(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.
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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.