Well - regarding permission-commons ques the current problem with mass upload agreements is Common's regulation that ticket-templates has to be added by OTRS volunteers themselves, except, when you are using GLAM tool, but GLAM tool is tailored for really huge mass uploads as it requires lot of preliminary preparations. So, there is no good path for mid-size mass uploads - say from 10 till 100-500 files.
This is incredibly boring job to add 100 templates to 100 files. There are some semiautomatic tools for this - but it still requires small programming and/or direct personal assistance - with at least 2 clicks per file. So OTRS volunteers - when they see agreements for for example100 pictures - are avoiding this, becasue handing this means not only aswering for E-mail but also 100 boring edits...
I was addressing the issue on OTRS e-mail list, around a year ago, but the answer was, that this is not the problem. But in fact - whenever there is such semi-mass-upload agreement - you can observe that OTRS volunteers are avoiding answering them.
2015-02-04 11:46 GMT+01:00 Andrea Zanni zanni.andrea84@gmail.com:
Thanks Ryan for the clarification. My question is: what could we ask, as a community, to the WMF, o to chapters? Is there some tool/task/workflow that could receive help from Wikimedia? Maybe a new software, or some trusted agents in key position, or something else. What could speed up the volunteers work?
Aubrey
On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 11:38 AM, Rjd0060 rjd0060.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
James,
I realize your tickets were already resolved but I thought I'd take a moment to clarify the issues that cause the delays in response.
The Wikimedia Volunteer Response Team ("OTRS") relies on the generous
work
of hundreds of volunteers from all over the world to handle hundreds of thousands of e-mails each year.
The scope of these tickets range from vandalism reports or technical
issues
to problems with biographies of living people and other generic edit requests, and dozens of other categories. A large percentage of the overall tickets received are "permissions" tickets -- e-mails used to verify the release of content on Wikimedia sites, typically from third parties.
Like every project that Wikimedians work on, there are various things
that
the volunteers are tasked to handle. The agents who take on this role do
so
in addition to their existing editing activities, often at the cost of their own free time. Due to the trust and patience required to handle
these
public-facing aspects of Wikimedia, the pool of available volunteers
tends
to be smaller than in other areas of the projects. Unfortunately,
backlogs
can occasionally crop up and take a bit of time to deal with, especially
in
the more complicated e-mails (like BLPs), that can take up to an hour to process. It happens on every large Wikimedia project -- where some
backlogs
never get cleared (just look at the English Wikipedia’s articles with unsourced statements! [1])-- so it is something I believe almost all of
us
can relate to in one way or another.
We had very good queue levels for much of 2014, but began noticing an increase in permissions and general information tickets (specifically in the English language) around the end of the year. Unfortunately, the end
of
the year typically shows higher than usual response times, likely because of volunteer free time. While OTRS agents are very dedicated, answering tickets can be stressful at times, so it’s not typically the type of
thing
you’ll want to during holiday vacations. Pair those longer response times with an increase in tickets because of our hard-working Wikimedians
adding
content and submitting more permissions tickets in their holiday free
time,
and it creates a bit of a backlog. :-)
Just as in other areas of our projects, backlogs are inevitable,
especially
in the more mundane and tougher areas. However, our dedicated pool of volunteers works diligently to clear these backlogs when they come up. While, again, it’s a tough job that’s not for everyone, we always welcome new applicants. Actually, we're continuously adding new agents. In 2014
we
added 62 new community queue accounts[2] to handle general information
and
permissions inquiries. Additionally, our agent retention is better - we lost about half as many agents in 2014 as we did in 2013. But finally, if you really want to help with the backlogs, we’re always looking for great new team members. Feel free to throw up an application on [[m:OTRS/Volunteering]] if you think you’d make a good agent and we’ll be happy to review it.
Basically, OTRS is tough job that runs into backlogs just like any other part of Wikimedia. However, we’re continuously working to add more agents and clear those backlogs as soon as they start.
I hope this helps clarify the current issues.
Ryan // User:Rjd0060
(OTRS admin)
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:All_articles_with_unsourced_statement...
[2] Community queue accounts are OTRS accounts with access to queues that answer general information inquiries about our projects, permissions
and/or
photosubmissions tickets. Other types of accounts do not have answer
these
tickets, but instead have access to a smaller subset of queues, such as those related to the Foundation (e.g., donations), chapters, or advanced rights on the projects (e.g., oversight, stewards). See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OTRS/Access_policy#Community_queues for more information.
On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 11:52 PM, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
OTRS does not even bother replying to the consents I send them. Thus
the
images I have received releases for get deleted. Going forwards I am
simply
uploading to En Wikipedia. Not ideal but not sure what the solution is.
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine www.opentextbookofmedicine.com _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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