On Sun, 2012-11-11 at 09:22 -0500, MZMcBride wrote:
Is there a policy or guideline about the level to which Wikimedia wikis care about data integrity? There are a few specific cases I'm talking about:
- edits or other logged actions with a wrong timestamp;
- incomplete user renames (contributions split between two accounts);
- weird entries in various *links tables (categorylinks, pagelinks, etc.);
- weird entries in various non-links tables (page, user, etc.); and
- revisions with weird user_id (page import bug, I think?).
I believe https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16660 ("Database table cleanup (tracking)") is the relevant tracking bug
It is. It boils down to people with shell access & time to fix reports. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Shell_requests/status#2012-10-monthly provides some statistics that anybody can use to draw conclusions. :)
The rest of this email covers the Bugzilla aspect of this case & my take on closing tickets as "WONTFIX". Skip this if you're not interested!
This has come up in the context of some old Bugzilla bugs about edits with the wrong timestamp. There's been some recent activity to mark at least some of these old bugs as "wontfix". And perhaps this makes sense, given that some of them are very old and it may be quite likely that nobody will ever go back and tweak the old revision timestamps.
It was me who WONTFIXed two or three tickets. In this specific case there are two aspects: 1) The underlying code problem that triggers occurrences: bug 2930. 2) Reports about occurrences (e.g. bug 6871), collected in bug 16660.
Obviously I'm rather new to Wikimedia Bugzilla so MZMcBride was kind enough to share the impression on IRC that "You might not fix the bug, but we don't close bugs based on that, usually."
Closing a report as WONTFIX means "I am against fixing this problem". I had to realize that I also use WONTFIX for "It is extremely unlikely that anybody will ever fix this; this is lower than lowest priority."
I like to communicate realistic expectations ("this won't get fixed because nobody cares, only providing patches might help") even if this disappoints people / the bug reporter. I prefer this to not communicating anything and letting a report silently rot (and make the Bugzilla search results noisy). This also disappoints the reporter - "First I haven't heard anything back for ages and now you simply close this without fixing it". Obviously I hurt or "punish" reporters in both cases, but I don't see us getting all bugs fixed quickly due to missing unlimited manpower. :)
So in case there is a culture in Wikimedia Bugzilla to not use WONTFIX too often, it could be interesting to discuss its use and the reasons.
andre