Now that the info-en email address is on the "contact us" pages, the amount of mail is increasing, and we need more help.
We are looking for a long-standing contributor with a good knowledge of the English Wikipedia and its policies and procedures. You should also have a working knowledge of other projects. You need to have infinite patience to reply to the same newbie questions time after time, and a friendly and helpful style of writing. Most important is the ability not to laugh at people who write to tell us we have a massive security hole - an edit link on each page!!!11!.
Being active on IRC is an advantage - it makes a real difference to be able to talk over the tricky ones sometimes.
Pay is at the usual Wikipedia rate of lots of good feeling and all the cookies you can eat.
Hopefully there will be a big rush of applicants for this wonderful job, and I will ask those volunteering to answer a few mails to see if you have the style we are looking for. Jimbo will have the final say though.
Please mail me directly rather than replying to the list if you are interested.
Thanks,
sannse
p.s. I lied about the cookies
On 6/15/05, sannse sannse@tiscali.co.uk wrote:
Pay is at the usual Wikipedia rate of lots of good feeling and all the cookies you can eat.
p.s. I lied about the cookies
I only saw the PS after I hit the reply button. I was going to file a complaint that I never got any cookies. Geez, how a dream can be shattered in a single sentence...
On a more serious tone, a good knowledge of how to deal with hardly English speakers is also a good asset.
And I will just add that the email help desk policy is that your real name is displayed, rather than your nickname in Wikipedia, although you send from a wikimedia address and your personal address is not there. Thought you should know.
Cheers,
Delphine
On Wed, 2005-06-15 at 13:34 +0200, Delphine Ménard wrote:
On 6/15/05, sannse sannse@tiscali.co.uk wrote:
Pay is at the usual Wikipedia rate of lots of good feeling and all the cookies you can eat.
p.s. I lied about the cookies
I only saw the PS after I hit the reply button. I was going to file a complaint that I never got any cookies. Geez, how a dream can be shattered in a single sentence...
Maybe an issue the Mediawiki developers can help with: there should be a strictly personal page for helpdesk people where they can get as many cookies as they want.
are you sure no cookies are possible? not even if you're attending wikimania?
:)
Finne
On 6/15/05, Guaka guaka@no-log.org wrote:
On Wed, 2005-06-15 at 13:34 +0200, Delphine Ménard wrote:
On 6/15/05, sannse sannse@tiscali.co.uk wrote:
Pay is at the usual Wikipedia rate of lots of good feeling and all the cookies you can eat.
p.s. I lied about the cookies
I only saw the PS after I hit the reply button. I was going to file a complaint that I never got any cookies. Geez, how a dream can be shattered in a single sentence...
Maybe an issue the Mediawiki developers can help with: there should be a strictly personal page for helpdesk people where they can get as many cookies as they want.
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Delphine Ménard wrote:
On 6/15/05, sannse sannse@tiscali.co.uk wrote:
Pay is at the usual Wikipedia rate of lots of good feeling and all the cookies you can eat.
p.s. I lied about the cookies
I only saw the PS after I hit the reply button. I was going to file a complaint that I never got any cookies. Geez, how a dream can be shattered in a single sentence...
I promise, if we ever meet in person, I will make all your cookie dreams come true ;)
On a more serious tone, a good knowledge of how to deal with hardly English speakers is also a good asset.
And I will just add that the email help desk policy is that your real name is displayed, rather than your nickname in Wikipedia, although you send from a wikimedia address and your personal address is not there. Thought you should know.
Although this is the norm on OTRS, I use a real-sounding nick there rather than my real name. I was not happy with being so public (I have quite a distinctive name) so Jimbo agreed that I could become "Lisa Carter" for the purposes of answering this mail. I'm sure a similar arrangement can be made for anyone else as paranoid and suspicious as me ;)
I've a nice little pile of mugs^Wgenerous volunteers now - I will be talking to Jimbo and elian about this as soon as I see them. Thanks folks
--sannse
I would be willing to help out with the emails. I have been a en.wikipedia contributor for a couple of years, am an administrator, and spend most of my life in front of a computer ;) Love the chance to help out a bit more.
-Matt (User:Morven)
I think that we should have pre-composed responses to the most common questions.
It may seem less personal, but it would certainly be easier and take less work.
Rather than writing to Jim Doe "Thank you for pointing that out. Actually, Wikipedia is a.... and that's the whole point", and then to Jane Smith "Jane, we really appreciate your concern. However," and then to Joe Johnson "Joe, thanks for letting us know. Actually...", we can write consistently "Dear Name, Thanks for really appreciate letting us point concern that know. Actually, Wikipedia is a however."
Mark
On 14/06/05, sannse sannse@tiscali.co.uk wrote:
Now that the info-en email address is on the "contact us" pages, the amount of mail is increasing, and we need more help.
We are looking for a long-standing contributor with a good knowledge of the English Wikipedia and its policies and procedures. You should also have a working knowledge of other projects. You need to have infinite patience to reply to the same newbie questions time after time, and a friendly and helpful style of writing. Most important is the ability not to laugh at people who write to tell us we have a massive security hole - an edit link on each page!!!11!.
Being active on IRC is an advantage - it makes a real difference to be able to talk over the tricky ones sometimes.
Pay is at the usual Wikipedia rate of lots of good feeling and all the cookies you can eat.
Hopefully there will be a big rush of applicants for this wonderful job, and I will ask those volunteering to answer a few mails to see if you have the style we are looking for. Jimbo will have the final say though.
Please mail me directly rather than replying to the list if you are interested.
Thanks,
sannse
p.s. I lied about the cookies _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On 6/15/05 10:05 AM, "Mark Williamson" node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
I think that we should have pre-composed responses to the most common questions.
It may seem less personal, but it would certainly be easier and take less work.
Rather than writing to Jim Doe "Thank you for pointing that out. Actually, Wikipedia is a.... and that's the whole point", and then to Jane Smith "Jane, we really appreciate your concern. However," and then to Joe Johnson "Joe, thanks for letting us know. Actually...", we can write consistently "Dear Name, Thanks for really appreciate
Hmmm..if only there was a page that listed commonly asked questions and gave responses...we could call it the CAQ (Commonly Asked Questions).
On 15/06/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
I think that we should have pre-composed responses to the most common questions.
We do have some template replies, but there a huge range of queries every day and boilerplate responses would not be helpful for a lot of them.
Another point to note is that it would be helpful if volunteers to this were also willing to fix the articles that people write to us about. Although we tell them they can edit Wikipedia themselves, there's no guarantee they'll do that so the problems they raise in the emails often need to be fixed, or at least mentioned on the article's talk page.
Angela.
Angela wrote:
Another point to note is that it would be helpful if volunteers to this were also willing to fix the articles that people write to us about. Although we tell them they can edit Wikipedia themselves, there's no guarantee they'll do that so the problems they raise in the emails often need to be fixed, or at least mentioned on the article's talk page.
Absolutely. While casual visitors may find their right to make such changes counter-intuitive this excuse should not be available for the regular users with enough experience to respond to complaints.
The people who regularly nominate articles for cleanup would do well to spend time doing cleanup instead of creating work for everyone else.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
The people who regularly nominate articles for cleanup would do well to spend time doing cleanup instead of creating work for everyone else.
I think both have a purpose. I've cleaned up (and written) hundreds (if not thousands) of articles, but I don't always have time or expertise to fix something I stumble across. IMO, if I find a new page that is clearly grossly subpar, it's better to at least tag it than to completely leave it as is. Not tagging it often leads to really terrible non-articles not being discovered for months, since once stuff gets past NewPages and RecentChanges, it gets buried amidst 500,000+ articles. (And yes, I've found untouched stuff from 3-4 months ago when hitting RandomPage).
-Mark
Many thanks to all those who replied. We decided to choose the first two who applied as there were so many good people to choose from. We may expand the team further in the future (almost certainly if the workload keeps going up) but for now, we have added JamesF and Mindspillage.
Thanks again to everyone who volunteered
--sannse
sannse wrote:
Now that the info-en email address is on the "contact us" pages, the amount of mail is increasing, and we need more help.
We are looking for a long-standing contributor with a good knowledge of the English Wikipedia and its policies and procedures. You should also have a working knowledge of other projects. You need to have infinite patience to reply to the same newbie questions time after time, and a friendly and helpful style of writing. Most important is the ability not to laugh at people who write to tell us we have a massive security hole - an edit link on each page!!!11!.
Being active on IRC is an advantage - it makes a real difference to be able to talk over the tricky ones sometimes.
Pay is at the usual Wikipedia rate of lots of good feeling and all the cookies you can eat.
Hopefully there will be a big rush of applicants for this wonderful job, and I will ask those volunteering to answer a few mails to see if you have the style we are looking for. Jimbo will have the final say though.
Please mail me directly rather than replying to the list if you are interested.
Thanks,
sannse
p.s. I lied about the cookies _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org