Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:

Delphine Ménard wrote:

...

crossposting to wikipedia-l as this is an international issue

Hi all,

as a totally non-en person, admin on other wikis and actually working "behind the scenes", I would like to give my view on what I believe is needed, and why an en-admin-only channel and list won't help to the extent that is needed. This is long, but please bear with me.

Let me try to make this more concrete.

OTRS (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OTRS) receives a lot (and here I mean "A LOT") of complaints.

<snip>

I'd like to add that helpdesk-l (which is just a regular old mailing list) suffers from the same problem, except that we have no way of knowing who has answered what until someone else posts a reply to it, and there are a lot less people working on it. At present I have a backlog of over 2300 messages, some of them from December last year. If you are interested please visit http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/helpdesk-l - we mostly use the OTRS messages (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OTRS/en), but Humblefool and Jareth have some other messages at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Humblefool/Helpdesk_boilerplates and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jareth/Boiler respectively.

Maybe we should shut it down and all move to OTRS. I don't know.

I think that something needs to be done to bring the two versions together. It seems clear that people are writing to helpdesk-l, thinking that they are writing to the "site owner's" email address, and asking questions that would be better answered officially. And there are plenty of mails on OTRS that could be better answered by a general help desk.

The only way I can see of bringing them together is on OTRS. Perhaps with two queues, one official mail and one helpdesk.

I don't know, but I do think it's something we should look at.

--sannse