On 9/16/07, Mark Ryan <ultrablue(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 17/09/2007, Gregory Maxwell
<gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
*snip*
I've seen
some prior examples of over eagerness to claim something is being
worked on in the past in our user communities.
*snip*
On IRC when Wikipedia goes down, I always set the channel entry
message to say that our "Technical Response Group" is working to fix
the problem, because with something as serious as a Wikipedia
downtime, the techs generally are already upon it. Is that wrong?
In cases of serious issues if you do not have direct personal
knowledge that someone with shell access
(
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Developers) is working on or at least
acutely aware of the issue, please do not make the claim that it is
being worked on. Allow those who have direct knowledge to make the
claim.
Since you mention IRC... you are welcome to join #wikimedia-tech.
Please listen for a moment before asking. And be aware that if there
is technical banter between folks that doesn't mean the right people
are aware of the issue. Many problems can only be addressed people on
the sysadmin end of the spectrum and there are a large number of
people, including some MediaWiki developers, who are not sysadmins and
can not actually fix many problems even if they understand them and
are talking about them. Do not assume that any person who knows more
than you can fix the issue, will fix the issue, or will even bother to
report it to someone who can.
In cases where the site is down, yes... Tech folks will know about it,
but there is no harm in not making the statement unless you are sure.
In cases which are serious but are not a total-site down event it is
somewhat more likely that we've had some new and exciting mode of
failure that the monitoring tools can not yet catch. In these cases it
is especially important that we do not prematurely suppress trouble
reports.
In all cases over-reporting is preferable to under reporting. The tech
IRC channel can be set moderated. Emails and OTRS messages can be
filtered. And, of course, if you see one of the people listed with
shell access saying "Hush we know already!" then it's a safe bet that
the issue is actually being worked on. ;)
Also, if you do decide to contact any of the tech team yourself please
try to be detailed and constructive. Entering the tech IRC channel and
saying "The darn site is broken AGAIN!" doesn't help fix anything.
Instead say something like "When I load any page, like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo all the images are upside down. I'm
running firefox on windows and this has been going on for two hours!".