Talk:Tech/Server switch 2018

Request: Global sitenotice at 10 September & 12 October 2018

Hi, could you please apply a global sitenotice for the event on those two days? To be placed more than one hour in advance, so that contributors have time to finish up and save their work? It could help to prevent loss of work. (and annoyances) If you had already planned such notices on those days, I humbly withdraw my request. Regards, --oSeveno (talk) 09:39, 10 September 2018 (UTC)

Hi OSeveno, yes, we are setting up a CentralNotice banner in advance, to warn people that this is happening. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 18:17, 10 September 2018 (UTC)

Thank you very much. Regards, --oSeveno (talk) 19:12, 10 September 2018 (UTC)

Timing

Though I think it's important to be prepared and resilent and exerecise that, I am not sure wether it is wisely to do this exercise a merely 24 hours before hurricane Florence is hitting the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. when potentially more people want to read WP and perhaps more people want to edit. --Matthiasb (talk) 01:06, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

Matthiasb: I understand this is suboptimal, although something important always happens somewhere at any given point – for example, yesterday we had the national election in Sweden, and Wednesday will be the day when the final tally is announced, after the expat votes have been counted. We're in the process of updating not only every article related to the national parliament, but also every single county and municipality in the entire country. People will be reading the articles on political parties and candidates, and it's a prime opportunity to get them to start editing because it's so obvious something is missing. But there will always be something like that, unfortunately. This is long in planning (announcements have been coming in different places over the last weeks, for example in Tech/News), and would require quite some more time spent on this, at the same time as we'd get in the way of something else, somewhere. The wikis are supposed to be editable; we're not taking the fact that they won't be so lightly.

With that said, we're aiming for minimal disruptions. We're saying up to an hour, but we're hoping for just a short while – it was much faster the last time we did this. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 01:37, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

Also, this will not affect the ability to read the wikis, just to be clear. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 01:38, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

On the one hand, @Matthiasb, I'd reiterate that the wikis are still readable during the interval. For this particular situation, I don't think there's a problem.

On the other hand, @Johan (WMF), if the hurricane were actually scheduled to strike land today, instead of tomorrow, I think you would have to seriously consider Matthias's point. Notwithstanding our disclaimers, people do frequently depend on these sites for information. And with the possibility of life-and-death information updates coming through—and whatever the Swedish political situation is, it's not that—it potentially would have made sense to postpone the exercise a day. It's obviously a balancing act, and not every situation would warrant a postponement. Perhaps few do. But you still need to be mindful of these things. StevenJ81 (talk) 13:26, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

Does the technical test have anything to do with Hurricane Michael

I know that the servers are located in Florida. So is the technical test due to Hurricane Michael? Or is it a general technical test? Felicia777 (talk) 14:03, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

This is the reversal of the temporary use of servers at the secondary location as the production servers, and was long-scheduled. See the page for which this is the talk page. StevenJ81 (talk) 14:19, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

Felicia777: The servers in question are actually in Virginia and Texas. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 14:20, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

Centre/center

Note: This discussion was moved from revision 18464649.

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Regarding Special:Diff/18459512 – centre is common in British English spelling, but center dominates in the US. The mix is a result of people writing British and US English working on the same text. (: /Johan (WMF) (talk) 14:40, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

Oh, I didn't know that. (Also spell checker in my browser (Firefox Nightly 64.0a1) shows underline on word 'centre'.) But according to Wikipedia, it's Data center. - PlavorSeol | T | C 15:27, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

We learn new things every day! That's what Wikipedia is here for, after all. If you're interested, w:en:Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Spelling has some tables – you can actually see how "centre" is marked as the standard spelling in every mentioned country except for the US.

I see how it might look like that is the recommendation, but when an article starts with "A data center (American English) or data centre (British English)" on English Wikipedia, this means both spellings are equally valid. The fact that the article is placed under "data center" is only because one name has to be picked. The general rule on English Wikipedia is that if something has a strong connection to something, it should be spelled in the variant that's dominating in that country (e.g. British English for a British town and US English for a US politician), but otherwise to just let whoever first created the article decide which variant to use. So you have a lot of articles that is under a specific name, but can be spelled in different ways in different variants of English. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 19:38, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

Then which should we use, centre or center? Maybe we need to talk about that, so let's move this to Talk:Tech/Server switch 2018 page. - PlavorSeol | T | C 14:08, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

For a matter like this, we ordinarily would use the rule from English Wikipedia, which is: whoever is first to write chooses, and then the page uses a consistent style. Here, User:Johan (WMF) created the page and used UK spelling, so that's what we use on this page. If the person who creates the notional Tech/Server switch 2019 uses American spelling, that's fine, too. We don't have to be consistent in these things, as long as everyone understands what's going on. StevenJ81 (talk) 14:38, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

I would add: the rule variant Johan mentions (British town: British spelling, US politican: US spelling) only applies when the "British-ness" or "American-ness" or "Canadian-ness" or what-have-you of the page is material to the page. In this case, the fact that the servers are in the US is not material to the facts being discussed, so that fact by itself does not force the US spelling. StevenJ81 (talk) (definitely from the US) 14:43, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

Let’s act as learned/learnt ones, people. Kindly be reminded on whatever edit, you do stick “update needed” flag to all translators watching those pages they have spent time on, and it is discouraging to come back and see you have to make a faux edit only to rip off the yellow icon. Translators’ community is bound for making more pages available in their languages, so you are doing right, but next time your linguistic itch urge you, please consider to discuss _beforehand_ at that namespace alotted to this type of argument, then go ahead and edit after conscent. Let us see and share the statics table greener :) . --Omotecho (talk) 22:55, 2 November 2018 (UTC)