উইকিপিডিয়া:প্রায়শ জিজ্ঞাসিত প্রশ্ন/কারিগরী

উইকিপিডিয়া, মুক্ত বিশ্বকোষ থেকে
সাহায্য:সূচী

কারিগরী বিষয়ক প্রাজিপ্র

এই প্রাজিপ্র পাতায় উইকিপিডিয়ার উইকিপিডিয়ায় ব্যবহৃত সফটওয়্যার ও হার্ডওয়্যারসহ কারিগরী দিকসমূহ নিয়ে আলোচনা করা হয়েছে।

যদি একই সময়ে দুই বা ততোধিক ব্যবহারকারী একই পৃষ্ঠা সম্পাদনা করেন?[সম্পাদনা]

যখন দ্বিতীয় ব্যবহারকারী পৃষ্ঠাটি সংরক্ষণ করবেন, তখন মিডিয়াউইকি স্বয়ংক্রিয়ভাবে দুজনের দ্বারা সম্পাদিত পরিবর্তন সামঞ্জস্য করে নিবে এবং পৃষ্ঠাটির বর্তমান সংস্করণ দেখাবে। যদি কোনো কারণে এই সামঞ্জস্যতা ব্যর্থ হয় তখন ব্যবহারকারী ব্যবহারকারী সংঘর্ষ বার্তা পাবেন, এবং সামঞ্জস্যতা ম্যানুয়ালি করার সুযোগ আসবে। Multiple consecutive conflicts are noticed, and will generate a slightly different message. This is similar to Concurrent Versions System (CVS), a widely used software version management system.

আমার শব্দচাবি ভুলে গেলে আমি কীভাবে তা ফেরৎ পাবো?[সম্পাদনা]

অ্যকাউন্ট খোলোর সময় আপনি যদি আপনার ইমেইল ঠিকানা আমাদের দিয়ে থাকেন তবে নতুন একটা শব্দচাবি (Password) আপনার ইমেইল ঠিকানায় পাঠানো হবে। পাতার উপরের ডান দিকে প্রবেশ/নতুন অ্যকাউন্ট-এ ক্লিক করুন, আপনার ব্যবহারকারী নাম লিখুন, এবং নিচে দেখুন লেখা আছে "নতুন শব্দচাবি ইমেইলে পাঠাও", সেখানে ক্লিক করুন। এরপর আপনি যে ইমেইল ঠিকানা দিয়েছেন সেখানে নতুন শব্দচাবিসহ একটি ইমেইল পাঠানো হবে। এরপর সেই পাসওয়ার্ড দিয়ে আপনার অ্যাকাউন্টে প্রবেশ করুন, এবং আমার পছন্দ -এ প্রবেশ করে আপনার মনে থাকবে এমন কিছু দ্বারা আপনার শব্দচাবি পরিবর্তন করে নিন।

কীভাবে আমি আমার শব্দচাবি পরিবর্তন করতে পারি?[সম্পাদনা]

অ্যাকাউন্টের শব্দচাবি নতুন করে দাও পাতায় গিয়ে আপনি আপনার শব্দচাবি (Password) পরিবর্তন করতে পারেন। এছাড়া আপানার আমার পছন্দ পাতায় গিয়েও শব্দচাবি পরিবর্তন করা সম্ভব।

কীভাবে আমি একটি বাগের ব্যাপারে রিপোর্ট করতে পারি?[সম্পাদনা]

বাগের গতিবিধি পর্যবেক্ষণের জন্য ডেভলাপাররা মিডিয়াজিলা/বাগজিলা ব্যবহার করেন। আরো তথ্যের জন্য বাগ রিপোর্ট দেখুন।

নতুন একটি সুবিধার ব্যাপারে আমি কিভাবে পরামর্শ দিতে পারি?[সম্পাদনা]

সুবিধার ব্যাপারে অফিসিয়ালি অনুরোধ করতে আপনি মিডিয়াজিলা/বাগজিলা ব্যবহার করতে পারেন। মিডিয়াজিলা ব্যবহার সম্মন্ধে তথ্য জানতে অনুগ্রহপূর্বক বাগ রিপোর্ট দেখুন।
To discuss a new feature, go to MediaWiki feature request and bug report discussion. But remember, if you don't report your feature request at MediaZilla, it will probably never be implemented!

What software is used to run Wikipedia?[সম্পাদনা]

Wikipedia originally ran UseModWiki, a general wiki script by Clifford Adams. In January 2002, we switched to a PHP script, which in turn was completely overhauled the following July to create what we now call MediaWiki.
MySQL is used for the database backend, Apache is the web server, and PowerDNS is used for DNS.
The Wikipedia servers' operating system is Linux. The most widely used distribution is Fedora. For details see Wikimedia servers.

How about the hardware?[সম্পাদনা]

Current situation[সম্পাদনা]

See m:Wikimedia servers.

History of Wikipedia Hardware[সম্পাদনা]

A brief history of Wikipedia serving:
Phase I: January 2001 - January 2002
  1. One of bomis' servers hosted all Wikipedia wikis running on UseModWiki software
Phase II: January 2002-July 2002
  1. One of bomis' servers hosted all Wikipedia wikis; English and meta running on the php/mysql-based new software, all other languages on UseModWiki. Runs both the database and the web server on one machine.
Phase IIIa: July 2002-May 2003
  1. Wikipedia gets own server, running English Wikipedia and after a bit meta, with rewritten PHP software. Runs both the database and the web server on one machine.
  2. One of bomis' servers continues to host some of the other languages on UseModWiki, but most of the active ones are gradually moved over to the other server during this period.
Phase IIIb: May 2003-Feb 2004
  1. Wikipedia's server is given the code name "pliny". It serves the database for all phase 3 wikis and the web for all but English.
  2. New server, code name "larousse", serves the web pages for the English Wikipedia only. Plans to move all languages' web serving to this machine are put on hold until load is brought down with more efficient software or larousse is upgraded to be faster.
  3. One of bomis' servers continued to host some of the other languages on UseModWiki until it died. All are now hosted on pliny; a few more of the active ones have been gradually moved over to the new software, and an eventual complete conversion is planned.
Phase IIIc: Feb 2004-present
  1. Wikipedia gets a whole new set of servers, paid for through donations to the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.
  2. The new architecture has a new database server (suda), with a set of separate systems running Apache, as well as "squids" that cache results (to reduce the load). More details are at m:Wikimedia servers.
  3. New servers bought as needed, bringing total number to about 350 servers.

How about the connection?[সম্পাদনা]

In Tampa (pmtpa), Wikimedia has one 10 Gbit/s and one 1 Gbit/s connection to its US colocation provider PowerMedium and 1 Gbit/s to Time Warner Telecom. The Amsterdam facility (knams) has a single 700 Mbit/s connection to Kennisnet, and the South Korean facility (yaseo) has a single 1 Gbit/s connection to Yahoo. Combined output is roughly 3.0G bit/s at peak (as of February 2007).

How big is the database?[সম্পাদনা]

Early in Wikipedia's history, in February 2003 the database was about 4 GB in size. By August 2003, this had grown to roughly 16 GB, with uploaded images and media files taking up another gigabyte or so. By April 2004, this had grown to about 57 GB, and was growing at about 1 to 1.4 GB per week, and by October 2004, it had grown to about 170 GB. This includes all languages and support tables but not images and multimedia.
As of late August 2006, database storage takes about 1.2 terabytes:
  • English Wikipedia core database: 163G
  • Other Florida-based core databases: 213G
  • Other Korea-based core databases: 117G
  • Text storage nodes: 44G, 44G, 200G, 149G, 166G, 84G, 84G
This may include free space inside database storage files, as well as a lot of indexing.
Uploaded files took up approximately 372 gigabytes as of June 2006, excluding thumbnails.
Compressed database dumps can be downloaded at http://download.wikipedia.org/.

What kind of markup language does Wikipedia use?[সম্পাদনা]

Wikipedia uses a very simple markup based on UseModWiki. For more details, see Wikipedia:How to edit a page.
The short answer is: for simplicity and security.
And now the longer answer. Wikipedia, and wikis in general, are meant to be edited on the fly. HTML is not easy to use when you simply want to write an article. Creating links gives us a particularly dramatic example. To link to the HTML article using HTML, one would have to type
<a href="HTML">HTML</a>
Using Wikipedia markup is much easier:
[[HTML]]
Then there's security. Different web browsers have bugs that can be exploited via HTML. Malicious users could also do things like JavaScript popup windows or page redirects if they had full HTML ability on Wikipedia. Several "experimental" sites that allowed full-HTML editing have suffered such attacks, including a couple of other wikis that allowed arbitrary HTML.

So we can't use any HTML?![সম্পাদনা]

That's not true. Some HTML tags work. Also, HTML table tags were once the only way to create tables (but now it can be done by wiki syntax too). However, there's been some rumbling among the software developers that most HTML tags are deprecated.
For discussions on wiki syntax for tables, see m:Wiki markup tables and m:MediaWiki User's Guide: Using tables for more recent activity; m:WikiShouldOfferSimplifiedUseOfTables for an old beginning activity.
Also see Wikipedia:How to edit a page.

What about non-ASCII characters, and special symbols?[সম্পাদনা]

Wikipedia uses Unicode (specifically the UTF-8 encoding of unicode) and most browsers can handle it but font issues mean that more obscure characters may not work for many users (particularly Internet Explorer users as IE has very poor support for automatically using alternative fonts for obscure characters). Meta:Help:Special characters page for a detailed discussion of what is generally safe and what isn't. This page will be updated over time as more browsers come to support more features.
See http://www.unicode.org/help/display_problems.html for instructions on how to enable Unicode support for most platforms.

What about math topics, which require many special symbols, fonts, and graphics?[সম্পাদনা]

Just use TeX! See Meta:Help:Formula.

Is it possible to download the contents of Wikipedia?[সম্পাদনা]

Yes, the complete text and editing history of all Wikipedia pages can be downloaded. See Wikipedia:database download.
Note that downloading the database dumps is much preferred over trying to spider the entire site. Spidering the site will take you much longer, and puts a lot of load on the server (especially if you ignore our robots.txt and spider over billions of combinations of diffs and whatnot). Heavy spidering can lead to your spider, or your IP, being barred with prejudice from access to the site. Legitimate spiders (for instance search engine indexers) are encouraged to wait about a minute between requests, follow the robots.txt, and if possible only work during less loaded hours (2:00-14:00 UTC is the lighter half of the day).
The uploaded images and other media files are not currently bundled in an easily downloadable form; if you need one, please contact the developers on the wikitech-l mailing list. Please do not spider the whole site to get images.


Does Wikipedia use cookies?[সম্পাদনা]

Cookies are not required to read or edit Wikipedia, but they are required in order to log in and link your edits to a user account.
When you log in, the wiki will set a temporary session cookie which identifies your login session; this will be expired when your browser exits (or after an inactivity timeout), and is not saved on your hard drive.
Another cookie will be saved which lists the user name you last logged in under, to make subsequent logins just a teensy bit easier. (Actually two: one with your name, and one with your account's internal ID number; they must match up.) These cookies expire after 30 days. If this worries you, clear your cookies after completing your session.
If you check the "remember my password" box on the login form, another cookie will be saved with a hash of your password (not the password itself). As long as this remains valid, you can bypass the login step on subsequent visits to the wiki. The cookie expires after 30 days, or is removed if you log out. If this worries you, don't use the option. (You should not use it on a public terminal!)

Hey! Why was I automatically logged out?[সম্পাদনা]

This could be a result of your cookie, browser cache, or firewall/Internet security settings. Or, to quote Tim Starling (referring to a question about "remembering password across sessions"):
  • "The kind of session isn't a network session strictly speaking, it's an HTTP session, managed by PHP's session handling functions. This kind of session works by setting a cookie, just like the "remember password" feature. The difference is that the session cookie has the "discard" attribute set, which means that it is discarded when you close your browser. This is done to prevent others from using your account after you have left the computer.
  • The other difference is that PHP sessions store the user ID and other such information on the server side. Only a "session key" is sent to the user. The remember password feature stores all required authentication information in the cookie itself. On our servers, the session information is stored in the notoriously unreliable memcached system. Session information may occasionally be lost or go missing temporarily, causing users to be logged out. The simplest workaround for this is to use the remember password feature, as long as you are not worried about other people using the same computer." from the Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) on May 4, 2005. (italics added).
In other words: click the "remember me" box when logging in.

The software that runs Wikipedia is great! Can I use it for my site?[সম্পাদনা]

You can, but depending on your needs you might be better served using something else; MediaWiki is big and complex. See first Wiki software for a list of wiki scripts.
If after scanning that you're still sure you want to use MediaWiki; see the MediaWiki web site for details on downloading, installing and configuring the software.

Can I add a page hit counter to a Wikipedia page?[সম্পাদনা]

Page hit counting is a feature of the MediaWiki software, but this feature is disabled at the Wikipedia site for performance reasons. Wikipedia is one of the most popular web sites in the world and uses a complex of more than 200 servers to handle the load. Nearly 80% of the load is handled by fewer than 20 front end cache servers which are specialized web servers that are very fast but have very few features. Page access logs are also not maintained at this time due to the sheer number of hits experienced.
However, you can find an experimental hit counter at this address.

Low-bandwidth wireless Wikipedia[সম্পাদনা]

To view a low-bandwidth Main Page suitable for wireless users, select the Wikipedia:Main Page alternative (simple layout) link. That main page has a link to the text-only version of the main page. For now, direct entry of the URL into your wireless device's browser is the most convenient way to get to the articles. If you know a one-word article, such as Science, you can use that article to gain entry to your favorite topics.
Also if you log in, then try selecting the chick skin in your preferences to eliminate all the stuff from the edge of the screen, and give you more space to read the articles themselves.

Is the "random article" feature really random?[সম্পাদনা]

No, although it's random enough to provide a small sample of articles reliably.
We have an index on the page table called page_random, which is a random floating point number uniformly distributed on [0, 1). Special:Random chooses a random double-precision floating-point number, and returns the next article with a page_random value higher than the selected random number. Some articles will have a larger gap before them, in the page_random index space, and so will be more likely to be selected. So the actual probability of any given article being selected is in fact itself random.
The page_random value for new articles, and the random value used by Special:Random, is selected by reading two 31-bit words from a Mersenne Twister, which is seeded at each request by PHP's initialisation code using a high-resolution timer and the PID. The words are combined using:
(mt_rand() * $max + mt_rand()) / $max / $max
Some old articles had their page_random value reset using MySQL's RAND():
rand_st->seed1=(rand_st->seed1*3+rand_st->seed2) % rand_st->max_value;
rand_st->seed2=(rand_st->seed1+rand_st->seed2+33) % rand_st->max_value;
return (((double) rand_st->seed1)/rand_st->max_value_dbl);

I have a problem not on this list, where do I go?[সম্পাদনা]

See Troubleshooting - if it's not on there try the village pump. For help with a particular software task see Wikipedia:Computer help desk.