Shutting down WikiCheck

I will be shutting down our WikiCheck service soon. There are two reasons for that:

  • The number of visits is ridiculously small compared to the number of visits on https://languagetool.org. We usually have just 10 visits per day on WikiCheck. I cannot justify spending my limited resources on a project with such a low impact.
  • Our server’s resources are limited, too. Visits to https://languagetool.org are growing and it seems the server has issues keeping up with the growth, i.e. more and more users are getting error messages on the home page when trying to check a text. Shutting down WikiCheck will free at least some resources.

If you want to host WikiCheck: you can get the code at GitHub - languagetool-org/languagetool-wikicheck: Wikipedia style and grammar check (OUTDATED). You need Grails 2.5.3 to compile it. If you need help with that, please post your questions here.

This is sad news. I used to like the WikiCheck service. :cry:

I’m also sad about it, but well, I can understand the reasons. I was using wikicheck once in a while to find false positives. I also used it sometimes to correct articles in wikipedia.

I wonder though: what if wikicheck was run less often? say once a week, with static pages in between? It would still bring most of the benefits, for perhaps a fraction of the computation resources needed.

It could run less often of course, but that will need to be set up as well, which takes time. And considering the very low visits, I don’t want to spend more time. It’s still Open Source, anybody can run it on their own server.

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Why did Wikipedia is not hosting this natively? Did you try to get in touch with them?

There is a huge amount of errors in Russian Wikipedia, which are real errors I believe that wiki editors would be happy to correct them.

WikiCheck had been online for more than two years, and usage was still almost zero, as described above. I once had it hosted at a Wikipedia server (Tool Labs) but that wasn’t stable (the process often crashed). However, anybody is free to host it wherever they want.

There is another option at Wikimedia. See here. Tool Labs is a “hosting environment”, that probably it’s not stable enough, as Daniel said. But there is also Wikimedia Labs (“cloud computing infrastructure”). A project can be requested at Wikimedia Labs when “you cannot run your code/bot/thing on Tool Labs” (see here). We can ask for an account there.

Well, that explains the errors I’ve been trying to check from Wikipedia…:cry:
Wonder how many of those 10 hits/day were me.
Hope you find someone else to host the server.
In the meantime, you might want to remove “Wikipedia checks” from https://languagetool.org/development/