Tech Support

Your ticket is here somewhere! :)

This page have details about support@wikimedia.ch - that is, the technical support mailbox of Wikimedia CH.

New: after you have filed a ticket, you can also book a #Quick Meeting.

How does It Work

You can write an email to the indicated e-mail address. You will obtain an answer automagically in minutes. This means your "ticket" has been created.

You can answer your own ticket anytime, adding details, hopefully becoming #The Best Ticket.

Or, you can wait an answer, which will arrive only during our #Support Availability.

Support Availability

Since mid-2026, support is generally available every afternoon, of every business day, between 16:00-18:00 CEST, excluding Italian holidays.

More precisely, the general support availability is:

Monday	16:00-18:00 CEST
Tuesday	16:00-18:00 CEST
Wednesday	14:00-18:00 CEST
Thursday	14:00-18:00 CEST
Friday	14:00-18:00 CEST

This means, each working day, tech support can produce an average of maximum ~3 working human-hours, at maximum.

Note that only a fraction of this availability is invested in answering support tickets.

Daily Priorities

During our very limited availability we want to maximise our throughput, that is, we want to close as many activities as possible, so, we proposed this heartless list of priorities, from the most important:

1. Triage new tickets.
2. Resolve #The Best Ticket.
3. Manage self-declared urgent tickets.
4. Manage oldest tickets.

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Anyway, ticket management is only a part of our daily routine. Here the more comprehensive list of priorities, from the most important:

1. Join a planned online meeting (#Quick Meeting).
2. Manage organisation emergencies (disaster recovery, etc.)

   An emergency is indeed more important than a planned meeting, but it's not a good reason for not joining a short meeting: it may take more time to postpone a meeting and explain the emergency than joining the meeting.

3. Manage a planned development.

   Usually also tracked in Wikimedia Phabricator phabricator:tag/wmch-infrastructure/. Doing planned developments is arguably less important than triaging new tickets, but otherwise we never implement the requested developments.

4. Cleaning up spam tickets.

   Cleaning spam is arguably less important than answering tickets, but otherwise we do not even see the real tickets.

5. Triage new Tickets
6. Resolve #The Best Ticket.

   Answer detailed tickets is arguably less important than answering self-declared "urgent" tickets, but urgent tickets are not always actionable and may be rabbit-holes consuming unclear amount of time, in contrast of the best ticket.

7. Manage self-declared urgent tickets.
8. Manage oldest tickets.
9. Check and apply security updates in servers (which is arguably the most important thing ever, but we cannot invest time in fixing potential problems, if we have real problems tracked down in tickets)
10. Proactively plan a short activity from Wikimedia Phabricator (phabricator:tag/wmch-infrastructure/)

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With triage, we just mean:

• Understanding if a ticket is clear or not, if it's actionable or not, and by who.
• Understanding if the topic is in scope with our #Support Perimeter.
• Understanding if the ticket needs a meeting instead of investing time to fail to reproduce.

Faster Support

A ticket with updated extra details, and recent details, attract faster support.

That is, while waiting for our availability, we kindly recommend to proactively review your own ticket and consider what extra information an external technician might need from you in order to better understand your topic, how to reproduce your situation, etc. - and you are encouraged to share these extra details anytime by replying this ticket, go get faster support.

You can express extra urgency anytime, by replying to your own ticket and saying so. Anyway, please do not share urgency more than once each working day. Thanks!

The Best Ticket

• The best ticket enables the other person to help you.
• The best ticket is direct, short, clear, and actionable. That is, who reads the ticket has nothing preventing an action.
• If you discover new details to be shared, feel free to reply to your own ticket, anytime.
• If you have already shared too many details, sharing a final a quick summary brings extra points.
• If you discover a new different problem (or feature), please open a new completely different ticket.
• If you are sharing a screenshot, thanks for including the whole page, and the page URL.
• If you are sharing a problem, share how exactly you arrived to that error, what is happening and what should happen instead.
• If you're suggesting a feature, rather than suggesting a technical change feel free to share your exact final goal (the "Five whys" approach documented in Wikipedia is usually a simple but excellent tool)

Support Perimeter

In general, we can give support only to resources listed in our Infrastructure/Inventories and with the column marked as "Tech Support".

For example, for Microsoft products, we will deliver all tickets to Moresi, who is the Microsoft service provider for WMCH.

Support Transparency

If your problem affects a community project, your ticket may be escalated to a Wikimedia Phabricator task, hoping to attract more attention and faster solutions.

phabricator:tag/wmch-infrastructure/

Support is Delicate

Having a single support inbox for such a wide range of issues (on more than ~23 websites and more than 10 servers), managed by just one part-time person, is truly challenging. Thanks for your understanding.

After every weekend, we frequently even end up with all the urgencies from Thursday evening and Friday emergencies, plus possible incidents discovered on Monday that causes more Monday tickets, plus activities scheduled on Monday therefore rescheduled Tuesday, plus 20-50 spam week-end spam emails, plus 5-10 internal error emails from ZNUNY mailserver timeouts, plus planned meetings, plus external attacks, plus external denial of service caused by indiscriminate AI aggressive crawlers.[1]

That is why your help is crucial in sharing as much details as possible in your ticket, until the management of the support ticket system stabilises as WMCH evolves.

Support Team

Since mid-2026, the Tech Support Team is composed by:

• Valerio Bozzolan (for WMCH) - activated by Ilario Valdelli (WMCH) under the Innovation programme

This means, at the moment, only one person usually works on support, that is, only one ticket can be worked at the same time during our availability.

Please do not reach these users in private to get support. Write to support instead.

Quick Meeting

To speed-up your ticket, feel free to pick a slot to have an online meeting:

https://nextcloud.wikimedia.ch/apps/calendar/appointment/k4XXkpcGNApP

Thanks again! Your Wikimedia CH Support Team