Mailing List Archive

For tasks where you do not have the capacity to work on them, but which
are not declined, can you instead re-open them and only remove the
Readers-Web-Backlog project?


--
Bartosz Dziewo?ski
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Changing project tags would have been a much better idea, and how
every other backlog-focused team deals with similar situations. Even
triaging as Lowest would have been better. Closing as Declined says
that the task can't be completed by anyone, at any time.

The choice to (improperly) decline a bunch of valid tasks is one
thing, but doing it as a silent batch edit is another thing entirely.
As I mentioned in
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Wcpss4hjs4552ak6, using a silent
edit to make controversial actions has the appearance of an evasion of
scrutiny. Even if the decision to use a silent batch edit was made in
good faith (and I have no reason to think it wasn't), it still meant
that the action was not properly communicated to those involved and is
difficult for others to review. The only place the action was logged
was on the tasks themselves, where it would only be seen by someone
who happened to come across it. This goes against the idea that
actions and decisions should be public and open for review if at all
possible found both in Phabricator etiquette and the Wikimedia
movement more generally.

Silent batch edits are an extremely powerful tool, which is why only a
few people have the ability to mark a batch edit as silent. However,
the use of this ability does not appear to be routinely logged
publicly, in Phabricator or externally
<https://sal.toolforge.org/__all__?p=0&q=%22make-silent%22&d=>, which
is unusual when compared to similar actions elsewhere. There is also
no written documentation about when batch edits can be made silent,
which sets up the potential for differing expectations like this.

ACN

On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 3:07 PM Bartosz Dziewo?ski <matma.rex@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> For tasks where you do not have the capacity to work on them, but which
> are not declined, can you instead re-open them and only remove the
> Readers-Web-Backlog project?
>
>
> --
> Bartosz Dziewo?ski
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
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While I very much support the idea of closing old tickets (as well as
Gerrit patches) that don't look like they will ever be tackled – this
tends to be a delicate decision that benefits a lot from being as open
as possible. There is not much to add to what AntiCompositeNumber
already wrote.

1. While 61 tickets is not a small number, it's not a large number
either. People are typically not subscribed to all tickets the same
time. I, for example, would have received a single notification email.

2. I, personally, disabled almost all Phabricator emails. For example,
removing a tag it rarely something I care about. Feel free to suppress
such notifications, esp. if you own the tag. But having a ticket
declined is a relevant information for me, if not the most relevant.

Overall I think it would have created less irritation and stress to
just let Phabricator do what people expect it to do.

Here is another look at these 61 tasks, in case people are interested:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/qJdT7nxCgmK3/#R

Kind regards
Thiemo
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