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Summary

Licensing

Issues

The red-dot image is used (or actually, transcluded) into over 10,000 articles on the English Wikipedia alone. That makes the image an access bottleneck, in case of updates, or an easy target for wide-ranging vandalism. In configuration-management practices, an easy solution is to maintain redundant copies. The most obvious use of the redundancy practice is in the US NASA space program, such as duplicating the entire Mission-Control Room (MOCR) on the 2nd and 3rd floors of Mission Control; in the 1990s similar redudancy was achieved by allowing Shuttle control from either JSC (Houston) or KSC (Florida).

On September 15-16, 2007, image-cache problems prevented the display of the original image (Image:Red_pog.svg), but not of similar image files, such as Red_pog2.svg.

Another example of forced redundancy is in common utility routines, such as component calculations for commercial-loan mortgage origination (involving up to 18 independent variables or more), where testing of altered loan calculations can be reduced into isolated sets, by using redundant copies of component calculations: only those mortgage types using an updated copy would need to be extensively tested to ensure accuracy of mortgage payments and insurance premiums. Other copies could be updated at a future negotiated time, or left as documented variations, to control impact across the vast complexity of financial calculations.

Redundancy of image files can be simple to manage, if all variations are cross-checked, as needed. The bottleneck or target problems can be reduced, with minimal maintenance overhead.