The autoreview feature for FlaggedRevs does not work in the Hungarian Wikipedia because of a configuration problem with a group name. This causes a lot of extra work for the patrollers, and a lot of extra waiting for everyone else for their edits to appear.
It has been about forty days since I filed a bug about this; in the meantime, I asked twice for help on wikitech-l (not to mention the several personal emails and IRC messages I and other Hungarian editors sent). After my first wikitech-l mail, there was a short and unsuccessful attempt to fix the problem without actually understanding what we asked for; before and after, in those seven weeks, nothing happened.
This is very disappointing. To fix the bug, one would need to replace all occurrences of 'confirmed' with 'trusted' in the huwiki flagrev config file - that takes about 20 seconds. If one wanted to be thorough about it and move users from the old group to the new, one would need to construct an appropriate SQL query - maybe 5 more minutes. There are about a hundred patrollers on hu.wikipedia (including admins). If we suppose they only have to work one extra minute a day each (a very unrealistic lower estimation), that adds up to about sixty hours. Which is about a thousand times twenty seconds.
Is staff time really a thousand times more valuable than volunteer time, so that no one can be bothered to make this trivial fix, even if many hours of other people's time could be spared? I'm aware it is summer, and Wikimania is going on, and everyone has a lot on their hands, but even so I can't believe none of the people with shell access can find a minute to make the fix.
Letting the time of the most active community members go to waste like this is not only very discouraging them, and not only does it undermine their trust in the revision flagging system (which proved to be a very valuable anti-vandalism tool, but it was always hard to get enough people involved), it also creates a rift between WMF and the local community. People perceive that the foundation does not respect their volunteer work at all, and it is only quick when it is creating problems (their previous contact with WMF was when someone shot down the statistics script that ran with community consensus, without as much as a question or comment), and not when it should be solving them.
If you want to broaden participation and involve more people into meta-projects, start with actually caring about issues like these. And now please, please find someone to finally fix bug 19885.
--- On Fri, 8/28/09, Tisza Gergő [email protected] wrote: <snip>
Letting the time of the most active community members go to waste like this is not only very discouraging them, and not only does it undermine their trust in the revision flagging system (which proved to be a very valuable anti-vandalism tool, but it was always hard to get enough people involved), it also creates a rift between WMF and the local community. People perceive that the foundation does not respect their volunteer work at all, and it is only quick when it is creating problems (their previous contact with WMF was when someone shot down the statistics script that ran with community consensus, without as much as a question or comment), and not when it should be solving them.
If you want to broaden participation and involve more people into meta-projects, start with actually caring about issues like these. And now please, please find someone to finally fix bug 19885.
I hope someone is able to shortly fix this issue for you.
However I think you have a mistaken idea about WMF. The reason people are wanted to join meta-projects is to ensure that their local wikis issues are understood. The meta-projects *are* hu.WP's projects, not competition for hu.WP. If you, or someone like you, is not part of foundation discussions to both speak up about hu.WP concerns and also to better inform hu.WP discussions about larger issues and trends, then how can hu.WP be properly cared for? Certainly everyone here wishes success for hu.WP and that her volunteers are active and happy. But for the most part, people here are not some abstract "WMF-people" who have neglected hu.WP. We are en.WS people or fr.WP people or de.WP people.
I originally joined this list much like you did. Rather upset at what felt was attacks on en.WS's sincere efforts to do the right thing and general lack of help for us. These "WMF-people" had been talking about en.WS and saying we would have to delete the UK Hunting Act. I came here hoping to convince these people to actually help us: tell us exactly what copyright allows (very naive I know) rather than just dictating that our stuff be deleted without clarification. But I discovered that these "WMF-people" were no more than people just like me. Passionate people who found their way here with their feet still firmly planted in their own particular interests. They meant no harm to en.WS, but en.WS didn't rate very high in their concerns either. I quickly realized that someone from en.WS better keep on top of things here, before our interests got inadvertently squashed by someones pet issue. Or we merely got forgotten.
So I understand how you might be hoping for for solutions and answers to be found here. I certainly did, but I learned it was a mistake to think there was such authority here. You will find opinions and ideas here. Sometimes you may find needed attention. (I hope this is the case today!) But the only real answer for solving hu.WP issues is to see that hu.WP is in WMF. hu.WP people must be in WMF people. hu.WP developers must be in WMF developers. hu.WP projects must be in WMF projects. Then hu.WP will find real answers and solutions. Or at least, they will find answers and solutions as well as anyone does.
Birgitte SB
Birgitte SB hett schreven:
I hope someone is able to shortly fix this issue for you.
However I think you have a mistaken idea about WMF. The reason people are wanted to join meta-projects is to ensure that their local wikis issues are understood. The meta-projects *are* hu.WP's projects, not competition for hu.WP. If you, or someone like you, is not part of foundation discussions to both speak up about hu.WP concerns and also to better inform hu.WP discussions about larger issues and trends, then how can hu.WP be properly cared for? Certainly everyone here wishes success for hu.WP and that her volunteers are active and happy. But for the most part, people here are not some abstract "WMF-people" who have neglected hu.WP. We are en.WS people or fr.WP people or de.WP people.
I originally joined this list much like you did. Rather upset at what felt was attacks on en.WS's sincere efforts to do the right thing and general lack of help for us. These "WMF-people" had been talking about en.WS and saying we would have to delete the UK Hunting Act. I came here hoping to convince these people to actually help us: tell us exactly what copyright allows (very naive I know) rather than just dictating that our stuff be deleted without clarification. But I discovered that these "WMF-people" were no more than people just like me. Passionate people who found their way here with their feet still firmly planted in their own particular interests. They meant no harm to en.WS, but en.WS didn't rate very high in their concerns either. I quickly realized that someone from en.WS better keep on top of things here, before our interests got inadvertently squashed by someones pet issue. Or we merely got forgotten.
So I understand how you might be hoping for for solutions and answers to be found here. I certainly did, but I learned it was a mistake to think there was such authority here. You will find opinions and ideas here. Sometimes you may find needed attention. (I hope this is the case today!) But the only real answer for solving hu.WP issues is to see that hu.WP is in WMF. hu.WP people must be in WMF people. hu.WP developers must be in WMF developers. hu.WP projects must be in WMF projects. Then hu.WP will find real answers and solutions. Or at least, they will find answers and solutions as well as anyone does.
Birgitte SB
Well, on a general participation level it's all true, what you are saying. But looking at the actual issue "Flagged Revs at hu.wp" it's very clear: The Foundation pays staff to do administrative tasks local projects cannot do. It's their job to do it. And they haven't done the necessary steps in six weeks. Tisza/hu.wp have done what they needed to do: File a bug at Bugzilla. If the coordination would work properly that should suffice to get the job done. It didn't. He searched to directly contact people who can help about this. And that didn't help too. So it's not Tisza's fault, he did it all right. The problem lies at the foundation level. Some processes are broken.
There are two possible solutions: If we don't have enough manpower to handle all requests and bugs than the foundation should hire more staff (with millions in donations flowing in that should be no big problem). The second solution (the cheaper one) would be to create an interface, that allows local bureaucrats to switch on or off a set of approved extensions on their project. The interface would then run the needed scripts automatically. This interface needs to be written, but that's only one time and it will save much time and effort in the future.
Marcus Buck User:Slomox
On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 11:36, Marcus Buck[email protected] wrote:
necessary steps in six weeks. Tisza/hu.wp have done what they needed to do: File a bug at Bugzilla. If the coordination would work properly that should suffice to get the job done. It didn't. He searched to directly contact people who can help about this. And that didn't help too. So it's not Tisza's fault, he did it all right. The problem lies at the foundation level. Some processes are broken.
Actually he did many more than he ought to, since he spent quite an amount of time to try to contact people on several levels. My other problem is that fixing the problem really requires five minutes times two. I understand that 100 times 5 minutes are a lot, but the bug was opened on 2009-7-22, or two months ago, with priority HIGH and severity MAJOR. Other than that we cannot do, apart from that I offered (in private email) to get the config files, do the search and replace on my machine (takes 20 seconds) and send back the file.
Either prioritising in bugzilla isn't working or we're understaffed. Both can and should be fixed.
I'm not blaming anyone, by the way. I'm understaffed too. ;-)
g
--- On Sat, 8/29/09, Marcus Buck [email protected] wrote:
From: Marcus Buck [email protected] Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] FlaggedRevs on Hungarian Wikipedia still not working To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" [email protected] Date: Saturday, August 29, 2009, 4:36 AM Birgitte SB hett schreven:
I hope someone is able to shortly fix this issue for
you.
However I think you have a mistaken idea about WMF.
The reason people are wanted to join meta-projects is to ensure that their local wikis issues are understood. The meta-projects *are* hu.WP's projects, not competition for hu.WP. If you, or someone like you, is not part of foundation discussions to both speak up about hu.WP concerns and also to better inform hu.WP discussions about larger issues and trends, then how can hu.WP be properly cared for? Certainly everyone here wishes success for hu.WP and that her volunteers are active and happy. But for the most part, people here are not some abstract "WMF-people" who have neglected hu.WP. We are en.WS people or fr.WP people or de.WP people.
I originally joined this list much like you did.
Rather upset at what felt was attacks on en.WS's sincere efforts to do the right thing and general lack of help for us. These "WMF-people" had been talking about en.WS and saying we would have to delete the UK Hunting Act. I came here hoping to convince these people to actually help us: tell us exactly what copyright allows (very naive I know) rather than just dictating that our stuff be deleted without clarification. But I discovered that these "WMF-people" were no more than people just like me. Passionate people who found their way here with their feet still firmly planted in their own particular interests. They meant no harm to en.WS, but en.WS didn't rate very high in their concerns either. I quickly realized that someone from en.WS better keep on top of things here, before our interests got inadvertently squashed by someones pet issue. Or we merely got forgotten.
So I understand how you might be hoping for for
solutions and answers to be found here. I certainly did, but I learned it was a mistake to think there was such authority here. You will find opinions and ideas here. Sometimes you may find needed attention. (I hope this is the case today!) But the only real answer for solving hu.WP issues is to see that hu.WP is in WMF. hu.WP people must be in WMF people. hu.WP developers must be in WMF developers. hu.WP projects must be in WMF projects. Then hu.WP will find real answers and solutions. Or at least, they will find answers and solutions as well as anyone does.
Birgitte SB
Well, on a general participation level it's all true, what you are saying. But looking at the actual issue "Flagged Revs at hu.wp" it's very clear: The Foundation pays staff to do administrative tasks local projects cannot do. It's their job to do it. And they haven't done the necessary steps in six weeks. Tisza/hu.wp have done what they needed to do: File a bug at Bugzilla. If the coordination would work properly that should suffice to get the job done. It didn't. He searched to directly contact people who can help about this.. And that didn't help too. So it's not Tisza's fault, he did it all right. The problem lies at the foundation level. Some processes are broken.
There are two possible solutions: If we don't have enough manpower to handle all requests and bugs than the foundation should hire more staff (with millions in donations flowing in that should be no big problem). The second solution (the cheaper one) would be to create an interface, that allows local bureaucrats to switch on or off a set of approved extensions on their project. The interface would then run the needed scripts automatically. This interface needs to be written, but that's only one time and it will save much time and effort in the future.
Marcus Buck User:Slomox
You cut off the part of Tisza's message with was not particularly about the call for technical help. Those were the sentiments I was replying to. I don't disagree that the bug should be fixed sooner. Every single wiki thinks their bugs could be fixed sooner, and I have personally written about the need for bugs to be prioritized better in the past. I have no disagreement there.
Birgitte SB
I checked on it today and saw that this bug is marked resolved. Tisza, is it working to hu.WP's satisfaction now?
Birgitte SB
--- On Fri, 8/28/09, Tisza Gergő [email protected] wrote:
From: Tisza Gergő [email protected] Subject: [Foundation-l] FlaggedRevs on Hungarian Wikipedia still not working To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Date: Friday, August 28, 2009, 6:24 PM The autoreview feature for FlaggedRevs does not work in the Hungarian Wikipedia because of a configuration problem with a group name. This causes a lot of extra work for the patrollers, and a lot of extra waiting for everyone else for their edits to appear.
It has been about forty days since I filed a bug about this; in the meantime, I asked twice for help on wikitech-l (not to mention the several personal emails and IRC messages I and other Hungarian editors sent). After my first wikitech-l mail, there was a short and unsuccessful attempt to fix the problem without actually understanding what we asked for; before and after, in those seven weeks, nothing happened.
This is very disappointing. To fix the bug, one would need to replace all occurrences of 'confirmed' with 'trusted' in the huwiki flagrev config file - that takes about 20 seconds. If one wanted to be thorough about it and move users from the old group to the new, one would need to construct an appropriate SQL query - maybe 5 more minutes. There are about a hundred patrollers on hu.wikipedia (including admins). If we suppose they only have to work one extra minute a day each (a very unrealistic lower estimation), that adds up to about sixty hours. Which is about a thousand times twenty seconds.
Is staff time really a thousand times more valuable than volunteer time, so that no one can be bothered to make this trivial fix, even if many hours of other people's time could be spared? I'm aware it is summer, and Wikimania is going on, and everyone has a lot on their hands, but even so I can't believe none of the people with shell access can find a minute to make the fix..
Letting the time of the most active community members go to waste like this is not only very discouraging them, and not only does it undermine their trust in the revision flagging system (which proved to be a very valuable anti-vandalism tool, but it was always hard to get enough people involved), it also creates a rift between WMF and the local community. People perceive that the foundation does not respect their volunteer work at all, and it is only quick when it is creating problems (their previous contact with WMF was when someone shot down the statistics script that ran with community consensus, without as much as a question or comment), and not when it should be solving them.
If you want to broaden participation and involve more people into meta-projects, start with actually caring about issues like these. And now please, please find someone to finally fix bug 19885.
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