The Jackal Rants

Our IRC channel (#mediawiki on freenode) is a popular forum for direct support; most questions asked there will get resolved within a few minutes, or else, users will be pointed elsewhere for useful information.

Here are a few tips for getting the best out of us:

Read the FAQ

It seems so obvious, and yet it seems so few people bother to do it. Before asking a question, read through the FAQ at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:FAQ to see if the issue’s listed there. If it’s not, do us a favour, and have a quick search around the rest of the web site, and perhaps a quick web search, before deciding to ask us.

Don’t ask to ask, just ask

This oft-quoted mantra is quite popular among Wikimedians, too, and there’s a reason for it - it’s common sense. Asking to ask a question is a bit pointless, and wastes time. Just ask, and if no-one answers within a few minutes (do be patient), then ask again when things seem to be perking up. On the other hand, don’t spam us in 3-minute intervals with the same question just because no-one seems to have spotted it.

Version?

Almost without exception, if reporting an apparent bug or odd behaviour, we’re going to ask the version number in use. Do not be a smartass - “the latest” is not a good enough answer, and chances are, you’re incorrect. If I was paid solid cash for every time someone thought they were running “the latest” version, only to discover they were running a snapshot that’s over a year old, I would be comfortably well off.

If you don’t know what version of MediaWiki you’re running, make it your business to find out, via the Special:Version page, as soon as possible. Other useful information includes the version of PHP in use, and (less often, but still handy) the version of MySQL running on the database server. These two pieces of information are also available on the version page.

Don’t flood

Flooding is bad, and inadvertent flooding makes us all cringe. Instead of pasting a lot of text to the channel, consider pasting it to a free “paste bin” service; we’ve set one up at http://mediawiki.pastey.net, and providing the URL to that, instead.

This also helps to ensure that things like configuration snippets, which we might ask to see, don’t get mangled, and don’t get separated into meaningless chunks with all the other chat and automated notifications going on in the channel.

Show us

If the problem is occurring on a public wiki, and if it’s a visible problem, e.g. error messages, incorrect rendering, other weirdness, ‘’show us” - give us the URL to an affected page or a simple test case.

Be reasonable

None of the people answering questions in the channel are being paid to do so.

With that in mind, please be reasonable about asking questions. Be aware that we might have to ask further questions in order to solve a problem; we might need to see snippets of the configuration file, or you may be asked to verify a particular PHP configuration setting - the output of phpinfo() is handy for this sort of thing.

Ultimately, if you ask us for help and then can’t be bothered to help us help you, you’re wasting your time, and ours, and being extremely rude to us in the process. Please don’t.

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed