[Foundation-l] The Mediawiki 1.18 image rotation bug on Commons and on all Wikimedia projects

Tue Dec 13 18:35:00 UTC 2011

On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 9:52 PM, David Richfield
<davidrichfield at gmail.com> wrote:
> What effect would a less aggressive tone have had?  Would you have
> been more likely to convince your audience?  less likely to alienate
> people?

It's a fair point. I think part of the problem is that people are
feeling that reasonable, calm, friendly inquiries are likely to be
ignored and "making noise" is necessary to get attention. I want to
make sure we do our best to respond to reasonable inquiries in a
timely manner, and would ask all WMF staff and contractors to help me
in that regard.

In general, if you feel that an engineering issue merits escalation,
never hesitate to email me directly and, unless I'm totally swamped,
I'll try to help. There are other folks whose job it is to help with
triaging, like Mark Hershberger (mah at wikimedia dot org) and Sumana
Harihareswara (sumanah at wikimedia dot org, especially for things
like patch review), and of course you can also contact any of the
engineering directors for tech issues, raise them on IRC, on Bugzilla,
etc.

It's true that sometimes people complaining loudly helps us to take an
issue more seriously, but ideally that shouldn't be necessary and our
processes should work to understand what's causing pain and what
isn't.
-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

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