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Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place ((Help me)) before the question. Again, welcome! JohnCD (talk) 20:48, 13 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that a response has been made at Wikipedia:Requests for undeletion regarding a submission you made. The thread is FlexRAID. JohnCD (talk) 20:48, 13 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, Spectwiki. You have new messages at Lankiveil's talk page.
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Hello and welcome to Wikipedia. When you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion (but never when editing articles), please be sure to sign your posts. There are two ways to do this. Either:

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Thank you. --SineBot (talk) 14:26, 17 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Take a look at this page. On there is a link to an article creation wizard. After a few steps you'll have created a page (e.g. Draft:FlexRAID) where you can add content and references. If you want to skip the wizard and get right to creating the article you can instead jump right to here and enter in the title into the box at the center. That will create the page and preload it with a template at the top which lets people know it's a draft.

Once you feel that the article is ready to be moved to the encyclopedia, you can submit it for review. In the case of this article, it's important that you be very diligent about finding sources (because it's already been deleted for sourcing problems).

It's also possible that there aren't sufficient sources to meet our expectations of basic sourcing for articles. I don't know, but there's no better way to find out than to try and write a neutrally worded, independently verifiable article without making claims which can't be found in source material. Those three expectations (respectively, Neutrality, Verifiability and "No Original Research") represent the backbone of our content guidelines. In an ideal world, everything on wikipedia meets those three conditions. If you can write an article that meets those conditions using reliable sources you should probably be fine. If you can't that may mean that Wikipedia isn't ready for an article on FlexRAID yet.

Alternately, if you don't want to go through the Wizard or aren't comfortable creating a page yourself, I can create a draft page for you so all you'll have to do is edit it. Just let me know either on my talk page or here. If you want to "ping" me (which sets up those notifications you've been seeing) you can do so with ((ping|Protonk)) or ((ping|Any Other Username)) (just as you see it written there, curly braces and all). Protonk (talk) 21:58, 17 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

((ping|Protonk)) Awesome. Thanks a great deal for the directions. I will spend the next week on the task. That would be awesome if you could create the draft for me. There have been many offers from various magazines to cover the technology, but those offers were not properly followed up as we were too swamped with other tasks. So, the first task will be to follow up with those magazines. Thanks again.

• One note, because Wikipedia was created before content editable, the editor you see is not WYSIWYG. A markup language (wikitext) was created so that links could be generated and content could be formatted (often you'll see editors indent replies with : or *, that indentation is generated via the markup). So if you type ((ping|Protonk)) (exactly as you see it) you'll invoke the ((ping)) template, which is just a more complicated form of markup. Somewhat confusingly, the template ((tlx)) exists just to show how a template works in text without actually invoking it. This isn't just used for talk pages, you'll see articles with templates like ((Cite web)) for citations or ((infobox)) for the boxes you see on many articles. You can look at Wikipedia:Tutorial for some hints on how to get started. It's a bit creaky, but once you get used to it you can edit most articles fairly easily. If you're familiar with reddit, github or hacker news, it's similar to Markdown but a bit more complicated.
• I would strongly (you get bold text with '''text you want to bold''') recommend that you start editing on other articles before writing your draft. Like anything else, editing is a skill that improves with practice. Adding/fixing references to articles, improving content (in terms of accuracy or readability) or simply fixing errors will give you a much better handle on both the practice of editing and the content expectations at wikipedia.
• I'll create the draft for FlexRAID and link it here when I'm done. Protonk (talk) 14:54, 18 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• Draft:FlexRAID is the link. You may edit that page at your leisure, but note a few things:
  • Drafts which haven't been edited for a long time (on the order of 3-6 months) may be deleted. This isn't a big deal as the moment you want to edit it again you can come to WP:REFUND and someone will restore it.
  • Content on the draft page doesn't need to be up to the standards of an article. That means if you want to paste a bunch of links in while you're working or you want to leave notes to yourself in the text you can. You can't copy-paste text from other sources in there (I mean a lot of it) and you can't have stuff in there that's obviously problematic, e.g. "I think Protonk smells like rotten eggs and anchovies", but you've basically got a lot of leeway.
  • When you're ready to have the draft reviewed let me know and I'll show you how to do that.
• Got it? Protonk (talk) 15:00, 18 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Protonk: I think I got the most of it. I will re-read the whole thing again in the morning with a fresher mind to ensure I got everything as you have detailed. Once again thanks a great deal for the directions. One question, would it be appropriate to edit (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=RAID&action=edit&section=7) and talk about RAID over File System (RAID-F) and Transparent RAID (tRAID) as implemented in FlexRAID? So, in the bullet points for the section "Software RAID can be implemented as", I would add at the bottom of the list the bullet points below:

• A layer that transparently provides parity protection to independent devices as implemented in FlexRAID's Transparent RAID (tRAID)
  • Unlike Linux's md RAID where multiple devices are abstracted into a single virtual device, devices in Transparent RAID are fully independent in that:
    • they can be formatted and partitioned independently
    • they can be pooled into a single volume if needed through LVM or storage pooling solutions
    • they can be addressed directly for low level operations including IOCTL operations and SMART data pulling
    • each device has its own full and complete file system, which allows for different devices in the same array to have different file systems
    • any disk can be pulled out of the array or system and be fully readable/writable in the system or another system independently of the array
• A layer that sits above any file system and provides parity protection to user data as implemented in FlexRAID's RAID over File System (RAID-F)
  • The strategy here is to provide RAID protection only to meaningful user data as opposed to every disk sector as done in traditional RAID implementations

Take a look at how the section is structured. They're covering broad mechanisms of how software RAID is implemented. At the device level, at the file system level and at the volume manager level. In this case FlexRAID looks like it's some combination of the above (I'm not too familiar with the specific tech, so forgive the generalizing here). I'd pick a single sentence (and a source that supports it and add it). Remember that we're writing a general interest encyclopedia. This doesn't mean we can't get technical or cover topics in detail but it means that on a page like RAID, we want to give a reader a broad overview, not try to pitch them a specific technology. Protonk (talk) 12:23, 19 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Protonk: I see. I think a useful contribution to that page and section then is on RAID over File System. "A layer that sits above any file system and provides parity protection to user data (e.g., RAID-F)^[1]". I will spend the next few weeks collecting all the relevant material to fill in the draft article on FlexRAID. Thanks.

• Sounds good. Let me know if you need any help. Protonk (talk) 16:07, 22 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]