As it turned out, Wikilabs is crap. Some sysop simply disabled CatScan without taking in mind, that in the German WP this tool is an integrated part of the category system and most categories even cannot be used since the German WP is using a faceted classification system, for instance it has very very big categories for the gender but then all person categories don't distinguish the gender. As an example, there is no w:en:Category:German female singers but there is only w:de:Category:Musiker (Deutschland) and w:de:Category:Frau and you need CatScan for intersecting the results. Thus CatScan is linked from any category description page. Thank you, dear unknown wikilabs sysop, for disabling the work with the German WP cat system. And don't tell me about resources: it was promised that wikilabs can do what the toolserver did. The result is: Wikilabs can't manage this. Wikilabs is crap. --Matthiasb (talk) 18:14, 11 October 2013 (UTC), very displeased
Topic on Talk:Wikimedia Labs
There was scheduled maintenance that took longer than expected. We've never promised that labs would never have maintenance periods where it would be down. We've promised that if a failure of some variety occurs there will be resources there to fix the issue. Toolserver has had unplanned outages that have lasted weeks at a time, so I think we're doing quite a bit better from that regard.
The weeks long outages of the toolserver happened years ago, before the toolserver capacity was doubled, correct me, when? 2007? Now it seems that 1) obviously there was (and perhaps still is) no skill at wikilabs how many resources are needed for the tools previously working on the toolserver and 2) a lack of knowledge about the importance of the several tools. Especially for a German WP user Catscan is the most important tool and in case of insufficiencies that tool should be among the latest to disable and again between the first to enable. Indeed all the bot stuff and other gimmicks should have lower priorities than tools which are part of the normal WP interface, as for example sulinfo (@ quentinv57) and contributions (@ luxo) – these are both still at the TS – or the stimmberechtigung tool (or other language specific "election" tools), then the category tools as above mentioned catscan_rewrite (@ magnus) or catgraph (@ dapete, still @ TS). If this is not possible or not appreciated I propose to put those tools permanently back on the toolserver.
If you take a look through the Technical pump archives, you'll notice a pretty normal pattern of the Toolserver being down for days or weeks at a time this year, here's a thread discussing it being down for two weeks in May. Check out most of the archives for the tech pump over the last couple years and you'll notice frequent day long outages or week long outages. Of course, this thread isn't a Toolserver bash fest. Toolserver needed hardware and it needed proper staffing.
Tool labs has had relatively few unplanned outages and this particular case was scheduled maintenance that took 11 hours longer than planned due to the amount of data that's being generated inside of the project. If you are interested in scheduled outages because it impacts your work, feel free to subscribe to labs-l for announcements of maintenance.
Neither Toolserver nor Wikimedia Labs are scoped for fully production workloads and there's an expectation in either infrastructure that tools and bots may be unavailable for extended periods of time on occasion.
Regarding your proposal on order of disabling tools: all tools were disabled at the same time because the underlying filesystem used for them was taken down for maintenance. The underlying filesystem was moved to another system to ensure better long-term stability.
Wait, hold on. Are you talking about this catscan tool? It seems it isn't working right now, but the labs maintenance was completed quite a while ago. If the tool isn't working you should contact the tool's maintainer (Magnus) and tell him it's broken.
It would have been massively more helpful if you would have stated the tool was broken rather than going on a rant...
Hi Matthiasb, are you subscribed to mail:labs-l? That's the list where you get all updates concerning Wikimedia Labs and Tool Labs. On Oct 8th, there was this thread about CatScan started: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/labs-l/2013-October/001726.html. It was not "just" disabled by an unknown admin but Coren informed the list and is in discussion about CatScan with Magnus to help debugging. There is nothing wrong with this, on the contrary, it's helpful.
And to both of you (and everybody else): To be honest, I think the comparisons between Toolserver and Tool Labs don't help at all, they just polarize the discussion and are not constructive. This discussion already is difficult enough. By keeping to compare directly, I'm afraid you may end up hurting the people who are more deeply involved in one of the two projects. If you ask me, we should stop this comparison and move forward to get the best out of the new infrastructure we got.
I'm afraid you may end up hurting the people who are more deeply involved in one of the two projects. -> Well, that damage already was done by the way the WMF decided and communicated that they will eventually take out the toolserver and force users onto labs, just another instance of how far nowadays the WMF is estranged from the Wikipedias' and other projects' communities and the smaller, and the more exotic a project seems to be, the lesser developped is the communication between them and the WMF – but that's a totally different nonetheless important issue.
I am happy to hear that Magnus Manske has been informed of the problem with his tool and is hopefully successful resolving the situation.