[Wikipedia-l] Discussion forum for bugs/features

[Toby Bartels]

Brion Vibber wrote:

>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...

I'm not sure what you plan to do to assure me of this untenability,
because I took part in that system, and it seemed to work.
There were problems with it, such as rare refactorisation
and the lack of tracking -- SourceForge solves the latter problem,
and as I said before, SourceForge is good.  But it's not sufficient.

>>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?

I want to see more than just *my* bug reports and feature requests!
I discovered how to get email sent about other items, by clicking "Monitor".
What I haven't discovered is how to get email about all items automatically.
Even if there is such a way, and you tell it to me,
that doesn't change the fact that most people won't know how to do this.
But any regular user knows how to watch Wikipedia pages.

I don't always have the opportunity to view SourceForge within 48 hours.
Yet Lee will close an item after 48 hours.  What have I missed?
When something is deleted from Wikipedia, it's still in the history.
Again, there may be a way to view closed items in SourceForge,
and you may tell me what it is, and I'll be grateful,
but we *already* know how to that on Wikipedia.

And Lee does not treat it as a discussion forum.
He said as much in a comment to an item on SourceForge.
Perhaps you didn't see that, because the item was closed.
If SourceForge is to be a discussion forum, then that may be the solution,
but then we have to redesign how it's going to be used.
I came to the mailing list because I accepted Lee's statement
that SourceForge does *not* work as a discussion forum;
I don't care how it comes out, but I do think that we need one.

>>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.

That's good.  Can the ordinary user do that?  *I* don't know how.

>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.

That may be the solution.  I have no experience with Bugzilla;
I'd like to hear from the people that have how it would work.


-- Toby Bartels
   <toby+wikipedia-l at math.ucr.edu>