For what it's worth, my opinion (as some who has had access to a fair few OTRS queues for a fair number of years) is that we need more OTRS volunteers. Lots more. At the moment, Wikimedia UK has about a dozen semi-active volunteers for its queue, and we have reasonable response times (48 hours ish). I'm not sure how many the WMF has for the global queues, but to answer every email within, say, 48 hours, would require (in my opinion) at least several hundred volunteers, with several dozen being active daily.
Wikimedia UK did run an OTRS workshop, which was useful, but it turned into more of an OTRS planning weekend, with only a few new people trained to use OTRS. It's a very slow way of training people - it's not just the OTRS software, but customer service skills which are needed. Most Wikipedians can't reliably answer emails from OTRS because they don't have the needed levels of WIkipedia experience, OTRS system experience, and customer service experience. There's the added (necessary) stumbling block of identifying to the WMF.
<radicalthinking> Perhaps OTRS access to the English Wikipedia courtesy queue could be given to English Wikipedia admins who are willing to identify to the WMF? That would free up the experienced OTRS agents to handle the more important 'quality' queue. </radicalthinking>
Richard Symonds Wikimedia UK 0207 065 0992
Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects).
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On 14 November 2012 12:53, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com
wrote:
On 14 November 2012 12:42, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 11:55 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
On 14 November 2012 00:00, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
And there is. Oliver's revamp of the Contact Us pages has made a huge difference, because previously, PR professionals would pass three invitations to fix the article themselves before they would come to
the
OTRS e-mail address.
But there is still room for improvement. OTRS e-mails should be responded to the same day, not up to four weeks later. Is anyone collecting data on how quickly OTRS mails are responded to? Are those data public? If not, there is another potential area for improvement.
What WSQ said.
Also, rethinking the "contact us" route is one thing, encouraging more people to use it early is another. The first may well be helpful, the second in current circumstances is not going to improve things. Some of your questions here are clearly for the WMF.
Charles
For better or worse, Wikipedia is the number one Google link for pretty
much
everything and everyone. With that comes a responsibility to get things right; a responsibility we cannot live up to, given the open editing
system
we've got, and the number of articles and editors we've got.
The trouble is ... we have no power over Google, do we? It is a familiar argument that you are putting.
The actual solutions are (1) to grow the community (and I mean growing it with responsible, well-trained editors). I personally have put time and effort into this in the past, as well as editing many hours a day. And (2) to make it easier for the community to do useful work.
Now the WMF is well resourced, we should really be discussing these matters. The traditional spiralling blame game set off by "case studies" is not the best way, IMX.
Charles
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