can we make it better?". (there _has_ been some interest from other chapters
recently about how to improve the toolserver; however, most chapters don't have
a lot of money to spend. a single additional database servers for the
toolserver would cost at least EUR8'000.)
in the past, we had a lot of problems getting WM-DE to do anything for the
toolserver (it seemed everyone there was busy with something else), but that's
been better recently, so i think we're making some progress.
- river.
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