Tech Support: Difference between revisions

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* 🫸 Assistance about old operating systems, old software, that is, software which has not security updates (for example we may give assistance in upgrading these environments, but not about these environments themselves).
* 🫸 Assistance about old operating systems, old software, that is, software which has not security updates (for example we may give assistance in upgrading these environments, but not about these environments themselves).


These are just examples about situations out of our control, where our email support is not possible. Just like a building manager usually cannot offer assistance about a broken fridge. Having a broken fridge is important but should be managed through different channels unknown to us.
These are just examples about situations out of our control, where our email support is not possible. Just like a building manager usually cannot offer assistance about a broken fridge. Having a broken fridge is important but should be managed through different channels, channels which are frequently unknown to us, or where we do not have any particular voice.


In any case, you can always, always request a nice [[#Quick Meeting]] and we can do our best commenting your screen sharing, which usually leads to a more useful answer than an email answer.
In any case, you can always, always request a nice [[#Quick Meeting]] and we can do our best commenting your screen sharing, which usually leads to a more useful answer than an email answer.

Latest revision as of 11:41, 22 October 2026

✅ This page contains public tech info. Don't panic! The details in this page are public information which any external technical person could already guess anyway. Publishing this kind of documents bring more known benefits than unknown risks.

We do not believe in security through obscurity. Private documentation tends to a comfort zone leading to worse documentation, worse security management and faster obsolescence. Instead, we are glad to have this document in the open, and thank you for your help to share this document to others, to raise constructive critiques and suggest updates. Further info in the WMCH Tech Strategy#Public as Default on Meta-wiki.

This wiki exists to survive potential outages of other critical services. That is, in case of outages, this documentation can be easily obtained by using the cache in your search engine or Internet Archive.

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 Support Works

You can write an email to the indicated e-mail address. In few seconds/minutes you will obtain an e-mail answer automagically and this just means your "ticket" has been received.

From this moment, you can answer your own ticket anytime via email, adding details, hopefully becoming #The Best Ticket to receive #Faster Support.

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, excluding Italian holidays.

More precisely, the general support availability is:

Monday 16:00-18:00 CEST (2 working hours)
Tuesday 16:00-18:00 CEST (2 working hours)
Wednesday 14:00-18:00 CEST (4 working hours)
Thursday 14:00-18:00 CEST (4 working hours)
Friday 14:00-18:00 CEST (4 working hours)
Saturday No support.
Sunday No support.
Italian public holidays No support.

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, as part of our #Daily Priorities.

This is just our availability, but you can write your own ticket anytime, even outside this period.

Faster Support

A ticket with updated extra details, and recent details, etc. (#The Best Ticket) attracts 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 other unknown persons to help you.
  • The best ticket is direct, short, clear, reproducible
  • The best ticket is actionable, in our #Support Perimeter
  • The best ticket has not a wall of text AI-generated, but describes tangible facts.
  • 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 a new different feature, please open a new completely different ticket.
  • Share what is happening and what should happen instead.

If you are sharing a problem:

  • Share how exactly you arrived to that error.
  • Mention if you successfully reproduced the same problem another time on another device or on a different connection.
  • Copy-paste the full error message.
  • Share a screenshot, thanks for trying with an English interface, and taking a screenshot of the whole page, with the page URL. Make sure it's readable.
  • Mention when you discovered the problem for the first time.
  • Mention if you have found any workaround already.

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 before implementing a feature.

For software adoption in our servers (rare situation):

  • The general requirement is to have a software 100% open source, available in Debian GNU/Linux main or at least fully compatible with it.
  • The software should be based on established frameworks (non-esoteric approaches) using best security practices.
  • The software should be inspected by us or by an external expert for random code quality inspections.
  • We require documentation about how to upgrade the software, especially in case of security problems in one of its dependencies.

Support Perimeter

We will generally help you in detecting if a ticket is inside the support perimeter or not. Anyway, to make it explicit:

In Scope

Activities in scope to receive direct email support:

Borderline Scope

Activities with known borderline scope, where you can still contact us by email and we will do our best to reach the right person:

  • Workstations and laptops provided by WMCH (standard configuration, under our warranty and management): We forward all tickets to User:Ilario who knows the provider and activates assistance.
  • Office 365 and related office-automation services: We are not authorized by Microsoft to offer assistance. We forward most tickets to Moresi, our reseller.
  • https://wikimedia.ch/ - About the main WordPress website we forward most tickets to the Outreach & Communication Lead and the consultant Scandola who has sufficient privileges.
  • https://donate.wikimedia.ch/ - About the donation platform we manage some tickets about the server, and we forward design related tickets to User:Ilario who reaches the website consultant.
  • https://www.dicoAdo.org and https://fr.dicoado.org/ etc. - About DicoAdo we manage some tickets about the server, and we forward other tickets to the Education programme, which eventually activates WikiValley.
  • https://wikimini.org/ - We manage some tickets about the server, and we forward most tickets to Wikimedia Phabricator, Laurent, and eventually activating the consultant WikiValley.
  • https://map.wikimedia.swiss/ - This project is lacking a maintainer. We manage some tickets about the server.
  • https://www.openedu.ch/ - This project is lacking a maintainer. We manage some tickets about the server.
  • https://otrs.wikimedia.ch/otrs/index.pl - We manage some tickets about the server. We forward some tickets to Moresi.
  • https://stats.wikimedia.swiss/ - platform nowadays maintained by inmagik.it, activated on-demand by the Innovation programme.
  • https://community.wikimedia.swiss - platform nowadays maintained by inmagik.it, activated on-demand by the Innovation programme.
  • https://metabase-stats.wikimedia.swiss/ - platform nowadays maintained by inmagik.it, activated on-demand by the Innovation programme.
  • https://stats.wikimedia.global/ - platform nowadays maintained by inmagik.it, activated on-demand by the Innovation programme.
  • https://itwikicon.org - This is a community resource not managed by WMCH, but managed by the volunteer capacity of m:User:Valerio Bozzolan and other Italian users. Specific details in m:ItWikiCon/man#Siti web. For an interesting series of circumstances the human Valerio Bozzolan is also a person activated for WMCH support, so these problems can be managed in working hours, normally. Assistance may continue under volunteer capacity during week-ends in other community channels, like phabricator:tag/itwikicon/.
  • Thunderbird - Configuring a Thunderbird mailbox on your device is in scope but most of the time it's a server-side block where we need to forward your problem to Moresi who manages mailboxes.
  • External open source community project: we will help you with basic triage, to forward your ticket to the right software maintainer, or external bug tracker.

Not in Scope

Anything not mentioned above may be not in scope for email support. Particularly not in scope for email support:

  • 🫸 https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikimediach-it.lists.wikimedia.org/ - this mailing list is managed by Community Managers, not by Tech Support. We will usually delete all automatic notifications regarding this topic as they are always proactively managed by community managers. The list owners to be contacted are mentioned in that page.
  • 🫸 Salesforce.com - We are not authorised by Salesforce go give assistance on their product.
  • 🫸 Assistance on Microsoft Windows operating systems: we are not authorised by Microsoft to offer this assistance and anyway we may have not a computer with a valid license to be used to conduct tests. Sorry.
  • 🫸 Assistance on macOS operating systems: we are not authorised by Apple to offer this assistance and anyway we may have that hardware to conduct tests. Sorry.
  • 🫸 Assistance with local printer on Microsoft Windows or macOS: we have not access to your local network and we cannot do this kind of troubleshooting. Sorry.
  • 🫸 Adobe software. We are not authorised by Adobe to provide support for their closed source software.
  • 🫸 Assistance about old operating systems, old software, that is, software which has not security updates (for example we may give assistance in upgrading these environments, but not about these environments themselves).

These are just examples about situations out of our control, where our email support is not possible. Just like a building manager usually cannot offer assistance about a broken fridge. Having a broken fridge is important but should be managed through different channels, channels which are frequently unknown to us, or where we do not have any particular voice.

In any case, you can always, always request a nice #Quick Meeting and we can do our best commenting your screen sharing, which usually leads to a more useful answer than an email answer.

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 and new answers.
  2. Resolve #The Best Ticket.
  3. Manage self-declared urgent tickets
  4. Manage the oldest ticket (ticket with oldest answer).

Note that a well-curated ticket may become more prioritised than an urgent ticket. That is, if your ticket is really urgent, expand it with as much understandable details as possible, to gain our priority. For a heartless matter of lack of time we must prioritise actionable tickets.

Anyway, ticket management is only a fraction of our daily routine. Here a more comprehensive list of support priorities:

  1. Join a planned online meeting (#Quick Meeting).
  2. Manage organisation last-minute incidents.
    An incident is arguably much more important than a planned meeting, but as we have very limited time, postponing meetings can create much more organisation troubles than managing an unclear incident, which may be a rabbit hole anyway.
  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 and new answers ← here you get the first answer
  6. Resolve #The Best Ticket.
  7. Manage self-declared urgent tickets.
  8. Manage the oldest ticket (ticket with oldest answer).
  9. Do ordinary maintenance on servers. Like, apply security updates.
    Applying security updates is arguably the most important thing ever, but all our servers have SSH blocked, trusted Unix users, only stable software and therefore the risk is usually minimal. We cannot invest time in fixing all potential problems when we have real tickets with real problems. If somebody does not agree, we can hire more sysadmins.
  10. Proactively plan activities.
    For example we can cherry-pick from our huge backlog tracked in Wikimedia Phabricator (phabricator:tag/wmch-infrastructure/).

Support Triage

Pre-requisites for triage:

  • The topic is in scope with our #Support Perimeter. If not, find who should receive the ticket. If yes, find the related project and documentation.
  • Understanding if the problem is clear or not, and if it's reproducible and therefore actionable.
  • Understanding if the ticket needs a meeting instead of investing time to fail to reproduce.

Internal triage guidelines:

High priority
Investing time in this ticket is highly recommended as it's actionable and would create essential benefit to multiple users. If the user self-declared the ticket as urgent, it becomes high priority only when it's clearly actionable.
Medium priority
Investing time in this ticket is recommended to increase non-essential benefit to multiple users. For example there is a workaround.
Low priority
Investing time in this ticket is OK. Probably the benefits are not incredible, or it may be a rabbit hole, so it should not take resources from other tickets.

Support Transparency

If your problem affects a community project, your ticket may be escalated to a public Wikimedia Phabricator task, hoping to attract more attention and faster solutions, and publicly document its resolution in a way useful to you or others.

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.

Costs

💡 To be cost-effective, we recommend to always write #The Best Ticket, which greatly increases our capability to serve you and more users, faster, so everyone waits less, which is more cost-efficient.

Counter intuitive fact: in contrast with many other support systems, opening many "urgent" tickets do not automagically trigger immediate costs here, but declared urgencies may visibly delay the tickets of your coworkers, which is a big indirect cost if you think about it.

Talking about specific costs, this support has a fixed cost. These costs only depend by our weekly #Support Availability agreement, which is fixed.

If you are curating global budget, you may notice support invoices from "ER Informatica" varying from month to month, but it's only related to the amount of weeks naturally present in each month.

Support Team

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

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

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