On 22/11/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/22/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
When I say OTRS-like it's deliberate - this isn't going to be bolted on to the existing system for handling @wikimedia.org emails, but rather a seperate handling system which uses the same (or similar) software and concepts. Basically, just something that lets us see what's open, what's closed, what's being handled.
What's the need, exactly? Wikipedia is littered with "work to be done" requests. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_Portal/Opentask, fo example. None of those tasks are really tracked, monitored, prioritised - people just do them when they get to them. Is that not the appropriate strategy for this as well?
Hmm. I expect three resolutions: "vandalism removed", "page actually labelled as crap", or "real problem being dealt with"; "resolving" one of these should be trivially easy except in case 3. We're not actually guaranteeing to *do* the remedial work, etc - just to ensure that the page is flagged that it needs it. In many ways we're feeding {{opentask}} rather than running alongside it...
We don't really need a tracking or prioritising system, but some way of seeing if there is a backlog and how bad that backlog is would be a very useful way of deciding if this system works or not.
An additional benefit of the "single flagging account" is that we can trivially go back and see how the system is being used, just by looking at the contributions of that single "user".
Logging everything on one central page would also have that advantage.
True. Again, this is as much for judging uptake as it is for ease of operation.
I do honestly feel that preventing blocks from governing this gives us a net benefit - sure, we'll get some abuse, but we'll also get the opportunity for a lot of users who would otherwise be unable to participate to leave comments. (Think of AOL users, or those behind school rangeblocks, etc etc)
Maybe - you could be right. Anyway, this is a bit of a side issue. We can certainly implement this a bit further down the track, can't we?
Yeah, most likely. I just *really* don't want to implement something like this and then discover that it's giving massively unhelpful and disconcerting you-have-been-blocked, etc, messages to users. This would - to my mind - negate the entire "outreach" aspect of it.