Hi all,
Recently, the Web team closed a large number of tasks on Phabricator within the Readers-Web-Backlog https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/67/. These are tasks that the team will not have capacity for in the near future (~6 months from now) or team representatives deemed as inactionable. Most of these tasks were created by members of the team. We opted for a silent edit to avoid noise for all subscribers. If you feel like a task has been resolved prematurely or needs additional attention, feel free to re-open or leave a comment on the task. Note, these tasks may be reopened at a later date if the team has expanded capacity.
Here is the full list of declined tasks: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/oyaVe_xbp_Gn/#R
Thank you,
- Olga and the Web Team
For tasks where you do not have the capacity to work on them, but which are not declined, can you instead re-open them and only remove the Readers-Web-Backlog project?
Changing project tags would have been a much better idea, and how every other backlog-focused team deals with similar situations. Even triaging as Lowest would have been better. Closing as Declined says that the task can't be completed by anyone, at any time.
The choice to (improperly) decline a bunch of valid tasks is one thing, but doing it as a silent batch edit is another thing entirely. As I mentioned in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Wcpss4hjs4552ak6, using a silent edit to make controversial actions has the appearance of an evasion of scrutiny. Even if the decision to use a silent batch edit was made in good faith (and I have no reason to think it wasn't), it still meant that the action was not properly communicated to those involved and is difficult for others to review. The only place the action was logged was on the tasks themselves, where it would only be seen by someone who happened to come across it. This goes against the idea that actions and decisions should be public and open for review if at all possible found both in Phabricator etiquette and the Wikimedia movement more generally.
Silent batch edits are an extremely powerful tool, which is why only a few people have the ability to mark a batch edit as silent. However, the use of this ability does not appear to be routinely logged publicly, in Phabricator or externally https://sal.toolforge.org/__all__?p=0&q=%22make-silent%22&d=, which is unusual when compared to similar actions elsewhere. There is also no written documentation about when batch edits can be made silent, which sets up the potential for differing expectations like this.
ACN
On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 3:07 PM Bartosz Dziewoński matma.rex@gmail.com wrote:
For tasks where you do not have the capacity to work on them, but which are not declined, can you instead re-open them and only remove the Readers-Web-Backlog project?
-- Bartosz Dziewoński _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
While I very much support the idea of closing old tickets (as well as Gerrit patches) that don't look like they will ever be tackled – this tends to be a delicate decision that benefits a lot from being as open as possible. There is not much to add to what AntiCompositeNumber already wrote.
1. While 61 tickets is not a small number, it's not a large number either. People are typically not subscribed to all tickets the same time. I, for example, would have received a single notification email.
2. I, personally, disabled almost all Phabricator emails. For example, removing a tag it rarely something I care about. Feel free to suppress such notifications, esp. if you own the tag. But having a ticket declined is a relevant information for me, if not the most relevant.
Overall I think it would have created less irritation and stress to just let Phabricator do what people expect it to do.
Here is another look at these 61 tasks, in case people are interested: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/qJdT7nxCgmK3/#R
Kind regards Thiemo
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