When Wikipedia goes down Options Rating

[thekohser]

English Wikipedia (and Meta, and French Wikipedia, and Wikiversity, but strangely not Wikiquote) seems to have a server down right now. Anybody else notice this? Additionally, I notice that on the "error" page the Foundation has also craftily mentioned:

The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organisation which hosts some of the most popular sites on the Internet, including Wikipedia. It has a constant need to purchase new hardware. If you would like to help, please donate.

I wonder if they might be actually planning downtime deliberately, in order to drive up contributions?

[Eva Destruction]

To be boring for a minute – usually when you get this message it means someone's doing an action that's locked the system (either the devs updating the software, or something which puts a major strain on the server). Renaming an account with a lot of edits will do it, as will deletion/restoration of pages with thousands of revisions – when Nawlinwiki was at his fearless-grawp-hunter peak, you'd get this all the time as he deleted and selective-restored what felt like every single page.

[MZMcBride]

To be boring for a minute – usually when you get this message it means someone's doing an action that's locked the system (either the devs updating the software, or something which puts a major strain on the server). Renaming an account with a lot of edits will do it, as will deletion/restoration of pages with thousands of revisions – when Nawlinwiki was at his fearless-grawp-hunter peak, you'd get this all the time as he deleted and selective-restored what felt like every single page.

There are protections in place now that put large renames in the job queue and prevent deletions of pages with over 5,000 revisions.

Nowadays, when the site is down, it's nearly always related to a server issue of some sort, not something caused by an admin.