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

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

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

the volunteers are tasked to handle. The agents who take on this role do

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

public-facing aspects of Wikimedia, the pool of available volunteers

to be smaller than in other areas of the projects. Unfortunately,

can occasionally crop up and take a bit of time to deal with, especially

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

never get cleared (just look at the English Wikipedia’s articles with unsourced statements! [1])-- so it is something I believe almost all of

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

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

you’ll want to during holiday vacations. Pair those longer response times with an increase in tickets because of our hard-working Wikimedians

content and submitting more permissions tickets in their holiday free

and it creates a bit of a backlog. :-) Just as in other areas of our projects, backlogs are inevitable,

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

added 62 new community queue accounts[2] to handle general information

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]

[2] Community queue accounts are OTRS accounts with access to queues that answer general information inquiries about our projects, permissions

photosubmissions tickets. Other types of accounts do not have answer

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(a)gmail.com> wrote: > OTRS does not even bother replying to the consents I send them. Thus

simply _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 11:38 AM, Rjd0060 &lt;rjd0060.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt; 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_statemen… [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. simply _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

On 4 Feb 2015, at 12:19, Krd &lt;krd(a)wikipedia.de&gt; wrote: Am 02/04/15 um 13:14 schrieb Michael Maggs: Yes, I do. That is updated manually, at irregular intervals, applies only to one Commons list, and doesn't provide anything like the information that should I think be available.