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Wikipedia Overhaul

All-knowing, user-generated, online encyclopedia Wikipedia is due for a massive makeover. So fear not, fact-finders, but get ready for a new look, new layout and new features.

All-knowing, user-generated, online encyclopedia Wikipedia is due for a massive makeover. So fear not, fact-finders, but get ready for a new look, new layout and new features. But the news comes less that 24 hours after Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation websites went down for hours on in a “global outage” caused by a series of interconnected technical problems. “The problems started when Wikimedia servers overheated in the organization’s European data center and shut themselves off automatically. Wikimedia then switched all its traffic to its server cluster in Florida, but the failover process, which involves changing servers’ DNS entries, malfunctioned, knocking the organization’s sites offline around the world. “Shortly after we did this failover switch, it turned out that this failover mechanism was now broken, causing the DNS resolution of Wikimedia sites to stop working globally,” wrote Mark Bergsma, Wikimedia’s operations engineer in a post on Wikimedia’s Technical Blog.” Yesterday Google’s YouTube video sharing site also suffered downtime. Tut tut.

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