[WikiEN-l] I Need Some Help

[Andrew Gray]

On 11 July 2010 14:26, Benjamin Esham <bdesham at gmail.com> wrote:

>> b) We're easily contactable, so people do write to us to ask about it
>> rather than just throwing up their hands over it - a perception bias on my
>> part
>
> To be fair, though... for how many websites are you in a position to see
> such problems?  Do you deal with user complaints at Google, Facebook,
> Yahoo!, and the New York Times as well?  Otherwise I would think this is a
> clear case of selection bias: it's likely that people behave no differently
> with Wikipedia than they do with any other website, it's just that we only
> happen to hear about the Wikipedia issues.

I suspect you are entirely right! I'm not quite sure how I missed this
explanation - it is pretty obvious - but I think I was being misled by
the "unique" aspect of it, in that people tend to report it's us and
only us who are broken.

On the other hand, in all the years I've helped people who've had
"internet problems" generally - I've had jobs dealing with public
computer rooms for over ten years - I've almost never encountered it
"in the wild". There are some technical problems that get reported for
Wikipedia that seem to be closely linked to our site in a way that
makes me suspect they're disproportionately common with us for some
reason or another, though as you say there are selection bias issues
here.

(The other, incidentally, is the situation where loading a page
prompts a message asking to download the file rather than displaying
it, a known IE bug - I encounter this myself occasionally on enwiki,
but rarely anywhere else, and once a month or so see an email about
it. That one certainly feels more than just random, though I don't
know if we ever identified the source of it.)

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk