Bugs

Bugs. Bugs are annoying. And no, I'm not talking about the real life bugs that bug you when you're trying to write a blog about Wikia bugs.
What is the proper procedure when you find a bug on Wikia? Where do you report them? Wikia used to have a Bugzilla for tracking bugs... but a very smart person must have decided it wasn't needed back in 2007 or so. Currently only Wikia staff are able to use Wikia's bug tracking system, when in the past everyone was able to use the Bugzilla. Since July 2008, Wikia's open company test page has stated that Wikia doesn't have open bugtracking yet. Now, we have two options left:

One of these options is Special:Contact, a feature I dislike using because it takes days before you finally get a reply and the reply you get usually says that they're looking into the problem and then you never hear from them again.

The other option we have is IRC, #Wikia on freenode to be precise. And this is where we reported a bug that was caused by the recent move of Wikia Central to community.wikia.com. A number of users have userpage templates to for use all around Wikia, these templates are located on Central (now moved to community.wikia). These templates stopped working after the move. Once I found out they were no longer working, I went to the Wikia IRC channel and asked if anyone knew what the problem was. The first person to reply referred me to a Wikia forum, now, there is nothing wrong with that. But, on the forum it says my bug had been reported 4 days before I reported it, and the forum also makes it very clear that Wikia does not care about fixing this bug. No, they are to busy moving Central around and creating bugs to actually consider fixing them. Now, I know it's more fun to play around while creating bugs and that fixing bugs is not really a fun thing to do, but, the normal users like me would surely appreciate it if bugs like that would be fixed as fast as possible.

And this is when the conversation in #Wikia really picked up, more and more people started to have their say (nothing wrong with that, right?). Well, if you think like that you have clearly not been around #Wikia lately. We were kindly requested to take our conversation to #Wikia-social, and no, this request did not come from Wikia staff because they're not around during the weekend. It was another user who suggested we take BUG REPORTS to a SOCIAL CHANNEL because the main channel is not for "complaining" as he called it.

The discussion then evolved into a heated argument about the fact that Wikia staff doesn't seems to care about bug reports. A shame really, cause all I was looking to find was the answer to a set of simple questions:

1) There is a bug, has it been reported yet?
2) If it has been reported, what is being done to fix it? If it hasn't been reported yet, how soon can someone look at it?

Although I did get an answer to both of my questions (1: yes 2: we don't care, so go bug someone else), I find the way I got them ridiculous. And what's even worse, another question has come to my mind: How the hell are we supposed to report bugs on Wikia?

By the time someone replies to an email sent via Special:Contact the bug has probably already gotten bored and fixed itself. If you go to the IRC channel you'll be met with hostility and accused of "complaining". In the end we'll just have to realize that there is no way to report a bug on Wikia, and even if there is, Wikia does not care about bugs and they care even less about users. We will just have to wait for bugs to learn how to fix themselves.

Wiki autonomy...or then not

Back in 2007, I adopted a Wikia wiki named WarWiki. I revived it, imported a fair bunch of articles from English Wikipedia (with attribution, naturally) and so on. Then I moved on to work on other things (such as being a Wikia janitor, but that was quite a while ago) and didn't have so much time for that wiki.

WarWiki was relatively quiet, only a couple edits per week, mostly from random anonymous users. I decided to clean the wiki up a bit, and started by disabling Wikia's Welcome Tool (HAWelcome extension); don't get me wrong, HAWelcome is very nice extension, at least from a technical point of view, but some wikis prefer to do welcomes "old-school" style — that is, to have real users welcome other users instead of bots. I find it quite annoying when the welcome bot leaves a "Hi, thanks for your edit" message to a spambot. No wiki needs any more of those!

So, I disabled Welcome Tool, deleted some old IP talk pages, and also Welcome Tool's user page and its talk page. A couple of days after this, I gave sysop rights to a couple friends of mine, as I thought that they could help me revive this wiki. What a fool I was. The next day, a Wikia staff member undeleted Welcome Tool's user page and talk page and re-enabled the Welcome Tool. So much for that wiki autonomy.

But wait! This story isn't over just yet...

After this stunt, my fellow co-administrators disabled Welcome Tool once again and re-deleted its user and talk pages. Guess what this earned us? Mass-deoppings, that's what. I lost my bureaucrat and sysop rights, and all the people I had promoted to admin status a couple days earlier lost their sysop rights. For a while, WarWiki had only one (inactive) bureaucrat and two inactive admins. All active admins had lost their rights...and for what? Hmm, that's a good question. You see, we were never told the reason! Last time I checked, there was a box on Special:UserRights labeled "Reason for change".



The above is a screenshot of Special:UserRights special page on MediaWiki.org...do you see the box I'm talking about? Yeah, I see it there too.

A page I had deleted earlier, related to Wikia's new "blog" feature, was also undeleted by the Wikia staff member in question. I don't feel that blogs are appropriate for every wiki, and that's exactly why I had deleted the page earlier on.

After a relatively long and painful discussion with another Wikia staff member, I got my sysop rights back — of course, after I had been suspected of "doing a subtle troll". I haven't edited WarWiki since that, because I feel that their behavior towards me was at least highly questionable, if not more.

What does this remind me of? It certainly reminds me of this blog post by Mikko Hyppönen, the Chief Research Officer of F-Secure (English Wikipedia's article on F-Secure). His blog post has a link to Michael Krigsman's Project Failures Analysis regarding Mikko's problems with Twitter; I suggest checking it out. I think this quote sums it up nicely:

”	[...]this situation offers a case study example of immature customer service and suggests problems with the organization’s corporate culture.	”
~Michael Krigsman [source]