I have also added the following alert if there was an issue with getting a response or processing the responses from the API:

That makes sense.

@Lydia_Pintscher is there a place where we can people link to to find out what happened and when it will be back online?

Looking good! One small thing:

In T275629#6869161, @Botoxparty wrote:

I have also added the following alert if there was an issue with getting a response or processing the responses from the API:

It seems words there are switched. "An error occurred while processing your request." ?

In T275629#6869170, @Jan_Dittrich wrote:

That makes sense.

@Lydia_Pintscher is there a place where we can people link to to find out what happened and when it will be back online?

Not yet. I think we should solve this with T275993.

Not yet. I think we should solve this with T275993.

It would make sense to provide some way forward in the error message. I don't know what causes such errors typically. It might be helpful if we add "please try again later" or "have a look at [LINK]" (Based on #9 of the Nielsen Interface Heuristics)

I will offer another suggestion also, the user can directly report the issue to the GitHub project and capture the error messaging from the application.

For example: "Click here to report the issue"

This may be problematic for users who don't have Github but would like to get your thoughts anyway.

This may be problematic for users who don't have Github but would like to get your thoughts anyway.

Yes, I think for non-developers (which, I think are the tool’s target group) this is not very helpful (thought I am not against having the possibility somewhere were it is not drawing attention for the main target group)

In T275629#6870126, @Botoxparty wrote:

I will offer another suggestion also, the user can directly report the issue to the GitHub project and capture the error messaging from the application.

For example: "Click here to report the issue"

This may be problematic for users who don't have Github but would like to get your thoughts anyway.

We shouldn't ask Wikimedians to report issues on github though :/ If we can get the same data to a phabricator ticket that'd be ideal.

Lets split the "other developers should be able to report problems" in a separate ticket; as we should do with "have a error message that provides helpful guidance to problem solving (for non-developers)"

It is possible to create a bug report in Phabricator in a similar way. Would this come under a 'Bug report' or 'Production Error' ?

Review notes:

Change text to An error occurred while processing your request with a report option to Phabricator as a New Task

Isn’t the most likely reason for an error that the WiFi is flaky?

The error could appear if:

• There was a problem connecting to the Wikidata API or ORES API (could be WiFi or the service is down)
• There was a problem parsing the results from the APIs (purely internal to the application)

Can we distinguish the problems? Cause then we could have:

"There was a problem connecting to the service. Please check your internet connection or try again later"

"There was a problem parsing the results from the APIs. This is probably a problem with our code. If you know how, report the issue at [link]"

Yep, we should be able to detect if its an error from a service vs. something internal in the application and have different messaging.

Discussion about error messages to T276236