Tech Support

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Revision as of 19:17, 8 October 2026 by Valerio Bozzolan (talk | contribs)
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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.

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/)

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. Please also copy-paste anything important written in the screenshot, so we don't transcribe it.
  • If you are sharing a problem:
    • Share how exactly you arrived to that error.
    • Mention if you successfully reproduced the same problem another time and on another device.
    • Copy-paste the full error message.
    • Share what is happening and what should happen instead.
    • 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)

Support Perimeter

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

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

In Scope

Activities in scope to receive direct support:

Borderline Scope

Activities with known borderline scope, where you can still contact us 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.
  • 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.
  • 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. Particularly not in scope:

  • 🫸 Salesforce.com (or other Fundraising systems) - 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.
  • 🫸 Assistance on macOS operating systems: we are not authorised by Apple to offer this assistance.
  • 🫸 Assistance with local printer on Microsoft Windows or macOS
  • 🫸 Adobe closed source software. We are not authorised by Adobe to provide such support.

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.

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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