Hi, is there a policy / recommendation about Wikimedia employees using wikimedia.org addesses when contributing code and participating in community activities as part of their paid work? Or has this topic been discussed in the past?
-- Quim
On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 4:36 PM, Quim Gil quimgil@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, is there a policy / recommendation about Wikimedia employees using wikimedia.org addesses when contributing code and participating in community activities as part of their paid work? Or has this topic been discussed in the past?
I don't know of any past discussions on it--nor do I know of any policy. In practice, most people with an @wikimedia.org address tend to use it. The one notable exception is people who were volunteers before becoming staff, who may have a prior e-mail address they prefer to use.
-Chad
Le 02/11/12 21:36, Quim Gil a écrit :
Hi, is there a policy / recommendation about Wikimedia employees using wikimedia.org addesses when contributing code and participating in community activities as part of their paid work? Or has this topic been discussed in the past?
I use a personal email dedicated to Wikimedia stuff, sounds to me I can talk about anything this way without embarrassing the Wikimedia Foundation for which I am a contractor.
The wikimedia.org I mostly use it for internal stuff and to write to WMF employees and contractors.
I think there is no need to make any walls between community and wmf. Main difference between volunteers and wmf employees is that they are paid for they work. I see no reason why someone should highlight that fact by using wmf e-mail or (WMF) in SUL (it appears as "showing off" to me more than anything useful) so it seems quite ok to me that they are using personal e-mails and don't try to be more different from volunteers.
On Sat, Nov 3, 2012 at 1:20 PM, Antoine Musso hashar+wmf@free.fr wrote:
Le 02/11/12 21:36, Quim Gil a écrit :
Hi, is there a policy / recommendation about Wikimedia employees using wikimedia.org addesses when contributing code and participating in community activities as part of their paid work? Or has this topic been discussed in the past?
I use a personal email dedicated to Wikimedia stuff, sounds to me I can talk about anything this way without embarrassing the Wikimedia Foundation for which I am a contractor.
The wikimedia.org I mostly use it for internal stuff and to write to WMF employees and contractors.
-- Antoine "hashar" Musso
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
I don't think that using my Wikimedia address (like I am now) is meant to create a wall. I just use it because this is my job and I like to keep my email lives separate. The (WMF) notation is used by employees to notate that they are an employee and usually used for more "official" business. The convention is to use a separate account for personal purposes (like normal editing, instead of something official).
If you think this is a major problem, these questions are more appropriate for wikimedia-l as they are not technical and instead policy :)
On Sat, Nov 3, 2012 at 8:09 AM, Petr Bena benapetr@gmail.com wrote:
I think there is no need to make any walls between community and wmf. Main difference between volunteers and wmf employees is that they are paid for they work. I see no reason why someone should highlight that fact by using wmf e-mail or (WMF) in SUL (it appears as "showing off" to me more than anything useful) so it seems quite ok to me that they are using personal e-mails and don't try to be more different from volunteers.
On Sat, Nov 3, 2012 at 1:20 PM, Antoine Musso hashar+wmf@free.fr wrote:
Le 02/11/12 21:36, Quim Gil a écrit :
Hi, is there a policy / recommendation about Wikimedia employees using wikimedia.org addesses when contributing code and participating in community activities as part of their paid work? Or has this topic been discussed in the past?
I use a personal email dedicated to Wikimedia stuff, sounds to me I can talk about anything this way without embarrassing the Wikimedia Foundation for which I am a contractor.
The wikimedia.org I mostly use it for internal stuff and to write to WMF employees and contractors.
-- Antoine "hashar" Musso
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On 11/03/2012 08:53 AM, Leslie Carr wrote:
If you think this is a major problem, these questions are more appropriate for wikimedia-l as they are not technical and instead policy :)
Fair point. I have continued on the topic of email addresses in code contributions, which is indeed a technical topic.
About the rest, let me just reply to the previous answers:
- Note that Chad and Antoine are saying different things. With the big and still heavily growing Engineering team at WMF it would be useful to have a recommendation for fresh & new fires. I bet even the oldtimers and outsiders will be happier with some guideline in place.
- If there is a wall perceived between WMF employees and the rest then that is a problem regardless of what email addresses people use or avoid. Ubuntu/Canonical and Fedora/RedHat come to mind as good examples of OSS projects where employees and non-employees collaborate and fight ;) regardless of the domain of your email address.
BUT overall I don't perceive such barrier here either. Wikimedia-MediaWiki feel like a healthy community with the usual degrees and side of collaboration, fun, noise and rants. But I agree with Leslie that thee is a better place to discuss this, if needed. Let's continue with the discussion of the code contributions since that one is really on-topic here. Thanks!
-- Quim
On Sat, Nov 3, 2012 at 11:09 AM, Petr Bena benapetr@gmail.com wrote:
I see no reason why someone should highlight that fact by using wmf e-mail or (WMF) in SUL (it appears as "showing off" to me more than anything useful)
My impression of the "(WMF)" accounts in SUL was always that the separation is for legal CYA reasons, to make it one step clearer when someone was making an edit as an employee versus as a "normal" editor. This went along with the disclaimers I saw on the user pages of most employees' accounts (personal and official) that explicitly point out this distinction.
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