Hi Ciell,

This is very surprising to us as organisers of Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine.

We rely on lists obtained from different government institutions (because we don't have one single national list). The VRTS queue wlm-ua@ was the place where we aggregated them.

We think that VRTS queue is exactly fit for the purpose, as it guarantees that, on one hand, all new volunteers have access to previous emails, on the other hand, we can link to the exact email as a source (because sometimes they send documents that were never published before). Basically if VRTS did not exist, we would have probably opted for a similar non-Wikimedia solution. If VRTS does not want to host wlm-ua@ emails, we would probably have to use a non-Wikimedia ticket system, which would costs us volunteer time for no good reason.

The closure of this list was never discussed with us, and statement that it contains only spam is wrong. Of course we did not use them for the last 6 months for obvious reasons (in a normal year we would have already received dozens of emails by this time), but not being able to use it anymore would be a major problem for us.

Should we make a separate request to unlock wlm-ua@ or does your request concerns the entire list of wlx queues?

Thanks

Mykola

24 серпня 2022, 20:17:37, від "Ciell Wikipedia" <ciell.wikipedia@gmail.com>:

Hi everyone,

Some teams from the 'early days' have been using OTRS, now VRTS, to handle incoming emails for their Wiki Loves Monuments competition. VRTS is a closed email system that allows multiple 'agents' access to the incoming emails sent to one email address, and to process these emails as a team. Wikimedia project volunteers also use VRTS to answer emails from readers, they are called the Volunteer Response Team, and have queues and agents in several languages.

Because these WLM-related queues had become inactive and seemingly abandoned, and received only spam, all WLX-queues were closed last January.

I have now started a procedure on the VRT-wiki to open up the general WLM-queue for the international team, since our email address is connected to our queue, and we need to have access to the email address for obvious reasons.

As far as I can see, there has been no consultation of the people working on WLX-competitions (so also Wiki Loves Earth, for instance) and therefore wanted to notify those that had a queue in the past and also might want to have their queue restored.

For those of you that have access to the closed vrt-wiki, my request can be found here. Please join the conversation if the same situation applies to you

If you have moved on to a different system for receiving and sending email about Wiki Loves Monuments and are not using VRTS as a platform anymore, or never used VRTS for WLM, no action is needed.

Best,
Ciell
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