CZ:Notice Board/March 2007

This is an archive of all notices added to CZ:Notice Board during March 2007. Please do not edit this page.

See CZ:Notice Board/Archive for archived notices from other dates.

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March 31, 2007

An Introduction to CZ for Wikipedians is now available. The page offers important information about contributing to CZ that Wikipedians particularly should find very helpful and that they need to know before fully diving in. Please disperse as appropriate. Stephen Ewen 22:36, 30 March 2007 (CDT)

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Creating a new page was causing a database error. The explanation as best I can understand it may be a timing issue related to postgresql sequences and how mediawiki handles edit transactions. If we see it again, we know how to fix it much faster.

Mail Changes:

• Bugs@ was not working to forward email on to developers. Fixed.

• Mailing lists to mail.citizendium.org have been bouncing with Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; mail for mail.citizendium.org loops back to myself. Mail.citizendium.org was added to the local destination in an attempt to fix. The server reports as voltaire for reverse DNS spam tests.

• MailScanner is now notifying instead of quarantining High Scoring Spam. I also rolled back spam scores in an attempt to get to the bottom of other delivery issues. Those may have been licked by changes above, and the settings will change back in a day or two if all mail errors are licked.

Robots.txt:

• An inquiry was made into status of robots.txt. Currently User and User Talk pages are blocked by good behaving bots in robots.txt See http://en.citizendium.org/robots.txt . Would also like to block &action=edit follows by bots to save a bit of load....bots don't need to follow those links.

Electrawn 12:34, 31 March 2007 (CDT)

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March 30, 2007

Thanks to the help of various mediawiki developers, servers appear slightly more stable. Client-side Caching is now on. We now use Squid to act as a front end to Apache and Mediawiki. Special thanks to Domas Mitzuas, Brion Vibber and Freenode IRC nicks 'mark' and '_syphilis_'. Your CZ degrees are in the mail.

Greg Sabino Mullane has been working on the time fix. Apologies to those it drove "batty." A lingering server issue didn't make this fix go into full effect until late last night. Edits made on either server will be on time in recent changes. Electrawn 02:44, 30 March 2007 (CDT)

UPDATE: sorry, we aren't out of the woods with our server problems. We've had some significant ones this morning, but the hard-working Jason is on it. --Larry Sanger 09:47, 30 March 2007 (CDT)

Reid is down with a possible hardware failure. Locke is currently handling the site exclusively. Both locke and reid were experiencing problems this morning. Steadfast is looking into it. Electrawn 10:20, 30 March 2007 (CDT)

March 29, 2007

The technical crew are aware of the bizarre date/time bugs that have been plaguing the wiki today. This makes the order of edits in Recent Changes and page histories off. At least they're right within a day! Sorry about this--consider this growing pains. They're still at work on it--please be patient.

Update: Servers appear to be synced, and the time window for "out of time" edits has passed. Electrawn 02:20, 30 March 2007 (CDT)

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We need workgroups on all new articles! Can you help? It's great to see new articles starting. We are still developing the nuances of how to go about things in making our compendium of knowledge, but, in new articles, always include: Category:CZ Live, and the workgroup that the article falls under. If you are an author and you start or add to an article, you might also add yourself to the workgroup (keep reading for the "how to do it").

Well, what if you started an article and you didn't add a workgroup? You can always add it now - or somebody else can.

For example: United_States_of_America has no workgroup. "United States" is not a workgroup.

For an example of an article with a proper workgroup tag, please see: Education. Notice the category box at the bottom of the article with the Education Workgroup in it. Articles can have more than one workgroup category!

Who can add the proper workgroup first? The Social Sciences contain the appropriate workgroups. (Hint- The Main Page lists them all- on the right). There are many other new articles that are stubs starting out with no workgroup. You can find them by going to the menu bar over on the far left and hit Recent changes [1] under Project Pages. Check each N! article. Does it have a workgroup category on the bottom? That workgroup category puts in in touch with the editors who will eventually be approving it. Can there be more than one workgroup? Yes- but there must be at least one.

To add yourself to a workgroup, use the form [[Category:Education Authors|Smith, Bob]], etc., and add it to your user page. Substitute the proper work group for "Education" in the example, and your name-Last, First for the names in the example. Only CZ staff should add "Editors" to user pages, please.

To add a workgroup category tag to an article, use the form [[Category:Education Workgroup]] at the bottom of the article. Substitute in the proper workgroup for "Education" in the example.

Some of us like to write, and some of us like to categorize. If you need help with either, please ask (I'll help you if I can). But go right ahead and -"do". Nancy Sculerati 06:40, 29 March 2007 (CDT)

March 27, 2007

Now that they can see our violations, some Wikipedians have been rather grumpy about the articles we have here that are not marked as being sourced from Wikipedia. So please do check those "Content is from Wikipedia?" boxes as appropriate. This is one of a dozen things you should know about. Also, The Big Cleanup is systematically checking for violations--which is just one of many good reasons to pitch in there.

An experimental list of most popular violations (i.e. most viewed articles with incorrect status) can be found on the talk page. Happy editing! --AlekStos

4AM CDT: Load balancing is here! Reid, after a nasty reboot glitch, has been added to the server pool to balance the massive traffic we have been experiencing. We now have 1 dedicated web server, 1 near-dedicated web server (reid also runs blog and forums) and a dedicated Database server. Since my brain is completely taxed, Puddy is in control. Fear Doxen System Administration. [[2]] Electrawn 04:04, 27 March 2007 (CDT)

March 26, 2007

We were down longer than expected, but running on the right server. Up as of 8:15CDT Electrawn 20:16, 26 March 2007 (CDT)

We will be doing some work moving the database in about 30 minutes (7 PM CST). Some downtime (20 minutes or so) is likely. Apologies, but it's very needed. -- ZachPruckowski (Speak to me) 18:31, 26 March 2007 (CDT)

Our applications have risen, and - with them, new questions have come. Some cases have raised issues, in the details, of what is and is not acceptable in an application. What's the proper interpretation of our policies for creating new user accounts? Please see [3] and participate in the discussion!

A dozen things you should know about!

March 25, 2007

We are now live! The Pilot Project is over! A big AP feature story is about to appear online--let's have fun!

The AP story is up--two related stories, in fact, reprinted over 100 times.

March 22, 2007

Comments desired on a new essay, before I link to it from the blog: Why the Citizendium Will (Probably) Succeed. Please e-mail me comments at sanger [at] citizendium.org. Thanks in advance! --Larry Sanger 18:58, 22 March 2007 (CDT)

March 21, 2007

We are now no longer at pilot.citizendium.org! As of this evening, Jason (in consultation with others) has moved us to en.citizendium.org. Yahoo! We aren't yet open to read access by the public--but we will be soon.

Another minor task for someone: search for all our CZ pages with "pilot project", and edit them all so that they speak about the Citizendium, not a pilot project. Anyone game?

March 20, 2007

Minor task for someone: please go through Category:External Articles, compare it to Category:CZ Live; none of the articles in the former category should be in the latter. Please remove the tags as necessary.

• This one is finished.

March 19, 2007

SysAdmin Notice: New Servers to be installed on Mar. 20; Wiki may be unavailable for undeterminable lengths of time. Expect disruption, be patient. UPDATE: This downtime will also encompass the forums and the blog.

As a result, our public launch will, finally, be happening quite soon--certainly before the end of the month. Major press coverage has already been lined up and you can probably expect a lot of new activity here.

March 15, 2007

Please sign up to help with The Big Cleanup! This will be extremely useful, and we need all the help we can get. Do have a look, and consider doing at least one set of articles.

March 12, 2007

We have created a new "CZ:" namespace that will replace the old "Citizendium Pilot:" namespace. Please do not use "Citizendium Pilot:" anymore--because we are soon no longer to be a pilot project, but a Beta project!

The "Content is from Wikipedia?" checkbox now, finally, actually works. If you check it, it will stay checked. Therefore, if you're working on an article, or notice an article, that has content from Wikipedia, but which doesn't credit Wikipedia, will you please edit the article and check that box? Notice that it is still the case that you must make some other change (just adding a space " " will do it) in order for the checkbox change to register.

March 10, 2007

We're now testing for The Big Cleanup and The Article Checklist. We need a few more people to go through a cleanup "to do list" for a dozen articles, for each making sure the title is bolded, unused categories are deleted, etc. You also place the Article Checklist template on the article talk pages. If you want an idea of some categories that the Article Checklist automatically generate, start at Checklisted Articles.

March 8, 2007

Larry Sanger is leaning toward using GFDL exclusively for Wikipedia-sourced articles, and is impressed by the arguments people have made for CC-by-nc for the other articles. Please contribute to the discussion of this absolutely essential question on this forum page.

Sanger says he would like to make a final decision, perhaps, tomorrow or this weekend.

March 7, 2007

We've got a launch plan.

Note, we're caught up with our application backlog.