[Foundation-l] The Mediawiki 1.18 image rotation bug on Commons and on all Wikimedia projects

[K. Peachey]

On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 12:36 AM, Teofilo <teofilowiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1 - Bug or feature ? It is a bug.
> ... snip ...
> It is somehow intentional, because it seems that the devs have
> suddenly decided that the exif orientation tag should be taken into
> account, while in the past users used had to use other ways to define
> image orientation.
It's been a requested feature for a while, Someone finally got around
to writing it (I believe it needed the Improved metadata handling
backend first) and implementing it, It wasn't a sudden "oh lets write
this and enable it in one day thing", a lot of work went into it and
subsequent testing.

> But even if it is intentional, we should call it a bug, because it is
> annoying to a lot of readers and uploaders whose pictures have been OK
> sometimes for years, and without warning they must suddenly change the
> orientation of their uploaded pictures. What about the pictures whose
> uploaders are no longer active ?
>
> So I hope everybody agrees that it is a bug.
The bug I see is software people used to edit these images didn't fix
the files metadata itself, thus in the end creating this situation

> 2 - The human bug
>
> I think the Wikimedia Foundation should present officially its excuses
> to the readers and active users annoyed by the bug. The excuses could
> be linked from the rotatebot template, so that the concerned users
> could read them.
Excuses? The reasons why it's "broken" have been posted in many
places, Last I checked the said template wasn't protected so anyone
could and pointers to about why its happening.


> The devs should find out what went wrong in the decision process to
> implement the 1.18 version, and try to find preventive measures so
> that big problems of this size do not occur again when a version
> upgrade is done. Is it really OK not to consult the Commons community
> before changing a picture-related feature ?
Nothing much went wrong in the planning of this feature, The metadata
backend was improved, the rotation feature was written, the feature
was tested (and i'm aware of this because I did test it) and the
feature did work as intended.

And why should commons be notified when a MediaWiki core feature is
written, why not ja.wikipedia or en.wikinews? just because commons is
a end user of the software doesn't make it all that special, While yes
the choice to deploy it to the cluster could have been handled
differently it worked from all the testing that was performed (and the
issues that were found from the testing were fixed before it was
pushed out).

Had more end users actually bothered to test the pre release(s) when
they were staged on test. and test2.wikipedia, "issues" like this
might had stood out more prominently so that its feature could have
been considered after being tested on a wider scale.


> 3 - The technical bug : deadline
> ...snip...
> Let us stop asking users to individually tag every wrong picture! Let
> us have some developers create a tool to find wrong pictures and
> rotate them back to their original orientation!
I believe that can be done quiet easily with a DB query, Then it's
just a matter of fixing the metadata attached in the file compared to
actually re-rotating them again.

> We need a deadline. We need to be able to say, In X month's time, all
> pictures will be back to normal.
A time line like that can't be given since there aren't plans to turn
the feature off from my understanding, So this will conciebly be fixed
when RotateBot fixes up the meta data on the files, Someone else does
it, or a extension/feature is written so humans have a interface
on-wiki to manually rotate the files to how they should be.

-Peachey, Signing off on what is now a new day.