Bug management/Feedback sources

Wikimedia has many wiki pages (forums) where users provide feedback.

For average wiki users Bugzilla is often hard to use, and developers cannot be expected to regularly take a look at all these forums. Anybody can help here by watching forums and forwarding well-reported valid bugs from the forums to Wikimedia Bugzilla. This helps other users see that reporting issues in Bugzilla is one important way of getting issues addressed.

Good practices

 * Copy issues when it looks like they are a bug in the software and when they have good instructions how to reproduce.
 * On many wikipages you can use the {{Tracked|123}} template to visibly link to the Bugzilla ticket 123. This raises awareness and avoids duplicated reports in Bugzilla. In normal text you can use  to link to bug report 123. On some wikis it may be necessary to import the [ exported Template:Tracked].
 * To mark problems as FIXED, you can change the aforementioned template to on many wikipages.

Feedback sources to check after software deployments
After the deployment of a new MediaWiki version to specific Wikimedia wikis (see the roadmap calendar, currently on Mondays and Wednesdays), forums on those wikis affected by the deployment should be checked more thoroughly in the 24 hours after the deployment, to quickly identify and escalate regressions.

Feedback sources to check daily
The following links should be checked at least once a day by bug management:


 * Village Pump Technical on English Wikipedia
 * Village Pump Misc on English Wikipedia
 * Village Pump on English Commons
 * Upload help on English Commons

Feedback sources to check from time to time
These links should be checked from time to time by bug management:


 * on English Wiktionary
 * Scriptorium on English Wikisource
 * on Arabic Wikipedia
 * on German Wikipedia
 * on Spanish Wikipedia
 * on French Wikipedia
 * on Polish Wikipedia
 * on Hebrew Wikipedia
 * on Hindi Wikipedia
 * English Wikipedia Help Desk

For a complete list of wikis, check out the targets list for Global message delivery.

Tools

 * Translation: Sometimes using a translation tool like Google Translate, Chrome's Page Translate or gTranslate is very helpful.
 * Stock answers: There is a rough Greasemonkey script by Andre Klapper available here that provides common one-click stock answers for Village Pumps.

Acknowledgment
Mark Hershberger's initial work on this topic