Amusing Mobile Feedback

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Help!“We have just launched this site… please send us your feedback!” When we added these words to the top of 1/5th of the mobile pages, we began a barrage of feedback to the mobile list. So much so that, we had to make a second list just for this kind of feedback. That certainly wasn’t unexpected and my fiancee, Michael Lintorn, has been fantastic about responding. He’s spending his summer answering about 150 messages to the list a day, ensuring that everyone knows that we are actually human and making sure we get all the weird bugs taken care of.
What I didn’t expect, was how many people absolutely, totally misunderstand the link. I would change the link to be more clear, but I’m not really sure how I can make it more clear without it just being a list of caveats the average person wouldn’t read.
However, the silver lining here is that we get a whole bunch of really hilarious messages where people are obviously not understanding A) What Wikipedia is, or B) What planet we are on.
Enjoy.

Hey I’m looking for a pic of the rood inverse with the inscriptons around it, if you can e-mail it to me I would really appreciate it. Thanks guys and keep up the good work

Oh, yes sir! We’ll get right on that.

Hey razor.I was just watching some boxing on tv and I thought about you.do you remember me from the time you bought your rv at independence rv in florida.my name is ### and I was the one who got your rv ready.as I remember I think you came back and traded 2 or 3 times in a row.you asked me if I liked working on rv’s and I made the joke. I guess it beats getting the crap beat out of you for a living.haha.any how I hope that large family of yours is well and your invention works out.take care

Razor, if you are out there. Please contact this person. He misses you.

This is great can you tell me where I can buy the whole series

Oh, its on Aisle 3.

Can’t find def for bafoone

Try another spelling.

Love your show. My wife & I watch every weekday.
Thanks for being a great great great great great American!

Yes, in my spare time I’m *am* a TV producer. Its one of the many hats we all wear at Wikimedia.

Best of luck this Friday.
Bob the window cleaner (just a normal guy like you)

Us regular guys have to stick together. And thanks for the goodluck wish. I could use it!

Why did he get Fired now will watch only ###LOCAL#STATION### news

Local news is the WORST. Politics, politics, politics.

I was looking up some health related stuff and would have preferred to
have a way of not being forced to see it. For example, when you go to
the page about jaundice, you imediately see a picture which looks
creepy when it fills up the small screen…

I do agree that all gross diseases should only have pretty people in the example pictures.

I would like to know more about the high sugar content caused by
cortisone injections and whether  or not it’s reversable by diet. The
cortisone is for arthritis which many people suffer from. I was hoping
to get a more detailed info pack for this with diet tips. I only had
three large doses but it has raised my sugar very high and I want to
counteract it. Would be glad if some of this was on site as I know you
did mention cortisone. However the site was a bit involved and I could
not really decide into wwhich category I was fitting!!! Thanks though
for a generally helpful site

Our medical staff will be back to you with this advice shortly.
Anyhow, I hope some of these made you smile!
Hampton Catlin, Mobile Development Lead

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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While all of these responses are amusing, I’d like to point out that (at least on my Palm Pre) all Wikipedia searches were resulting in pages with /nothing/ but the words you mentioned. It appears this has been remedied but for a time it was most distressing! Dunno if this had been reported or not, as I was too lazy to do so myself.

…why, oh why did I read
“now will watch only ###LOLCAT#STATION### news”
and spent a few minutes wondering what it could possibly be ?
—-
About randomness, at frwiki, we also sometimes have people posting to football club talk page looking to be hired 🙂 amongst many other oddities

Hampton, Yesterday the site was down, which happens, I guess, but I couldn’t get it to switch back to Wikipedia non-mobile. If possible, you should add a link on your error page that changes the cookie to use the regular version. Or you should expect me to call you up at random times of the day. “Hampton, it’s Carl. Real quick, you work for Wikipedia–what was the deal with the Kitkun Bay aircraft carrier my grandfather was on? Was that a real aircraft carrier or, like, a some kind of mini-aircraft carrier? Did it help sink the Yamato? If so,… Read more »

I was on the list when all those replies were coming in. Some were absolutely priceless.

hey, I got a reply today from your hardworking fiancee as well, Hamptom. I thought my feedback was of the non-random variety: I’m interested in links to the foreign language pages on the mobile site.
But, I have to admit, I didn’t know the big W opened up a menu on the mobile pages. Thought it was just where they buried the treasure in “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”

*Hamptom –> Hampton. Sorry.

The Wikimedia OTRS (Email support) team gets these kind of emails quite often. The German section has a “Best of OTRS” page http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOOTRS

[…] Misguided responses to Wikipedia Mobile’s feedback requests […]

when will we be able to edit on the mobile skin of wikipedia on our phones???????
please post the answer on twitter

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