User:Mdennis (WMF)

Welcome!

Talk to me!

You can reach me on my talk page. You can reach me by email: Mdenniswikimedia.org liaisonwikimedia.org For general concerns about project matters, contact: infowikimedia.org For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation, see Answers

Hi. I'm Maggie Dennis, the Community Liaison for the Wikimedia Foundation, a position I began in May 2011. Although I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, contributions under this account do not necessarily represent the actions or views of the Foundation unless expressly stated otherwise. For example, edits to articles or uploads of other media are done in my individual, personal capacity unless otherwise stated. Although I am a member of the Legal and Community Advocacy team, I am not a lawyer. The legal team can only represent the Wikimedia Foundation on legal matters, so our team is unable to give legal advice to others, including community members, editors, or contributors. Communications with members of the legal team are not consultations and do not create any confidential relationship.

What I do

Many communities work together

My role is to facilitate communication between staff and all the communuties in every project under the umbrella of the Wikimedia Foundation, to help ensure that both sides of this important equation are pulling together towards our common goal. In addition to setting up a system of communication whereby communities may find and reach out to staff or get information on the Wikimedia Foundation, Answers, I am working on several projects intended to help improve understanding of the communities among staff and of staff among communities.

Among my goals in this capacity are to help volunteers get access to resources and information they need from the Wikimedia Foundation and to ensure that the Wikimedia Foundation remains aware of the character of its communities.

You can read my official job description here. If you aren't sure if I can help you, please feel free to ask. If I can't help you, I will try to direct you to resources or people who can.

I also welcome your feedback and input.

More about me

In my volunteer capacity, you can find me as Moonriddengirl, which is also my username on IRC. A happy reader of Wikipedia, I edited as an IP a few times before deciding finally to register an account there in April, 2007. Not entirely sure how to help out, I pressed "random article" in the toolbar until something came up that looked like it needed fixing. This was the article I found. I didn't exactly know what I was doing (obviously), but I left it better than I found it. The next day I found en:Wikipedia:Cleanup and things progressed from there.

From the beginning, I loved Wikipedia. I love that a diverse group of people from all over the world can come together to build something so incredibly useful. While not without challenges, it is an ambitious and admirable goal, and I have tried to do my bit towards advancing it since 2007. My enthusiasm for our work only increased as I discovered the diversity of our projects. While I have put most of my volunteer time into Wikipedia, I have tried my hand at some of the other projects as well, contributing content to Wikimedia Commons, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, Wikinews, and Wikisource.

I am not in the San Francisco office, but am based on the east coast of the United States with my family. I have previously worked in education, publishing and law (as a paralegal). I understand a lot of living languages a little bit and a few dead languages fairly well, but am all too aware of my shortcomings to claim fluency in anything outside of English. (I am, however, very good at finding translators to help me, so don't let a lack of English fluency on your part prevent your sending me a note!)