[Wikipedia-l] Discussion forum for bugs/features

Brion VIBBER brion at pobox.com
Fri Aug 9 19:58:56 UTC 2002


Toby Bartels wrote:
> Under Phase II, we used [[Bug reports]] and [[Feature requests]]
> not merely to list desired features and undesired bugs
> but also to talk about them in a wiki way.

I can assure you, that was completely untenable. The pages quickly 
because so long and unwieldy that they were hard to edit; half the time 
they got truncated by someone with a buggy browser; it was hard to find 
some particular item of interest; something that didn't get implemented 
got quickly lost and forgotten in the huge pile of text...

Good riddance.

> Under Phase III, we instead use SourceForge for this.
> But SourceForge doesn't lend itself to discussion.

If you login with your e-mail address, any comments tacked onto your bug 
report/feature request are e-mailed directly to you. If that's not 
lending to discussion, what is?

> Because Lee is essentially the only programmer,
> he will close an entry there if he doesn't want to do it.
> Of course, we know that he's willing to be convinced,
> but there's not much chance of that if there's no discussion.

I also check those fairly regularly, and can and have reopened items 
where I disagree with Lee.

> There are alternatives.
> [[Bug reports]] and [[Feature requests]] still exist,
> but nobody has used them since the change,
> and I doubt that very many people are watching them.

Thank goodness!

> Much discussion of features has taken place on this list,
> but that doesn't reach nearly as wide an audience as before.
> Most people that submit an item to SourceForge
> aren't going to think to take it up on the list.
> 
> In short, I think that we miss the discussion that we had in Phase II.
> We need a place for people to submit items for Wikipedians' approval
> other than SourceForge, but we need to use SourceForge too.
> Ideas?

Some have suggested bugzilla; I have no experience with it, nor do I 
know whether it will be any easier than the Sourceforge tracker to deal 
with.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)




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