[Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people

[jim at scrubnugget.com]

Thomas Dalton wrote:
> I may be missing it due to not speaking Dutch, but it doesn't seem to
> be linked to from anywhere... Does it include the details of the
> article and revision in the default text? That's a key feature for
> what I'm suggesting.

>From any nlwiki page, click "Hulp en contact" (or the language-appropriate
equivalent of "Help") in the sidebar, then "Help:Contact met Wikipedia" at
the bottom of the page, then "contactformulier" near the middle of the
page.  The form is very simple - subject, name, reply address, and message
body - but it now generates a significant portion of the traffic in the
info-nl queue.

As it's written now, the contact form probably wouldn't work for enwiki:
it would condense most English-language traffic to a single address.  In
the past, a single incoming address has caused us to lose urgent BLP-ish
messages in the larger flood of vandalism reports and reference-desk
questions; this is precisely why we have several contact addresses for
English-language issues.  If we could have distinct forms for different
types of issue, though, or if we could have the end user select the
relevant queue from a list, then that form might be an option for enwiki.

I agree that the current enwiki contact page is definitely less than
optimal.  During an odd lull a while back, I started a rewrite at
[[w:en:Contact us/temp]]; the main ideas were to defer to the FAQs and
remind people that most problems can be solved on-wiki.  (I had to set the
rewrite aside when OTRS traffic picked up again.)  The temp page is
currently open for editing if anybody would like to contribute.

Finally: even with a huge backlog, I would never *think* of putting a
rookie OTRS volunteer on the Quality queue (which handles BLPs and similar
complaints from businesses).  That would be exceptionally cruel, like
throwing a non-swimmer in the deep end of the pool.  IMHO, it's far better
to have newbies start off in the easier queues, like Vandalism, and move
on to Quality as they develop a feel for the work.

--
Jim Redmond
[[User:Jredmond]]