Wikipedia Sucks!

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T334940

At this point, we should have a whole sub-forum just for developer incompetence.

lol hundreds of articles are affected.

badmachine wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 27, 2023 11:52 pm

lol hundreds of articles are affected.

Tens of thousands* on enwiki alone.

Not even including the millions of talk pages affected and all the pages in others wikis.

This is the kind of stuff on Sucks that isn't on Wikipediocracy because they're too stupid to know about.

Their software stack is overly complex and comprised of many layers of caching and programming surrounding that caching etc.

Anything involving bypassing cache for DB updates is going to involve maintaining obscure code at multiple levels of the mediawiki stack. The site manages to be fast, and its survived for a while but the code behind it's existence is a mess.

oranges33 wrote: ↑

Mon May 08, 2023 12:18 am

Their software stack is overly complex and comprised of many layers of caching and programming surrounding that caching etc.

Correct, and partly because they are totally dependent on a crude mash-up of assorted open-source products, many obsolete or abandoned. In fact, if not for Squid, I doubt Wikipedia would exist today. Their server loading functions are massively dependent on Squid and no WMF project wiki could survive the traffic loading without it. Squid is basically a leftover of the late 1990s dotcom boom, with very few active developers left. It's getting archaic.

we should have a whole sub-forum just for developer incompetence

Perhaps but we already have a lot of subforums. It's difficult to keep people's attention as it is. VERY few people, in or out of WP circles, gives a damn about their erratic software development environment. "It's a boring subject" and all that. Sorry.

(24,000th post on Sucks. Yay!)

ericbarbour wrote: ↑

Mon May 08, 2023 2:49 am

In fact, if not for Squid, I doubt Wikipedia would exist today. Their server loading functions are massively dependent on Squid and no WMF project wiki could survive the traffic loading without it. Squid is basically a leftover of the late 1990s dotcom boom, with very few active developers left. It's getting archaic.

Ironically, many of the proxies and VPNs used to vandalized Wikipedia also run on Squid.

Edit: They appear to have switched to Varnish caching

Wikipediocracy finally got around to it over a month after my original post.

Well.....far as I can tell, nothing is being done, because I keep seeing things like this on random articles.

ericbarbour wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 12, 2023 5:32 am

Well.....far as I can tell, nothing is being done, because I keep seeing things like this on random articles.

blanked-graph-eskom-article.jpg

There hasn't even been a new comment on the phab task since May 29th. This probably won't be solved for at least a 6 months, might even become a "forever issue".

Lol they created an entire roadmap/strategy to fix the graph issue: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extensio ... ns#Roadmap I bet it still won't work in ten years.