Ryan Lane wrote:
On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 4:39 PM, a b cheeseyapacman@gmail.com wrote:
After the recent dicussions open open-ness and clarity with requests by serveral people what is contained within the RT after several people have asked and given answers like "it's staff stuff".
So what is stored in it that can't be within either the staff or internal wiki where it must be private or bugzilla for other matters?
RT is used by the ops team to track and plan operations work. It may contain procurement information, quotes, and other sensitive information that can not be released to the public due to contractual or confidentiality reasons.
Just as a clarification for readers, "RT" refers to "Request Tracker", an open source issue tracker by Best Practical Solutions[1] used by the Wikimedia operations team.[2] According to the server admin log it was set up on August 10, 2010.[3] I'm not sure RT has been discussed publicly (at least on a mailing list) before now. There is a bit more information about it at http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/RT.
While I can see the value of having a private place to put confidential information like server price quotes, for better or worse, it seems that RT is being used to track issues that could likely be tracked by Bugzilla. That said, I can't see what the difference between using RT and using an internal wiki would be.
MZMcBride
[1] http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/ [2] http://rt.wikimedia.org/ [3] http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/index.php?oldid=29466#August_10