phoebe ayers wrote:
There are many good ideas in this list. I have one small idea re: bugzilla -- is it possible to make browsing bugs more transparent (like a link on the sidebar)? I only just discovered that it's possible to look at bugs by category, component or keyword rather than search, and for the hapless newbie who is nonetheless sometimes interested in looking (at) bugs to see what's going on (like me) it would help. First rule of taxonomies: everyone describes stuff differently, so browse is useful :)
I don't know about others, but I personally find the Bugzilla interface to be a complete pain-in-the-ass and just generally awful. Any search of the bugs in the system is often slow and filled with noise.
One way to solve this is to bypass the current Bugzilla interface altogether. In the same way that people can create neat and awesome tools using the replicated wiki databases, the Bugzilla database can (and should) be replicated to Toolserver users to allow them to have direct database access.
Direct database access makes it infinitely easier to build tools that could, for example, support a better tagging system. I'd like to see all bugs that affect wikipedia, that affect en.wikipedia, that are user interface related, etc. A separate tags system would be awesome, in my view, as the one in Bugzilla currently sucks. Direct database access also would allow for better (and faster) reports that could be output in a web tool or on a wiki (with versioning!). Which bugs have the most comments? Which bugs have no comments? Some of this information is query-able from the Bugzilla interface, but as I said, it's very slow to query and getting the query written takes way more time and energy than it should (if it's possible at all).
To this end, I filed a JIRA ticket with the Toolserver ops about getting the Wikimedia Bugzilla database replicated with public views: https://jira.toolserver.org/browse/TS-901
I have no tricks up my sleeve to get this moving along other than occasionally poking people about it, though. :-)
MZMcBride