This week, bugmeister Mark Hershberger coined the term "bugosphere" to describe "the microcosm that evolves around a particular instance of Bugzilla" such as the MediaWiki Bugzilla. In this edition of What is?, we look at the processes and procedures underlying the Wikimedia bug reporting system (in Bugzilla terms, a 'bug' may be a problem with the existing software or a request for features to be added in future versions, which may also be referred to as an 'enhancement' when differentiation is desired).

Bug #1 was filed on 10 August 2004; as of time of writing, 30602 bugs have been submitted. Of those, approximately twenty-four thousand have been closed, whilst six thousand are still open (about 60 percent of which are requests for enhancements). Not all bugs related to Wikimedia wikis; the MediaWiki Bugzilla collates reports from all users of the software, in addition to bug reports that do not relate to MediaWiki but instead relate to Wikimedia websites. In any given week, approximately 90 bugs will be opened, and approximately 80 closed (in extraordinary weeks, such as bug sprints, as many as 65 extra bugs may be closed). As such, Bugzilla serves as central reference for monitoring what has been done, and what still needs doing.

Registration on Bugzilla is free but necessary (logins are not shared between Bugzilla and Wikimedia wikis for many reasons, including the increased visibility of email addresses on Bugzilla). Anyone may comment on bugs; comments are used principally to add details to bug reports, or suggestions on how they should be fixed. Voting in support of a bug is possible, but in general bugs are worked on by priority, or by area of expertise; few "critical"-rated bugs remain long enough to accumulate many votes. In January this year, the Foundation appointed Mark Hershberger as bugmeister, responsible for monitoring, prioritising and processing bug reports. More recently, he has been organising a series of "triages", when bugs are looked at and recategorised depending on their progress and severity. To file a bug or feature request, visit http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org, though it is usual to demonstrate a consensus before filing a request for a controversial feature or configuration change.

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

• An interwiki-following redirection website has been created to allow users who cannot easily type in their native language, because of a restricted keyboard, to access their chosen article by typing the English name equivalent of it.
• The Abuse Filter extension (known on the English Wikipedia as the edit filter) has been deployed to all Wikimedia wikis by default (see also this week's "News and Notes"). Since it comes with no filters by default, this should cause no visible change.
• In unrelated news, the JavaScript component of the Abuse filter was significantly upgraded to use the jQuery framework and the ResourceLoader, cutting load times (bug #29714).
• Developer Jeroen De Dauw blogged this week about his efforts to add "campaign"-style functionality to the new Wikimedia Commons Upload Wizard, allowing for those uploading photos as part of an upload drive (such as this year's Wiki Loves Monuments competition) to enjoy a customised experience. The resultant functionality, he said, was ultimately "very generic" and therefore could be deployed for many future competitions and programmes.
• "After last weeks successful triage and the large amount of work that everyone has been doing were getting pretty close to having MobileFrontend [the new mobile Wikipedia site] production ready" reports the WMF's Director of Mobile Projects Tomasz Finc. He also listed the small number of bugs (at time of writing, six) that could still use developer attention.
• Similarly approaching its target deployment date is MediaWiki 1.18, scheduled for 16 September. Early in the week, there were concerns about the high number of revisions still marked as "fixme"s (59), a figure that has since been reduced to 45, as of 27 August. In particular, a developer skilled in Objective CAML is sought to help review the 'Math' extension.
• On the English Wikipedia, bots were approved to populate the fields of the {{Drugbox}} template and update uses of the {{Commonscat}} template to reflect moves, redirections and deletions at Wikimedia Commons. Still open are requests for a bot to add wikilinks to {{{publisher}}} and {{{work}}} parameters of citation templates, and to remove flags from certain infoboxes.

← Previous "Technology report"

Next "Technology report" →

In this issue

29 August 2011 (all comments)

News and notes

In the news

Recent research

Opinion essay

WikiProject report

Featured content

Arbitration report

Technology report

Discuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.

• To further confuse the numbers, not all bugs are bugs, they may be requests for features. Moreover not all closed bugs are "solved" they may be duplicate bugs (probably the biggest class), "won't-fix" closes or may even become irrelevant as the software evolves over the years. Rich Farmbrough, 14:32, 30 August 2011 (UTC).[reply]
  

All excellent points Rich :) It is a complicated business, but fortunately, the important business is the fixing rather than the trending. - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 14:35, 30 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• The Wikimedia Bugzilla, in addition to covering bug reports and feature requests for MediaWiki and Wikimedia websites, also handles the same for many MediaWiki extensions, including plenty that have never been (and likely never will be) used on Wikimedia wikis. 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{? · ☎ Dinoguy1000} 17:22, 30 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]