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>.
We don't discuss most ops things on the lists. We use IRC for the
majority of our communications.
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.
A wiki isn't the answer for everything. I know we make MediaWiki, but
let me repeat this again: a wiki isn't the answer for everything. RT
allows us to include people who don't have access directly to RT via
email, including vendors.
Bugzilla is not a terribly good software package, and we definitely
don't want to use the same Bugzilla for dev and ops, as it makes it
harder for us to track ops issues.
I don't see how this is an issue anyway. Though we do document
solutions in RT, we also move that documentation to wikitech. All of
our ops volunteers have access to RT, and the rest of the community
can simply ask us about things in IRC to be kept in the loop. There
isn't any beneficial reason for RT to be public.
Respectfully,
Ryan Lane