Wiki143 talk:MediaWiki 1.5 bugs

This is getting ridiculous

I'd say more than half of the edits to this page are from people adding again comments lost on an edit conflict and at the same time removing other comments by accident, prompting another readdition which causes another accidental removal, ad nauseum. --cesarb 28 June 2005 17:01 (UTC)

Is a solution to farm them out onto subpages, one for each heading like WP:VFD ? Dunc|☺ 28 June 2005 17:12 (UTC)

We have a separate bug tracker FOR THIS REASON. http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/ --Brion June 28, 2005 17:14 (UTC)

True, but this isn't the only page where it has been happening. Talk:Aetherometry, for instance. (I have been reporting all bugs I find both here for most users to see and on the tracker for, well, tracking.) --cesarb 28 June 2005 17:25 (UTC)

it would be easier for people to report bugs at bugzilla, rather than messing with a wiki page. that was tried for 1.4 and it didn't work either :) i understand that some people don't want to use bugzilla, but for those that don't mind, it would make things a lot easier. —kate

I doubt that it would be easier, as bugzilla has more or less the same problems other bug-trackers have. But I can understand that some people don't want to use it, as it has the additional feature of offering your E-mail address to whoever would like to harvest it. (Not quite the same as the Wikipedia mail-system.) Aliter 4 July 2005 21:39 (UTC)

Whose great idea was it?

Seriously, whose great idea was to use beta software on Wiki?? I understand using it on some other language Wiki, or even Wiktionary or something to iron out the bugs, but on Wikipedia?? Especially considering the amount and seriousness of bugs I have seen (seen, not read!) in the past 15 minutes this calls for some sacrifitial goat or some forks and a pyre :> Beta should be banned from Wikipedia forever. You don't use beta on large public projects, for crying out loud... just wait till they make fun of us at Slashdot and 1001 blogs... --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 28 June 2005 20:04 (UTC)

• The point is that the people who develop the software and the people who run the technical side of Wikipedia are the same, so the software can be fixed in the course of normal wiki-administering duties. Haven't we always used beta on Wikimedia projects before releasing it to other people's wikis, whose owners are not the authors of MediaWiki and therefore not able to fix bugs as quickly as we get them fixed here? — Trilobite (Talk) 28 June 2005 20:11 (UTC)
• Check out their definition of "beta". "Beta" means "ready to put on Wikipedia to find the rest of the bugs". These aren't just some geeks who wanted to use the latest software, they're the people who made the damn software. Since when should you believe what you read on slashdot? --brian0918™ 28 June 2005 21:38 (UTC)
• The beta is always trialed on Wikipedia. It's not like the release here was completely unplanned or untested since 1.5 has been available at test.leuksman.com for over two months. Angela. June 28, 2005 23:54 (UTC)

I think 1.51 is not quite beta quality. Edit conflicts keep wiping out edits; witness my earlier edit in this very page section. It was there when I loaded the page after my edit, but hours later I've come back and it's gone. It's hard to believe that such a destructive bug wasn't found in beta-testing and other installations before being put into production.

I'm not laying blame or complaining here, just supporting the assertion that this is an unfortunate situation. —Michael Z. 2005-06-29 00:05 Z

If I had to gues I would say that the bug probably wasn't found in alpha-testing because not enough people were testing on the testserver to cause edit conflicts. --Jpkoester1 June 29, 2005 04:16 (UTC)

A lot of these do look to be bugs that are only likely to emerge in a large-scale environment. And in all honesty, a wiki that "you can add information to, but a bit of the new information might get lost so be careful" is a lot more use than "a wiki you can't add information to" - it's not like the bugs were capriciously deleting scads of old text, just fouling up edits added since the change. It's bad, sure, but when all's said and done it only really affects about 24 hours worth of material, and whilst annoying it's not a killer... Shimgray 29 June 2005 04:40 (UTC)

It's one of our jobs as Wikipedia editors to perform beta testing for MediaWiki. If we don't do it, no one else is going to do it for us. In my opinion, the benefit of getting the many improvements in 1.5 far outweighs the inconvenience of having to report a few bugs and cope with some teething problems. Gdr 2005-06-29 23:28:39 (UTC)

• Agreed, but wouldn't many of these bugs have dropped out of any large scale trial? Would it have been possible (would it be possible in the future) to roll out the new version gradually, say to French or German wikipedia or English wiktionary or whatever first, before going live on English wikipedia (by far the largest of the Wikimedia projects)? Do we have to move from a testing environment straight to live use on all projects?

  Having said that, the developers have done and are continuing to do a grand job - well done! -- ALoan (Talk) 30 June 2005 10:04 (UTC)

  • I believe some of the smaller wikis were converted first, though I don't know where I saw a list. The thought of converting something 'mid-sized', like .fr or .ja, and leaving it for a week or so as a test-bed is useful - but using .en has the advantage that it makes it a lot easier to report bugs to the developers, who are (I think) mostly English-speaking... if you have to translate every bug complaint, it slows matters up quite a bit. So there are practical reasons, I'd guess, for using .en (If you look at the page here, it's hard enough working out what some of them are even in your first language...) Shimgray 30 June 2005 10:27 (UTC)
  • As Shimgray says, converting Wikinews/Wiktionary/Wikibooks/Wikisource/Wikiquote first was what did happen. I actually hit and noted the edit conflicts bug on Wikinews on the 27th. Uncle G June 30, 2005 11:02 (UTC)
    • Good point, but .en was converted by the 28th, leaving little time for a shake-down on the other projects or to deal with the bug reports coming from the already-converted wikis. I'm sure there are cogent arguments either way (slow roll out versus big bang). Being a .en user and a trifle selfish, I would rather that the smaller projects (.fr or .de or Wikibooks or whoever) were converted first and then left for a short while so the more significant faults could be found and fixed before .en was converted. Ho hum. Anyway, back to writing this encyclopedia... -- ALoan (Talk) 30 June 2005 11:45 (UTC)

Burden on small Wikipedias

While I can see why MediaWiki needs beta testing on a larger Wikipedia, to find bugs related to high traffic, I do not see any purpose in testing such a beta also on the small Wikipedias:
A small Wikipedia is unlikely to find a bug before that bug is found on one of the big Wikipedias, unless a feature is specific to small Wikipedias. Yet with, say 10 active contributors, testing each bug encountered and then checking that it actually has already been reported by another Wikipedia, is a serious drain on human resources. Aliter 4 July 2005 22:02 (UTC)

Why was the process stopped?

We (The Hebrew wikipedia) still wait to the upgrading. What is the reason of this? Troll Refaim 30 June 2005 14:54 (UTC)

(I'm not one of the developers involved, and this is an assumption. Please do not take it as fact.) The sheer size and activity of the English wikipedia means that a lot of previously unknown bugs have been found during the upgrade process (as you can see here), and work is currently being done on fixing these problems. It would seem a bit silly to upgrade another wikipedia with a version known to be buggy, when by waiting a short while you can upgrade it with a fixed, more useful, version of 1.5 Shimgray 30 June 2005 15:03 (UTC)

Search broken

The Search is broken, it does not return anything (since ~2 days). Also bugzilla is not accessable. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Helohe (talk • contribs) 07:04, 31 July 2005

Versions

Version 1.5rc2 was just released. What does the rc stand for and does that mean that the program is stable enough to use on a privately owned, public website (since it is not in beta anymore, or so I would assume from the [beta] part of the name being taken out)? Thanks. Jediarchives11 03:33, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

rc stands for Release candidate; see that article.-gadfium 06:03, 25 August 2005 (UTC)