Category — Wikipedia

As an administrator on the Wikimedia Foundation’s OTRS system, I’ve been asked a couple times what the admins look for in potential volunteers. I can’t speak for the other admins, but here is what I personally like to see in OTRS volunteers. [Of course, volunteers get bonus points if they can work in an underserved language, with tickets for an underserved project, or at a time of day when other volunteers are asleep.]

Some of this phrasing may apply best to the English Wikipedia, but the general concepts apply to all wikis.

A history of diplomacy

After a while, we start seeing patterns in tickets. One archetype is the “what do you mean X is not notable” message, where somebody connected to a recently-deleted article complains about deletion policy. A good reply to this category of ticket refers to deletion policy without sounding elitist; it gently points the user towards an appropriate remedy but does not give false hope. That sort of answer is tough, but possible, to write, and when I see that a user has been able to achieve this sort of tact on-wiki I get a little excited.

Experience dealing with thorny biographies

This isn’t an absolute requirement, but boy, does it help. Biographies of controversial figures are quite possibly the toughest articles to edit; not only are they high-profile targets for vandals, but they also get a lot of subtle POV added by supporters and critics alike. Somebody who can clean up these articles is just about a shoo-in for OTRS as far as I’m concerned.

An understanding that OTRS access is a responsibility, not a trophy for your user page

If you tell us that you want to help with OTRS, then we really do expect you to help with OTRS. I know OTRS can be challenging and time-consuming and stressful, and I know that it can take a while to really adapt, but don’t waste our time if you’re never even going to log in.

A willingness to step away from templates on user talk pages

Yes, templates are quick; yes, they’re easy; yes, we have plenty of stock answers written in OTRS; yes, I sometimes use templates on-wiki or boilerplates in OTRS. Sometimes, though, a more specific response is necessary. Remember, OTRS is essentially customer service, and as a result quality counts more than quantity.

“Administrator” status on a WMF wiki

It doesn’t have to be enwiki, but the sysop flag shows me that somebody somewhere trusts you. I do check out RfAs as well; they can be handy in spotting potential problems with a particular volunteer.

Discretion, discretion, discretion!

This one should go without saying. People who e-mail the Foundation expect that we keep their personal information private.

If you think you fit these criteria and still want to help, then check out the OTRS volunteering page on meta.

The Times of India has a brief article about the major contributor to the Gujarati Wikipedia and Gujarati Wiktionary. (Gujarati is the language of Gujarat, an Indian state in the northwest of the country.) As the article notes, the primary contributor (Yann Forget, who recently ran for the WMF board ) is not Indian, but French; there’s a charming story about how he came to know the Gujarati language, but I will defer to the article for that.

I’m not intimately familiar with every WMF wiki, but several smaller ones seem to have a similar story as the Gujarati wikis mentioned here — all the work is done by one or two very dedicated individuals, and if that core leaves, the project goes silent. Of course, we can blame much of this on either issues of scale (few speakers), issues of availability (few people with free time and decent Internet connectivity), or some combination of the two. Sadly, those issues are beyond the scope of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The next best hope for some smaller wikis, then, would be emigrants, expatriates, students, and foreigners. The Gujarati wikis, for example, might benefit from Gujarati speakers who live in the UK (especially around London, Leicester, Coventry, and Bradford). To get these people to contribute to Gujarati wikis, though, they first need to know that Gujarati wikis exist. (The Times of India article helps with that, though they could have at least posted a link.) On top of this, UK-based Gujarati speakers need to be nudged to spend more time on the Gujarati wikis than on the English Wikipedia; after all, the Gujarati wikis need a lot more help than en.wp.

It doesn’t help, of course, that the North American press tends to focus on the English Wikipedia. (Seriously, the only non-enwiki mentions I’ve seen lately have been about dewiki’s flagged revisions test; dewiki’s adventures in paper publishing; the ten millionth Wikipedia article, which was posted in huwiki; and an occasional en.wikinews story that “makes it” to the mainstream media.) Whenever possible, we should be reminding the press about the existence of other wikis — and not just the English projects!

Clay Shirky made a long blog post that’s now catching the usual attention from Boing Boing and Smart Mobs et al. In Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody, he discusses the role that sitcoms have played in American leisure time, and how that role is gradually being replaced by more participatory endeavors like Wikipedia.

At the end of the speech/post, he tells a story about a friend’s four-year old daughter, who was watching a Dora video and immediately began crawling around the back of the TV “looking for the mouse”. The assumption of participation is natural for today’s children, he says, and goes on to imply that that assumption will become more widespread.

I’ll confess that I already “look for the mouse”, as it were. In my case, though, it’s the “edit” button on blog posts and news stories and timeshifting capabilities on radio broadcasts and occasionally a conversation (”wait, what did he say?”). It’s a substantial a shock for me to spend an hour cleaning up a dodgy biography of a living person and then find that some of the cited sources are themselves poorly done. My instinct in these cases is to fix the problem myself — {{sofixit}} isn’t just a snarky template, it’s a way of life — and it’s infuriating when I find that I can’t.

Shirky’s smaller point, that Wikipedia editors “find the time” because they aren’t passively consuming content, also rings true for me. Aside from a few (frakking brilliant) shows, I rarely watch television any more. Instead, in my free time, I’m editing a wiki, or playing a video game, or baking, or cooking, or perhaps eventually playing rugby — in short, anything but camping out in front of “Deal or No Deal”. This pattern of behavior has been growing over the past few years, mostly because I’d rather involve my brain and hands and entire body than sit there blankly.

I don’t speak for all wiki editors, though, and I’m curious to know what other Wikimedia-connected folks think about Shirky’s article. Does he have a point? Is participatory culture a natural outgrowth of modern Western society?

As you may have heard, Wikimedia Foundation wikis (including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and Wikibooks) now have the “unified login” feature enabled for users with the sysop bit. UL is the feature formerly known as “single-user login” (SUL), and it allows eligible users of one wiki to log onto any other WMF wiki with the same username and password.

My sysop bit on the English Wikipedia entitled me to set up UL, so I did. I’ve already used it to establish usernames on about a dozen wikis where I had not previously edited, and I’ve used those accounts to do minor BLP-related work. It’s extremely handy to be able to link those contributions back to my established identity on enwiki and metawiki, and to be able to keep watchlists on suspect articles.

One minor complaint: though Luxo’s tool shows all my contributions on a single page (when the toolserver is working, natch), I’d love a tool that shows all my most recent watchlist activity. Perhaps I can create one in my copious free time…

The LA Times’s article about the Wikimedia Foundation’s funding (read it quick before it goes to archive) has reanimated the undead prospect of advertising. It’s one of the oldest topics in Wikipedia circles, and it spawned one of the earliest project forks, and it still won’t die.

Proponents of ads-on-wiki argue that ad content won’t affect editorial decisions. As somebody who’s familiar with the way Wikipedia works, I see some merit in this point; my edits are never affected by the WMF’s revenue streams, and I probably won’t see the ads while I contribute anyway. However, this argument ignores a major counter-argument — the one thing that really irritates me about answering Wikipedia-related e-mail from the public —

Most non-Wikipedians still don’t get how Wikipedia works; they still think that its content is centrally controlled.

We try to let them know that we have neither editorial committee nor review board nor paid authors nor legions of paid staff fixing errors. We send ‘em off to the FAQs and tutorials and Help: pages and tell them “seriously, you can edit”. And yet our OTRS queues are always full of complaints, requests, demands, and generally-confused statements from people who cannot fathom the concept of decentralized content management. (If you need proof of this, I offer the thousands upon thousands of polite requests that we remove images of Mohammed; these correspondents meant well, but e-mailing the handful of active OTRS volunteers won’t change consensus on the English Wikipedia.)

If Wikipedia starts displaying ads next to content, then Wikipedians and geeks will know all about editorial independence. It’s these non-Wikipedians — the ones who don’t know how it all works — who will start seeing implied bias everywhere.