Sunday, October 02, 2011

An issue with #MediaWiki is a nice pain

When #Wikipedia breaks, you are upset. You want to yell and get attention for what breaks.. Take for instance this one; you can skip the next paragraph, it is about a mobile that no longer works.
I am using a Samsung SCH-U430 cell phone to access the moblle version of Wikipedia. The URL that I have always used is http://mobile.wikipedia.org. All of a sudden the link won't work today, I get the error message "Parser Error". My phone is using Obigo Browser Q04C1-1.22 built on Apr 27 2010. I have tried other URL's such as m.wikipedia.org, en.mobile.wikipedia.org, and en.m.wikipedia.org. They still give me the same parser error. I also notice that that mobile Wikipedia site is a beta version. Can anybody help me out to get mobile Wikipedia working again on my phone? All my other bookmarks and other websites that I go to work as before. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.81.58.142 (talk) 16:34, 2 October 2011 (UTC)
What anonymous may learn is that a friendly developer explained the cause on the village pump. What anonymous will not know is that that the same developer signalled it to the right people on IRC and really that is all I can see.

The best way to report a problem is by entering a bug in bugzilla. This is another way an open source project shines. You enter a bug, and you are kept informed about how that bug progresses and may signal the existence of the looked for solution at the end.

"Barry" may be our anonymous user but Barry entered a bug; bug 31310 with the same description. For him it is a blocker and I am sure that someone will give it the rating that applies within the MediaWiki mobile development. Barry and I will be informed about future developments. Even when nothing gets done, we will know.

Compare this with commercial products, bug reports go into a black hole and you never learn if and when there will be a solution.
Thanks,
       GerardM

1 comment:

Zache said...

Yes and no. It is nice that one can report bugs, but it is useless if nobody does anything about it.

In example i opened three months ago one of the FlaggedRevs install requests to bugzilla and answer was:

PENDING; "At the moment, the Wikimedia Foundation is not activating FlaggedRevs on any
new wikis, pending further discussion on the extensions future."


And without any information when this was decided, by who and why or any idea how long it will be pending bug reporting even with bugzilla is still black hole.

It isn't really mater that extension will not be installed if there is some reason for the decision but if things are just left pending for unknown times it kills feeling that you can fix things.