It looks like there's a bit of trouble over at Wikia Search this morning.
The search portal, run by Wikia, the for-profit wiki service co-founded by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, was returning "Service Unavailable" error messages about 10 percent of the time, during a test I ran on both Firefox and Safari.
This error message was coming up some of the time Wednesday morning after attempting to load the Wikia Search home page. The problem was found on both Firefox and Safari, but only about 10 percent of the time.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)The rest of the time, the service seemed to be working mainly as it should, though from time to time, the search page would only partially load.
The error message would return when loading the Wikia Search home page, and read, "Error 503 Service Unavailable." It continued, "Guru Meditation:" and then "XID:" and a nine-digit string that changed each time I found it.
The site Pingdom.com reported earlier Wednesday morning that Wikia Search's problems had been happening since Monday, and were occurring about a third of the time, but my tests revealed that it wasn't that severe.
Pingdom.com also had a chart suggesting that the search site's uptime was only about 65 percent.
When the site's home page did run, it then returned search results with no problem.
The rest of the time, the service worked as normal.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)In October, Valleywag reported that Wikia had laid off about a third of its 43-person workforce.
A call to Wikia for comment wasn't immediately returned.
The Wikimedia Foundation has instituted a restructuring of its board of trustees, in the process adding two "chapter" board seats and formalizing Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' position as the "community founder" board member.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been designated the 'community founder' board member of the Wikimedia Foundation as part of a restructuring of the board.
(Credit: Lane Hartwell)Valleywag on Wednesday first noted the changes.
First, according to Jan-Bart de Vreede, the board of trustees' vice chairman, the board is expanding from its current 8 seats to a total of 10.
The big change, de Vreede wrote, is the expansion of the board through what he termed "chapter-selected" seats.
"This has been under consideration for a long time, and we are glad to finally be implementing it, de Vreede wrote. "We want to acknowledge that the chapters are an important player in the fulfillment of the Wikimedia Foundation's mission and that they therefore deserve a voice in the governance of the Foundation. Please note that the two chapter-selected seats are not intended to represent the interests of the chapters vis-a-vis the foundation. The chapters are being asked to pick trustees who they feel will represent the interests of the Wikimedia Foundation and help it fulfill its mission as well as it possibly can."
There will also be three Wikimedia community-elected seats.
Further, the foundation is designating four board seats for "specific expertise" in the hopes that it can find people who bring "skills and capacities" the board wants.
"For example, we might decide to actively recruit board members with deep nonprofit governance experience or fund-raising experience," according to de Vreede.
And, finally, Wales was formally appointed to the community founder board seat, a seat he will occupy until December 31.
According to de Vreede, the "specific expertise" seats and the community founder seat will be re-appointed in January 2009. De Vreede's post did not specify how those reappointments would be done.
The community-elected and chapter-selected seats will come with two-year terms and will be reselected in alternating years.
It's been a good week for the coffers of the Wikimedia Foundation.
On Tuesday, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced it was giving $3 million over three years to the organization that runs Wikipedia.
And on Thursday, top-dog venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and his wife, Neeru, said they were going to donate $500,000 to the foundation.
This is good news for an organization that has been recently criticized over its finances, particularly from those who say founder Jimmy Wales may have played a little fast and loose with the foundation's credit card when it came to personal expenses. The foundation's executive director, Sue Gardner, has strongly denied the charges, arguing that Wales did nothing wrong.
Still, with some ill winds circling around, it must be gratifying for the Wikimedia Foundation to be seeing people and institutions like the Khoslas and the Sloan Foundation giving it votes of confidence with their wallets.
As for the Khosla money, it's unclear exactly what it will be used for. The Sloan money, it is said, will go toward, among other things, helping to support the construction of a Wikipedia feature called "flagged revisions," which is designed to allow "experienced editors to publicly and visibly grade the quality status of articles--in effect, functioning as a kind of 'nutrition labeling' for Wikipedia content."
Another thing that's unclear is exactly how much control the Khoslas and the Sloan Foundation get over how their donations will be used.
Some, like Valleywag editor Owen Thomas, have argued that the new money gives the donors oversight that could curtail what critics contend is profligate spending. Whether that control actually exists is not known.
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