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Wikipedia:Volunteer Response Team

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"WP:OTRS" redirects here. For the noticeboard where you can ask OTRS volunteers questions, see Wikipedia:OTRS noticeboard.
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The Volunteer Response Team is a group of volunteers who answer most email sent to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. The team uses Open-source Ticket Request System ("OTRS") software to organize and process the email that it receives. OTRS is often used as a short-hand term to refer to the team itself.

The OTRS software provides an organized way for multiple people to categorize and respond to third party emails, so the team can be interpreted as a kind of Wikimedia-wide customer service email team. Volunteers must have an exceptionally good track record on Wikimedia projects, and may be required to provide personal identification to the Wikimedia Foundation.

There are several different email addresses that reach the volunteer team. If you have been advised to "contact OTRS" and were sent here, please read Wikipedia:Contact us for further advice, including suggestions for which email address to write to for particular problems as well as other possible ways to resolve your issue.

Team activities

The volunteer response team receives a wide variety of emails:

Most requests relating to usual editorial matters are referred to normal on-wiki processes. Volunteers may provide more active assistance for defamation and privacy issues and for requests from the subjects of articles. The volunteer response team also acts as a point of contact for third parties unfamiliar with Wikipedia's editing process, who wish to notify Wikipedia about an article error or concern.

User right (global)

All editors with access to the OTRS permissions and/or photosubmission queue are given the global OTRS members user right. The user right itself only includes the permission to read pages, held by every IP and user account. The user right exists for Special:AbuseFilter/642 which logs edits that add or modify an OTRS permission template to a file page or article talk page. Only some users who have access to the permissions and/or photosubmission queue have the user right so far, so the log is not accurate as yet.

Users, tickets and queues

See meta:OTRS for the main page, and a more complete list of queues and publicly listed volunteers

Tickets and queues

Incoming email requests in Wikimedia's OTRS system are known as "tickets" and are identified by a "ticket number". Emails are categorized on arrival by language and type of content to allow for improved service.

Team members are given access to designated categories of email (known as "queues") at the determination of the OTRS administrators. There are three main sets of queues which directly relate to the English Wikipedia:

  • info-en, which handles general inquiries sent in the English language, including most copyright issues. This is a general set of queues, so tickets here may be related to any Wikimedia Foundation project in any language.
  • info-en (Quality), a subset of info-en which has a more narrow membership relative to info-en. 'Quality' deals almost exclusively with sensitive tickets from subjects of articles.
  • Permissions, which handles tickets from copyright holders granting the Wikimedia Foundation permission to reuse text, images, or other media.

Membership of the volunteer response team

Team membership is under the direct supervision of the OTRS administrators (themselves approved by the Wikimedia Foundation), to individuals across all projects sufficiently trusted to give courteous and knowledgeable replies. Volunteer team work frequently involves being willing to work on difficult, sensitive, and at times hostile messages sent to Wikimedia; being sensitive to the needs of outsiders; and having exemplary discretion.

The complete list of user accounts on the OTRS system can be found at Meta-Wiki. If you have any doubts that an editor who is referencing an OTRS ticket in an edit may not be an OTRS respondent, please feel free to contact one of the OTRS administrators listed below via email to clarify, providing a link to the action which referenced the OTRS ticket in the summary.

New volunteers are welcome to apply at meta:OTRS/Volunteering. Other users are also encouraged to comment publicly or privately on applications listed on that page. The OTRS administrators will discuss all applications privately and decide whether to accept or decline the nomination at their own discretion.

List of volunteer response team leaders (OTRS administrators)

Note: For the complete list of OTRS administrators (including those not active on English-speaking issues) please see meta:OTRS#Administrators.

Emufarmers · Mailer Diablo · Sphilbrick

Privacy and team members on the English Wikipedia

Team members deal with private information, and the Wikimedia Foundation's privacy policy specifically prohibits release of that information without explicit permission from the original provider of that information. Therefore, when inquiring about a specific OTRS ticket, they may only be able to provide vague information (or no information) to protect the privacy of the individual submitting the request.

Team members must abide by the policies and guidelines of the individual wikis when carrying out tasks on those wikis related to requests received via the OTRS system. Most team actions on the English Wikipedia will be enacted under the Wikipedia:Copyrights and Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons policies, and will have protection from immediate reversion because of this.

Dispute resolution

Disagreeing with a team-related edit

The volunteer team requests that you contact the editor responsible prior to reverting. OTRS agents are not above English Wikipedia policies and do not have any specific editorial control. However, the agent may be in possession of confidential information relevant to the action that should not be published in a public forum.

If you disagree with an edit or logged action that you believe may be related to an OTRS ticket, you may initiate normal editorial review procedures as you would with any editor. Additionally you have the option to:

  1. Contact the editor who made their change, preferably by email, otherwise on their user talk page. Private correspondence may provide more latitude for the team member to discuss privacy-related issues in confidence.
  2. If you disagree with the resulting view and would like a second opinion you have the following options:

And again, remember that all actions are subject to Wikipedia guidelines, policies, and practices.

Disagreeing with a user's team membership

The volunteer response team is a cross-wiki effort and acts as a resource for all Wikimedia projects. As such, membership in the volunteer response team is not under the jurisdiction of any one particular Wikimedia wiki, its community, or its Arbitration Committee, but is purely determined by the OTRS administrators. Team members are accountable to the OTRS administrators for their actions when using the system. Because the system handles such a wide variety of emails, being sanctioned on one Wikimedia wiki does not automatically terminate users' access to the OTRS system; however, OTRS administrators will look at the underlying reasons for any sanctions to see whether the actions that led to them are incompatible with what is required from a respondent, and come to a consensus decision from that analysis. If you wish to bring any such issue or sanction to the attention of the OTRS administrators, please email one of the administrators listed above. If you have concerns about a pending volunteer nomination currently listed at meta:OTRS/Volunteering, please leave a comment in the relevant section highlighting the reasons for your concern or speak to an OTRS admin.

See also

OTRS Wikimedia.svg
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