Wikipedia talk:Contact us: Difference between revisions

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We have 2 html div's on this page with the following style definitions which are causing issues on the mobile site (see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31591): 1) float: left; width: 49%; margin-right: 1%; 2) float: right; width: 49%; margin-left: 1%;

We actually have css classes which do this and are more mobile resilient:

.portal-column-left
.portal-column-right

Could someone with permission to edit this page replace the style attributes on these div with

class="portal-column-left"

and

class="portal-column-right"

respectively?

Also after the last div to clear the floating is probably necessary

So, I spent a chunk of my volunteer time today redrafting the "contact us" page. The draft can be found here. Driving aims:

1. Minimise wikilinks. The current page has impressive degrees of overlinking. This virtually ensures that readers are sent down a rabbit-hole of link after link after link, leading to a game of 6 degrees of Wikipedia that doesn't necessarily even end them up with the info they wanted...assuming it was even there. We minimise links and keep them for the really important stuff, so that if we're driving someone down there it's worth it.
2. Increased prominence for email addresses. The existing page assumes that wikimarkup is not evil. And sure, it wasn't...in 2001, when the only people who used the internet were used to kludge. But the internet has moved on, and we've become a wee bit pedantic about how people use it. We should be clearly and easily directing people to "human-useable" contact methods.
3. Minimalist design. The existing design...oy. As well as fragmenting the data over a thousand different pages, it displayed it in two or three or four different boxes at a time. This makes it hard to read and easily identify what does what. The new layout contains one thing to read at a time, in one set of paragraphs.

What I'd propose is twofold. First: we implement this (obviously). Second, we do whatever analytics we can on the resulting mess. Find out what pages people go to, what our users are most concerned about, and increase their prominence if we can. Maybe look into a way to implement some kind of feedback thing so that we can see what we're missing. I've got a couple of ideas on that front, but none that don't run the risk of giving people a way of just, you know, leaving complaints or issues in that box. Ironholds (talk) 00:07, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• support, obviously. Ironholds (talk) 00:07, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Strongest support. It's desperately needed, and I think the draft is a very good start. Perhaps also add the general address for queries that don't fall under any of those categories. Goodness knows we get enough weird requests that someone will come here wanting something unusual. – GorillaWarfare (talk) 00:43, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  Good idea; shall tweak now :). Ironholds (talk) 00:47, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  I think we should leave a catch all email on a page at the bottom. You know quite a few internet users will just go "OH EMAIL ADDRESS, SWEET!" and start composing their email without effectively filtering it through the right categories. Then we get something called wasted volunteer time. :P -- DQ (ʞlɐʇ) 01:43, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. I like it. Much less cluttered, much more straightfoward. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 01:08, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Support the idea of change, but it needs some more change first I agree with all three of the points listed above, and I don't want to trample on hours of work, but there is quite a lot of white space in that centre section and I forget where, but quite a few people have told me (and I agree), there has to be a balance between white space and non-white space. At least 50% of the screens are white space and not all the text fits on one screen for an average sized laptop (I might be off on the average part, but then again, assume people have GTB and a whole bunch of other bars in their web browser). Maybe instead, have links on both sides of the page like "links|blah...blah|links" to efficiently use space more. If you really don't like the idea, maybe consider the staff page design. Also commented above about use of email. I also don't see critical topics covered in the old one, in the new version like "You deleted my article" or "I'm blocked" or "I have technical issues (like maybe something WMF Tech has to deal with, not just a dilemma)". Sorry to ruin the party. -- DQ (ʞlɐʇ) 01:43, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  Yeah, this cuts out some of the old issues, because, well...they're dumb issues. If you've been blocked, there's a notice left on your talkpage telling you what to do, and you get a bright orange bar appeared. If you have tech issues, we invite people to use bugzilla, an abhorrent, unfriendly mess, and in doing so generate more work for people who have to deal with "the site went down! zomg!" bugs if users ever actually get through. Tech issues tend to get noticed and identified by the 82k editors, and reported or resolved pretty fast - particularly anything severe enough to commonly impact on readers. Ironholds (talk) 01:46, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. Nice flow and easy to follow. The current pages are horrible. Rjd0060 (talk) 02:02, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Couple of Comments

• How many of the existing 23 subpages are cut out of the loop, and do any/many of them need to be added to this draft before it goes live? (eg /blocked and /deleted_page and /Warning_messages and /Top_questions and etc - I don't know, but would guess, that many/most of these subpages exist because they're frequent-OTRS-requests...)
• I strongly recommend that we replace existing pages, to increase the numbers of people watchlisting, and to decrease the number of abandoned/historic pages that someone might stumble upon via search. (Or - protect the new pages, and redirect their talkpages to here, and redirect the replaced oldpages, and widely announce the new pages somewhere with links for "add to watchlist").

HTH. —Quiddity (talk) 02:51, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• I agree with both of those :). So, almost all of them are cut out. To be honest, I'd avoid re-adding them: I can't find any evidence they were addressed as common concerns through OTRS rather than "well, I thought people might ask" (we had a question that dealt with PDAs, for example). I'd be pretty interested in gathering some quant and qual data from info-en after this goes live to investigate what we're missing. I agree we should wall off/delete/redirect anything that isn't being referred to any more, mostly the latter. Ironholds (talk) 02:53, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Support - Over encumbered at the present moment. James ^{(Talk • Contribs)} • 4:09pm • 06:09, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. Much better. Please add an assurance that OTRS mails by article subjects will be treated as private communications. JN466 08:55, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• I think we'd want to qualify what that means. They are private in the sense that they are viewable only by the X number of volunteers who have access to that queue, and OTRS volunteers are asked to respect confidentiality (at m:OTRS/introduction). --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 10:46, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Certainly. JN466 11:27, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Support I worked a bit earlier on a few of the pages. While I support the use of these, there are a few questions/issues for ironing out. :) The only address at Wikipedia:Contact us/draft2 for readers to report errors in articles is the vandalism queue. I think the majority of contacts we receive about errors are not vandalism, but BLP issues or standard errors and omission notices. Do we want to filter all corrections through the vandalism subqueue, or should we add complexity by listing the courtesy address? I also wonder if Wikipedia:Contact us/draft6 should be expanded a bit to include answerswikimedia.org, which is for general questions for or about the WMF. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 10:46, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  Shall and shall :). Ironholds (talk) 13:43, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• General Support although tweaks are needed. On the positive side, it is much less cluttered (and I hope my proposed tweaks don't ruin that). Glad to see that the garish red has been changed. I like the concept of the left navigation box, to identify major sections. One observation, (with no obvious solution), after intro, it sounds like an attempt to identify different groups of individuals, e.g. Readers, Donors, Press, but Article Subjects and Licensing don't fit the paradigm. One thought is a Who and What distinction, but hard to do that without re-introducing clutter.(Oops, just realized that Article subjects is about a group of people, but the comment still stands)

My main concern is that the Licensing section addresses three unrelated groups of people, yet the content flow of three paragraphs suggests more of a relationship than actually exists. Some people want to re-use material. Those people are not here to report a copyright problem, and neither of those two groups is trying to donate material. I accept that you want to keep the number of items in the left panel limited, but that means the right panel needs clearer demarcation.

My second main point is that the Schools partnership should be listed, ideally as a separate item on the left, but it arguably fits into the Press and Partnerships section.

And third, shouldn't GLAM be mentioned (may fit neatly into Press and Partnerships)?--SPhilbrick(Talk) 11:25, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, headdesk; thought I'd listed that - the glam thing, that is :). I totally agree with the licensing issues, but to be honest, I'm not sure how to better break it down :(. Ironholds (talk) 13:43, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Half the sidebar on the left goes off the bottom of the screen and for some reason not only is it (considerably) longer than the middle in all of them, but there's this mass of completely empty space on the right for no apparent reason. So the layout needs some work, but at least my first reaction to this version isn't to run away screaming (unfortunately because that was my reaction to the other I don't really have anything else to add). -— Isarra ༆ 15:35, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  Yeah, it was originally full width but I was advised to limit it, pixel-wise. There's not much we can do about the left sidebar other than massively compressing it, I think :(. Ironholds (talk) 15:53, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  Advised by whom? That just makes the weight disparity even worse, making the left even heavier by comparison than it already is. And perhaps just not using it as a sidebar would work better, since the way it's set up it contains more content than the content itself in some cases - and there is ample vertical space... -— Isarra ༆ 17:14, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes, oh yes. People hate long complicated phone tree menus. People hate the online equivalent. Kill it with fire and replace it with one email address that people contact. If we haven't got enough OTRS agents to handle that, the Foundation and the OTRS admins should actively recruit more. —Tom Morris (talk) 16:09, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • We started with one address originally, but it caused major problems: important BLPy tickets got lost among simple questions. By separating incoming mail into relevant subqueues, we can give better attention to urgent things, and we can let n00b volunteers ease in with simple tickets without having to deal with the really nasty ones. - Jredmond (talk) 21:06, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Support more brilliant work by Ironholds! Dougweller (talk) 16:34, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• SUPPORT. Cannot say this strongly enough. I'm sure there are tweaks that can be done before it goes live, but all in all, I can hardly wait to be able to use this helpful/easy-to-use tool with new editors, especially when I'm helping in the IRC -help channel (where many new/clueless/frustrated editors first wash up in their Wikipedia journey). Shearonink (talk) 16:39, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment I haven't read through the whole proposal yet, but I will note that there's been a reduction of the {{nospam}} template here and on commons recently to increase usability - letting people just copy and paste the addresses. We're probably already on everybody's spamlists by now, right? VernoWhitney (talk) 17:03, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  Well, OTRS doesn't actually *have* a spam filter. At the moment we use mailto, which is...rather ugly. I don't know if it kills spam at all. Ironholds (talk) 17:05, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  Yeah, I spend a good portion of my time on OTRS just triaging misdirected emails and killing spam. I don't know if it's a good idea, but I was just pointing out that the cat's already out of the bag for some addresses, and those supporting the changes do have a point about usability/user-friendliness. VernoWhitney (talk) 17:28, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  Point :). I've got no objection to a change, then. Ironholds (talk) 17:33, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• About time. I may look more later, but full support from me. Worm^TT(talk) 17:18, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Strong support Well done Ironholds and others (and Peter for your excellent template). I will also help if needed. heather walls (talk) 18:12, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. It looks fantastic, and is so much easier to use than the prior cruft, but I have a few comments:
  1. I made an edit to draft2, the "readers" page, to emphasize editing. (Lots of people still don't know that's an option!)

     I've actually reverted this :). I agree that a lot of people don't know, but we want to be resolving things in the manner that is as non-frustrating for the end user as possible. If the person tries to edit, they're presented with wikimarkup (hella-scary), and if they then make the edit on their own, there's a good chance they'll have it undone if it's good-faith-but-fails-at-[thing], which isn't particularly encouraging. Email actually gets the issue fixed. I worry about directing more people to get involved until we've got a non-scary interface and help documentation that does its job. Ironholds (talk) 21:11, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

     That's a fair point about wikimarkup, especially once we throw in tables and transclusion. Most of the new-editor issues are less about the technical details of editing, though, and more about silly Wikipedia internals or working with other editors - and a new editing UI won't fix either of those. :( - Jredmond (talk) 21:16, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

     Indeed, but good help documentation can :). Wait until you see my next project ;p. Ironholds (talk) 21:41, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

     I think a compromise could be reached here by including a quick link to "help for editors" in that sentence on the readers draft: if you don't happen to know you can edit, and you do happen to want to know more, here are our help pages, for better or for worse. I'd continue to emphasize "anyone can edit" because there are two reasons for that message, after all: 1) you too can edit, and 2) contents of articles may vary, caveat lector. Personally, I'd drop or reword the sentence about 'wikitext being hard to edit, so...' -- it comes off as unintentionally patronizing to me, *particularly* if we are trying to reach the demographic that edits but is instantly reverted (they've generally figured out wikitext just fine, just not culture). What about "if you'd prefer to email our volunteer team about a problem with an article, email xxxx with the article title and a description of the problem". Lastly, is a note about the talk page worth it? Maybe not? -- phoebe / (talk to me) 04:28, 12 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

     We have talk pages for the explicit purpose of discussing articles, and while some talk pages are like a guided sausage-factory tour, it's still worthwhile (IMHO) to direct feedback there. I do like the "for editors" idea, though, either as a link within the "readers" page or as a distinct page on its own. - Jredmond (talk) 14:03, 12 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  2. I made another edit to draft3, the "article subjects" page, to add some whitespace and indicate that we need specific details on e-mails. Details help everywhere, but especially on BLP issues (which tend to be much more time-sensitive).
  3. Draft4 (on reuse) needs a bit more work than I can give it right now, unfortunately. I'd start by discussing the reusability of text, and then point people to image description pages where they can see licensing details for the specific file(s) they want. Copyright is really complicated stuff, so we won't be able to keep this page too simple, but we can link to more in-depth discussions from here.

  - Jredmond (talk) 21:06, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Support. You've done a great job, Ironholds. I also think there are some good suggestions on this page, but you seem to be working through all of them. This will be much better once it's done. ···日本穣^? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 21:57, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Support A desperately needed and well-done improvement. wctaiwan (talk) 03:16, 12 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• support & comment -- cleaner, looks good. Comments: I'd retain a link to the general FAQ somewhere; I think having one link is better than trying to address "top questions" but removing it altogether seems extreme; I like to browse FAQs personally and I doubt I'm the only one. I'd also work on the text a bit; I think it can be cleaner and shorter even than what you've got. And lastly, does OTRS net many questions from editors? What about people whose edits are reverted? I'm not sure of the demographics; do 'questions about editing' need to be called out (either as a separate category: help for editors, or under 'readers'?) Anyway, all in all nice work. -- phoebe / (talk to me) 04:16, 12 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  In my experience, not particularly. I'm looking forward to doing some analysis of what kind of questions OTRS is getting after this has been in place for a while - it'll be nice to find out what the documentation is missing :). Ironholds (talk) 17:50, 12 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Conditional support: only if "Article subjects / Help for the subjects of Wikipedia's articles." is changed to something more second-person-ish like "Article subjects / How to deal with articles about you or someone you represent". It is simply not clear enough as is. — This, that, and the other (talk) 07:10, 13 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  Tweaked; I agree with the change :). Ironholds (talk) 17:20, 13 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong support as someone who is often on the article subject side of things - I'm confident this is an immense improvement. I have some very small nit-picky suggestions I'll put on the Talk page there. Corporate 17:02, 13 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. The page is simply bad at the moment. mabdul 00:28, 14 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• I have been bold and now implemented this :).
• I reluctantly oppose this implementation. The current version of the contact page encourages and facilitates self-resolution of problems, pre-filters problems we won't solve, and directs others to on-wiki resolution methods. Because of the staffing levels, emailing us should be a last resort rather than a first resort. The first reaction of someone hitting Contact Us and being presented with this new page is to scan through it, see the email address, and fire off an email saying "hi, do you have any more information on my dead grandmother that there's a two-line stub about?", ""I am a PR and attach the authorized bio of my client, please use this and his approved headshot in place of your existing article", and so on. These are filtered by the current structure. Stifle (talk) 06:36, 13 October 2012 (UTC)
  • This would be better put at the discussion on the "contact us" talkpage :). And, no, I disagree; it doesn't facilitate self-resolution, it facilitates trying to resolve yourself and buggering it up. Wikitext is difficult and unpleasant to use, and that's before we stick in the various community policies and principles and needs for X, Y and Z which we expect newbies to know by default. I'm happy to not put email first iff you can show me another human-readable place they could get help from. Ironholds (talk) 17:23, 13 October 2012 (UTC)
    • (Moved to the right place) Stifle (talk) 13:22, 14 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • I think an FAQ is a basic requirement to put ahead of the email address, similar to the previous "top questions", to cut out the email types I mentioned above, plus "Can I really edit", "Can I copy your site", and "can you please add an article about foo". Stifle (talk) 13:25, 14 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
      • A good middle-ground might just be a subtle shift in emphasis. Bring more emphasis to the Talk page and using it first and less emphasis on email, offer a couple more links to Help pages - that sort of thing. Minor tweaks. Corporate 22:26, 14 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment: I like this page, but when I start out by clicking "Help", I never come to it, but instead come to the rather horrible page at Wikipedia:Contact_us/Article_problem. Shouldn't the Help path lead to this page too? JN466 19:48, 14 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Tutorial etc still links there as well. Can we perhaps just redirect all the old subpages to the main new one? Andrew Gray (talk) 21:07, 14 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Doing so now :). Ironholds (talk) 22:41, 14 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

There seems to be more here and here - not sure if all these should go to the main page, or to one of the new subpages. Andrew Gray (talk) 11:27, 18 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Now that everything is live: I've gone through and added a space between addresses and any punctuation. OTRS does most of its queue-sorting through the recipient address, but if the pattern isn't an exact match then the message isn't delivered properly. (I know, that's fundamentally broken. No need to preach to the choir.) We've already had a couple dozen badly-routed messages since the switch; in each case the sender copied/pasted the address from the new Contact page, and inadvertently included the period that closed the sentence. The extra space should stop the broken routing (at least from that cause). - Jredmond (talk) 16:05, 15 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The extra space has helped; no badly-routed info-en messages today. - Jredmond (talk) 16:28, 16 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Just as a comment; correspondence to the main OTRS address appears to have skyrocketed since this change (In the region of 10 emails an hour-ish) --Errant ^(chat!) 14:27, 16 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

To be fair, most of those are from people who haven't grasped the idea of decentralized content control - and they'd have written us anyway, even though that's the least efficient way to get content issues addressed. - Jredmond (talk) 16:28, 16 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

New design is much better, but the talk pages of the new subpages need redirecting here. Rd232 ^talk 11:06, 18 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Done :). Ironholds (talk) 11:34, 18 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Actually I am not that impressed. When I clicked on Contact Wikipedia I expected to see a short intro'/disclaimer and then a list of problems/issues and a link to click on for each that takes you directly to a corresponding page/message editor. Simple. Direct. Items like Licensing, Donors, Press and partnerships should be at the bottom of the list as the average reader is not concerned with those. -- I did not expect to do a lot of reading through multiple messages telling me to go some where else. As it is I have to search and read, and search and click to get to where I would like to go and I'm still not quite clear on that. Where do you report a tech problem? The 'Contact Wikipedia' main page/Readers section doesn't give you a clue. The Contact Wikipedia link should bring you to a page that allows you to, uh, 'Contact Wikipedia' without alot of extra hunting around and clicking to do so. i.e.
Contact Wikipedia:
1. Report a tech problem
2. Report a problem with a page article.
3. Report this..
4. Report that.
5. etc, etc...
-- Gwillhickers (talk) 20:12, 22 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Outside of the mobile interface, which has its own "report a technical problem" mechanism, we only get about three or four reports of technical trouble per month - and most of those seem to be about either editing the lede section or asking why things look weird on IE. Technical issues are just not a significant source of messages, especially when compared with messages about factual errors, vandalism, procedural questions, BLP stuff, copyvios, reuse requests, photo submissions, permission grants, press inquiries, donation help, or snippy "YOU ARE SO BIASED AGAINST MY VIEWS" complaints. (Also: please read WP:CONTACT again; there's an address right there which is getting a lot of use.) - Jredmond (talk) 21:22, 22 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, you've demonstrated the point. 'Where' is the link to report tech problems? -- A direct link would have been nice -- esp on the 'Contact Wikipedia' page. I suspect the main reason you don't get many messages about tech problems is because the main page is no help. Could you please supply the direct link to report 'tech problems' if you know it? Thanx. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 21:50, 22 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Prior to this changeover there was a tech link. It is from this that Jredmond is drawing his data. Ironholds (talk) 22:44, 22 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The 'Contact Wikipedia' page has five main choices: 1. Readers 2. Article subjects 3. Licensing 4. Donors 5. Press and partnerships. (No link for 'Editors'.) After clicking on 'Readers' the only thing I can see that even approaches the problem is directions to send an email about any 'other' problems to some unnamed person and/or place at WP. Unless I'm missing something, and I'm hoping I have, there seems to be more considerations on the 'Contact WP' page given to readers and other parties than there is for editors and contributors. In any event there are some serious problems to report. I was editing a section on the Bibliography of early American naval history page, and after hitting 'Save page', the system hung in limbo for more than a minute, and then after it was over, it saved the section, but whipped out the rest of the page. Twice this has happened. During the week prior to this, saving edits has taken about 30 secs to a minute to process before the page was returned to view -- and I don't have a slow rig by any means. This occurred right after some new features were added to the editor i.e. An idiot light that says 'Your edit was saved'. In any event, a link for reporting this would be nice. Still can't find one, so I suppose I'll have to email 'someone' at WP and hope for the best. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 00:21, 23 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. "contact us" is biased towards readers. Why? Well, because editors are already inside the machine: they are familiar with wikimarkup, they are (more) familiar with how wikimarkup works, and they have access to a variety of places for reporting technical problems that are (much of the time) beyond readers. I'd suggest the village pump: I'd also suggest not calling the new features "idiot lights" if you want to be taken seriously. Ironholds (talk) 13:41, 23 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Insert : Thanks for your feedback Ironholds. Sorry for my less than congenial tone. Was just a little frustrated to see 'new features' (frivolous imo) using up resources while experiencing this problem. In any case I'm wondering if all the Url links on the page in question is causing the problems. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 19:42, 23 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry to hear you encountered that problem. :/ This seems to be related to bug 41280, which is currently undergoing repair. In terms of the "contact us", my first thought is that it might be useful to include a section for editors that has links to various help fora (including the VPT) or at least the WP:HD. I second-guessed that, wondering if most editors wouldn't visit "Help", which is the first link under "Interaction". The main issue with that is that "Report a problem" used to link to this page, which hosted a lot more editor-based links and included a link to the 'Help desk'. Somebody wanting to "Report a problem" with a technical issue who follows that link now will land now at Wikipedia:Contact us, which could be a bit frustrating. I'd think we either need to retool the older page or actually offer some guidance to editors who follow the "report a problem" link. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 14:15, 23 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Insert : Hello (again) Moonriddengirl, yes the page needs to be 'retooled' and include a straight-forward link regarding tech/system issues to a page that will be read by people capable of looking into/handling such issues. It's good to hear efforts are being made to fix bugs. In any case, the Bibliography of early American naval history page comes up quickly, however, when an edit is made it takes forever to process and return to view -- even when only one section is being edited. Again, on two occasions when I went to edit/save a section the section was saved but the rest of the page was whipped out. (!) I'm wondering if the changes recently made to the page editor is causing part of the problem -- probably not, but it should be checked also. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 19:42, 23 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

This is because the page you are saving is complex. Everytime you edit it, the server needs to do a lot of work to generate it (sometimes up to a minute yes). However, when it's done that, it is much faster to load the page any following times. You will find the same behavior on any other complex page (for instance the Obama page). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:39, 24 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

All I have to say is that the new design is 1000 times better. I had attempted to make the email addresses easier to find years ago but was reverted. I'm glad that something has finally happened to address this (pun heh). Gigs (talk) 17:36, 23 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! :). Ironholds (talk) 19:59, 23 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

A few tweaks needed:

• at Wikipedia:Contact us - Subjects (and at Wikipedia:Contact us - Readers) there is 1 pipe too many at the start of: {{nospam||photosubmission|wikimedia.org}} (and in {{nospam||info-en-v|wikimedia.org}}) (done)
• please fully protect Wikipedia:Contact us/tabs (done)
• These 3 pages are now unlinked from anywhere (but might still be bookmarked or found via google etc) and should be dealt with somehow:
  • Wikipedia:Contact us/deleted page
  • Wikipedia:Contact us/Warning messages
  • Wikipedia:Contact us/Article problem/File download

Thanks. —Quiddity (talk) 20:16, 25 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I've made most of the changes but haven't dealt with the three pages you mention because I'd rather have them useful somewhere than eliminate them. Thoughts? --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 11:40, 26 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps redirect them? The file download problem is....a massive edge case, to be frank. "deleted page" can go to Wikipedia:Why was the page I created deleted? fairly easily, but warning messages are a hard one :S. I can't believe we haven't generated a page on "what to do if you get an unexpected warning" given the number of queries we see about it, but I can't find one. Ironholds (talk) 15:29, 28 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

We have unanswered quality tickets dating back three months (for non-OTRS agents, these are the more tricky letters generally related to BLP). Should we put some kind of warning especially at Wikipedia:Contact us - Subjects? I wonder if we should encourage those who want speedy resolution to try BLP first. :/ --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 12:04, 26 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

We do need to "discourage" (aka present other options to) people e-mailing us. Ticket numbers have shot dramatically and we're currently having a hard time keeping up. If we continue at this rate, people will become dissatisfied when they receive an increasing number of generic responses. Pointing people anywhere possible, including the BLP noticeboard, etc. would likely only cut the incoming mail down a small fraction, any bit would help. I'll also use this opportunity to invite users to consider volunteering to respond to e-mails. Rjd0060 (talk) 12:49, 28 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Much of the uptick I've seen is misdirected mail - people see an article about (say) a fast-food restaurant, and send us an email to complain about dirty restrooms at a particular location, or they'll send us fan/hate mail intended for an article subject. I'm not sure how to fix that, though, because the link to this page is already "Contact Wikipedia"; because this contact page already says "Wikipedia" at least a dozen times before one reaches any e-mail address, even in the mobile UI; and because the address they have to copy/paste includes "wikimedia.org". - Jredmond (talk) 13:45, 29 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]