3170: Service Outage
| Service Outage |
 Title text: Now, if it were the *Canon* wiki, it's possible to imagine someone with a productivity-related reason for consulting it, but no one's job requires them to read that much about Admiral Daala. |
Explanation[edit]
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This is one of 52 incomplete explanations: This page was created BY SOMEONE WHOSE WORK RELIES ON THIS WIKI. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
This comic compares the effects that different internet service outages can have on people's productivity. When the service is essential to someone's work, their productivity will clearly go down. They may initially be able to switch to alternative tasks, but the longer the outage goes on, the more of their task stack will be blocked and the less they will be able to accomplish. However, if the service (such as the Star Wars Legends wiki) is non-essential, their productivity improves, implying that without access to the service they are less distracted and get more work done.
The title text makes a distinction between the productivity effects of the canon and non-canon Star Wars wikis. A writer or editor for a forthcoming Star Wars product may have a work-related reason to review a wiki containing Star Wars canon, in order to ensure consistency with the work they are developing. Star Wars Legends, on the other hand, have been considered non-canon since 2014. The character of Admiral Daala is well documented, but a relatively niche line of interest.
This comic was posted the day after there was an outage at Cloudflare, a major content delivery network (CDN) whose failure affected this very site (among many others). This outage followed outages a few weeks ago at Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, which provide cloud computing services, and fifteen months since another significant outage. These aren't sites that most non-technical users are directly familiar with, but they provide infrastructure for many popular web sites, so their failures have wide-ranging impacts even for those who had been previously unaware of their role in their online life. For example, popular websites such as Netflix, Spotify, and Pinterest were affected by the AWS outage. The same day as the Cloudflare outage, there was also a Github outage; this site is used mainly to support software development.
Transcript[edit]
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This is one of 27 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
- [A graph of "Productivity when a major internet service goes down" over time]
- [The productivity line starts at average. A point in time is labelled 'outage begins']
- [After that, the line splits into two lines: one labelled "People whose work relies on the service". It goes down over time.]
- [The second line is labelled "People whose work doesn't rely on the service". It jumps a little and stays roughly constant after.]
- [The second line is illustrated by Cueball seated at a desk, using a laptop computer. A thought bubble says: "Aw man, the outage took down the Star Wars Legends wiki."]
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F1R5T! RadiantRainwing (talk) 01:53, 20 November 2025 (UTC)
On the contrary, almost all the fanfiction I write is set in Legends, so my productivity takes a major hit there. (I don't care what disney says, they can take the old republic from my cold dead hands) 108.254.161.83 02:09, 20 November 2025 (UTC)
damn aws has been a month old already? TheTrainsKid (talk) 02:11, 20 November 2025 (UTC)
- But the Cloudflare outage seems like only yesterday. 76.187.17.7 04:52, 20 November 2025 (UTC)
The second paragraph is all 1 sentence. Somebody should probably fix that. Qwertyuiopfromdefly (talk) 02:36, 20 November 2025 (UTC)
At my most active on this site, an outage might have increased my productivity :-p But now I did not even notice this outage yesterday :-D --Kynde (talk) 08:32, 20 November 2025 (UTC)
I think the capital letter is significant. A Canon wiki would be about the Japanese company that makes fine optical equipment, something that would be a legitimate business-related destination.Muttley (talk) 09:57, 20 November 2025 (UTC)
Someone has put in "like Google" as an example. Should this site be extending the internet myth that Google is essential for internet use? In reality, it's just one of many search engines. If Google went down, people would get a less skewed result from something like DuckDuckGo. But they think Google IS the internet. And this wiki shouldn't ecoueage the myth. 86.45.82.77 (talk) 10:22, 20 November 2025 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
- Is that better? 82.13.184.33 12:27, 20 November 2025 (UTC)
- Finally, somebody remembered that DuckDuckGo exists. Duck player is genuinely a lifesaver. --DollarStoreBa'alConverse 14:00, 20 November 2025 (UTC)
- At least DuckDuckGo has self-declared. However, some other niche search engines depend on Google and the impact on them of a potential Google breakdown is unclear. 物灵 (talk) 01:32, 25 November 2025 (UTC)
The 'doesn't rely on' curve is wrong - it should initially plummet as the person repeatedly refreshes the Star Wars Legends wiki, while cursing it for (still) not working. 82.13.184.33 10:46, 20 November 2025 (UTC)
- I thought the same for people who rely on it. There should be a big spike down, while people keep refreshing and debugging things, then it gradually goes up again, often to almost the same level as before, as people focus on tasks that they can do without that service or find workarounds. Fabian42 (talk) 00:03, 21 November 2025 (UTC)
- That would make sense. How it's done in the comic, it might be an initial focus on tasks that can be done without the service, before people start to run out of things they can do without access to whatever software. It might also depend on the scale of the x axis, though the graph presumably covers about a day. R128 (talk) 18:40, 21 November 2025 (UTC)
I feel 903:_Extended_Mind might be relevant as well? 173.70.43.163 (talk) 17:07, 20 November 2025 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
Is there some separate Star Wars canon-only wiki that I'm not aware of that this comic is referring to? The main wiki to my knowledge is Wookieepedia which has both Legends and Canon information (generally a subject in both just has two separate pages and a link at the top to switch between Legends and Canon), but if that server goes down it's going to bring down all the articles on canon and legends equally so the distinction the comic makes seems meaningless to me. Maybe I'm just being pedantic. --Espella (talk) 00:44, 21 November 2025 (UTC) Add comment
