(Disclaimer - I'm a UTRS Developer)
OTRS is not allowed to handle unblocks because of a statement from the WMF legal team. It involves the issue of private data retention, and how OTRS does not have the measures to handle removal of private data.
Your right in the fact that we haven't told administrators specifically to pass anything not related to unblock to OTRS (not that there is an easy way for doing this, the interface is not setup to reply except to anyone but the appealing, plus administrators are not shown the appealing users email address because it's toolserver which is subject to European laws and private data + identification to the foundation.
Besides that though, do we really need to tell administrators to ONLY handle the unblock part and forward ALL unrelated requests to OTRS? Seems excessive, redundant, and more work on us programmers...something that I might have been able to help with a few weeks ago, but it's hard now that i'm in school.
------ DeltaQuad English Wikipedia Administrator and Checkuser
On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 12:16 PM, Thomas Morton < morton.thomas@googlemail.com> wrote:
On 12 September 2012 17:08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 12 September 2012 16:50, Matthew Jacobs sxeptomaniac@gmail.com
wrote:
One problem with that approach is that OTRS is not seen as
representative
of WP; the administrators are. If the admins are widely perceived as
being
dicks (probably because way to many of them behave like dicks a large portion of the time), then OTRS is going to continue to be ineffective
at
changing the perception of WP as unfriendly and more concerned with protecting territory than having accurate information.
I think that's a bit of an inside view. The outside world can't tell an admin from a non-admin, there aren't generally little tags on people's sigs. So the problem is more general dickishness, not specifically admin dickishness.
As far as I can tell, outsiders like to have someone central to approach, e.g. the email address.
(I vaguely understand someone gave Roth/his biographer the wrong answer, i.e. needing a secondary source rather than a referenceable self-statement. That's a different problem, of course.)
- d.
I figured out where; there is also UTRS (note the U) which is a separately maintained support tool (staffed by English Wikipedia admins) for requesting unblocks.
We probably need to look into how people are filtered to these things.
(I also am not sure why we have UTRS over OTRS, and why the participants are not told to pass such issues onto OTRS who are more experienced in handling them).
Tom _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l