On 9/16/07, Mark Ryan ultrablue@gmail.com wrote:
On 17/09/2007, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote: *snip*
I've seen some prior examples of over eagerness to claim something is being worked on in the past in our user communities.
*snip*
On IRC when Wikipedia goes down, I always set the channel entry message to say that our "Technical Response Group" is working to fix the problem, because with something as serious as a Wikipedia downtime, the techs generally are already upon it. Is that wrong?
In cases of serious issues if you do not have direct personal knowledge that someone with shell access (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Developers) is working on or at least acutely aware of the issue, please do not make the claim that it is being worked on. Allow those who have direct knowledge to make the claim.
Since you mention IRC... you are welcome to join #wikimedia-tech. Please listen for a moment before asking. And be aware that if there is technical banter between folks that doesn't mean the right people are aware of the issue. Many problems can only be addressed people on the sysadmin end of the spectrum and there are a large number of people, including some MediaWiki developers, who are not sysadmins and can not actually fix many problems even if they understand them and are talking about them. Do not assume that any person who knows more than you can fix the issue, will fix the issue, or will even bother to report it to someone who can.
In cases where the site is down, yes... Tech folks will know about it, but there is no harm in not making the statement unless you are sure.
In cases which are serious but are not a total-site down event it is somewhat more likely that we've had some new and exciting mode of failure that the monitoring tools can not yet catch. In these cases it is especially important that we do not prematurely suppress trouble reports.
In all cases over-reporting is preferable to under reporting. The tech IRC channel can be set moderated. Emails and OTRS messages can be filtered. And, of course, if you see one of the people listed with shell access saying "Hush we know already!" then it's a safe bet that the issue is actually being worked on. ;)
Also, if you do decide to contact any of the tech team yourself please try to be detailed and constructive. Entering the tech IRC channel and saying "The darn site is broken AGAIN!" doesn't help fix anything. Instead say something like "When I load any page, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo all the images are upside down. I'm running firefox on windows and this has been going on for two hours!".