Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-11-12/Technology report

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Next week's poll

Next week's poll is extremely subjective. All of the available answers (except "Other") rely on the assumption that lowest-priority bugs are worthless. I (and many other) strongly disagree. Lowest means in particular "Patches very welcome", and it is often a gathering point for motivated volunteers to write a patch and get an ACTUAL PROBLEM FIXED. Quite the contrary of "worthless". Please cancel this poll, as its results will necessarily be flawed and mis-used. Also: You write "This week saw a discussion [...]", so the least you could do is provide a link to said discussion. Previous polls were usually of high quality, so I am surprised by how obviously unethical this one is. Nicolas1981 (talk) 03:25, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

The poll reads:

This week saw a discussion about the difference between giving something the "lowest" priority and suggesting it will never be fixed. Which of these best sums up your response: Dealing with bug requests is a case of...

...telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, however brutal

...omitting "unhelpful" relevant facts, but never actually lying

...telling the odd white lie if it encourages future participation/engagement

Other / None of the above

Wow. That is just about the worst wording for a poll I have ever seen. It assumes that bugs are worked on in order of priority. That isn't even true where you pay the developers and it certainly isn't true when you have volunteers. Sometimes a lower priority bug is a very simple fix while the higher priority bug has you stumped. Sometimes you simply don't agree with whoever assigned the priorities. Sometimes someone else is working on the high priority task and you don't want to step on his toes.

But does the poll take any of this into account? Nope. It just assumes bad faith and decides that anyone who assigns a bug to the lowest priority must be a scheming liar and that only those who assign it a don't fix priority are honest and truthful.

I happen to like "won't fix" categories, but I use them to indicate bugs where even if you fix the bug your fix will not be accepted. For an example, look at the very first patent at List of Edison patents. That one is a classic "don't fix". See http://edison.rutgers.edu/vote.htm for details. In my opinion, this poll is POV pushing, plain and simple. --Guy Macon (talk) 08:31, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

While the Signpost's writing is generally quite good, several polls lately have been problematic. Perhaps you should run them by someone (perhaps a non-Signposter) for a) clarity, b) completeness, and c) objectivity before publishing them? --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 16:19, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

While there is a subset of bug reports that end up as "lowest" priority or WONTFIX (my guess is less than 10%), I don't see the relation to "Dealing with bug requests is a case of" which refers to ALL bug reports. When it comes to the available answers, what is "telling the odd white lie" meant to describe for a valid and normal or even critical bug report? There simply is nothing to lie that my mind can come up with. "Thanks for reporting, valid issue, should be fixed, patches will speed it up", but where and how to lie here in a way that "encourages future participation"? I don't get it, or my imagination doesn't work well on Friday mornings. --Malyacko (talk) 09:58, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Some of these responses seem a bit harsh about the poll, but I do also tend to agree with you that lying does not encourage future participation. Being honest causes future participation because then people's time is not wasted. I could perhaps somewhat understand not wanting to mark a wontfix bug as wontfix simply because in some controversial issues the users will yell at you (StringFunctions anyone?), but that's not an excuse for not marking bugs how they need to be marked. Additionally I'm not sure where said discussion took place [but then again I haven't been following all technical discussion recently. There was one about RESOLVED LATER, but that's a tad different]. Bawolff (talk) 00:18, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

The second part of the question doesn't need to be related to the first and is not. The fist is only needed to pretend that the poll has some relation to news; the relation being that those discussions and changes had as a stated objective to communicate more clearly/truthfully the status of bugs. The proposed answers were not really problematic because they didn't affect the choice or understanding of what to do next (unless one used a lot of imagination), but they surely were not about what I consider to be the "dealing with bug requests" and I voted "Other" to represent it.[1] [2] [3] --Nemo 08:20, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

• Afterword: In the 2012-11-19/Technology report, Jarry1250 announced: "In response to apt criticism of last week's poll title, I have decided to retire the polling feature until I can devote sufficient time to administering it properly." I'd like to take the opportunity to thank Jarry and the Signpost team for their ongoing hard work producing fresh and engaging reports each week and helping to bridge the gap between editors and techies. — Richardguk (talk) 06:00, 22 November 2012 (UTC)