BugNow

(English) This is an essay. It expresses the opinions and ideas of some Wikimedians but may not have wide support. This is not policy on Meta, but it may be a policy or guideline on other Wikimedia projects. Feel free to update this page as needed, or use the discussion page to propose major changes.

BugNow means that the staleness of a MediaWiki bug report says nothing on its importance, priority, desirability; that is, on its likelihood to be eventually fixed.

• "Staleness" is defined as the lack of activity (especially comments and patches) on the bug report.
• This is particularly true of enhancement requests, but also of all non-critical bugs (unless the critical bug was caught by the Bug Ness law).

BugNow is an extension of WikiNow, which states «A wiki exists in a perpetual state of nowness».

While bugzilla has some deficiencies compared to a wiki, namely that comments can't be edited and that it's a ViewPoint system (multiple reports can exist on a single topic, even with opposite opinions), the life of MediaWiki is largely similar to the life of the wikis which run on it.

• It grows organically, without a pre-defined plan; no component (except few extensions) is owned exclusively by someone.
• Most (useful) work on it was by volunteers, with all that it implies.
• Most parts of it were produced and then left to live on their own: they are not maintained by anyone other than the community of developers and users at large (with few exceptions).

An inactive bug report is like a stub of an improvement: just because nobody has yet "expanded" it to a (merged) patch, it doesn't mean it's less important or valuable to the (developer) community. One day someone will come and make that stub into a featured article, if you don't delete or hide it.