[teampractices] The Rule of Three (+1)

[Quim Gil]

On 09/23/2013 02:57 PM, Maryana Pinchuk wrote:
> Update: the Flow team has tried to make the community involvement
> practice explicit in its documentation on Mediawiki.org[1] and English
> Wikipedia.[2]

Very very good!

> talk pages of Flow documentation are already
> choked with dozens of angry threads that go nowhere and just make
> everyone sad and grumpy. Experience with/feedback on this from other
> teams would be most appreciated :)

Invite angry users to become active contributors, converting their 
arguments in isolated bugs or enhancement requests in Bugzilla. Make 
them part of the development process.

Bugzilla (and bug reporting in general) helps to analyze a problem, 
divide it into chunks, declare dependencies, declare relations to other 
issues in other projects, declare priorities and urgency. It is also 
clear when somebody is working on a report or not, when it is still open 
for discussion or WONTFIX. And whenever someone else comes with the same 
argument you can decide whether to just resolve as DUPLICATE or reopen 
the issue because better arguments have been exposed.

There can be a lot of anger in Bugzilla reports, but it is more 
difficult to sustain pointless anger there than in angry wiki Talk 
pages. And you can CC us, and we will help.  :)

-- 
Quim Gil
Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil