Hello all,

Here’s some news from the review we’re currently running about our support process. Our goal is to understand how the current processes to report bugs and feature requests work for you, and how we could improve them. You can read more about the project on this page.

Thanks a lot to everyone who gave feedback or answered our survey. We collected 23 anonymous answers on the survey, and 5 people gave feedback on the talk page or on the social media channels. The majority of the survey respondents (87%) already reported a bug report or a feature request, the most used platform being Phabricator (42%), followed by WD:Contact the development team and WD:Project chat.

Asked to think of an example report or feature request that they made in the last 2 years that generally represents their overall opinion of interacting with the Wikidata development team, people mentioned a long delay of response, issues taking too long to be fixed, problems with tagging the report on Phabricator or difficulty to get in touch with people who could solve the issue. Overall, the lack of response or delay in the response seems to be the main pain points encountered by the respondents.

People were asked to rate on a scale of 1 to 5 how satisfied they are with the current process, and the results are pretty polarized: one third of the respondents declared being very satisfied, one third declared being not satisfied at all. Some respondents mentioned that they couldn’t get an answer before pinging people several times. Some people declared that they had a positive experience and the issue they reported was solved quickly.

Respondents were asked about improvements they thought could be made to the existing bug report/feature request process. The main suggestions revolve around:

• Having a better/clearer overview of the open bugs and already reported issues
• Improving the way tasks are triaged and monitored, as well as the creation of Phabricator tickets
• Being able to suggest and vote for the most important features and bugs to fix
• The possibility of communicating in other languages than English

On the positive side, some respondents declared that the existing process works well for them, and a few people mentioned Phabricator being functional as a bug tracking system. People highlighted the importance of an on-wiki channel to report problems.

Respondents who never made a feature request or report a bug before in the last two years had varied reasons for not doing so. 50% said that they expected someone else to do it, 16% said they did not know how to report a problem, while the rest of the respondents said that they didn’t encounter the need.

Thanks again to people who took some time to answer the survey. Our next steps are to work on some concrete suggestions to improve the process, and to come back to you so we can discuss how to implement them.

If you have any questions or more suggestions, feel free to add them on this talk page. Cheers,

Léa & Mohammed