Volunteer Response Team/Volunteering
Volunteer Response Team
For prospective volunteers
The Volunteer Response Team (VRT) always welcomes new volunteers to help with answering tickets. Nonetheless, to ensure the quality of service and given the confidential nature of the work, there is a selective application procedure.
The VRTS administrators are a group of highly-trusted and experienced volunteers who assess your application to join the VRT. When assessing an application, they familiarize themselves with your work on the Wikimedia projects to ensure that you are suitable as an addition to the VRT. It therefore takes some time before you receive a response regarding your application.
- How do I volunteer?
If you are interested in volunteering, please read VRT/Recruiting for information about what the job entails. Feel free to join #wikimedia-vrtconnect to ask any questions that you might have with regard to the Wikimedia Volunteer Response Team. Before applying, please ensure that you are:
- Willing to work on difficult, sensitive, and at times hostile messages
- Courteous, skilled at resolving disputes, friendly – even in the face of hostility – sensitive to the needs of outsiders, and have exemplary discretion
- Willing to sign the VRTS users confidentiality agreement, considering the access to nonpublic personal data policy
- 16 years of age or older
Please review the list of queues prior to submitting your application, and apply for all of those queues where you think you'd be able to help.
- Notes
- The VRT is especially interested in users who are entrusted with any special tools on local projects (sysop, bureaucrat, checkuser, etc.), though this is not an absolute requirement.
- Applicants are usually expected to have shown consistent activity for at least six months.
- Language skills — other than English — are also highly appreciated. Additional help in language queues is greatly needed and we'd like to know if you are able to help in any other language.
- If you already have access to VRTS, and you'd like to get access to additional queues, you typically don't need to apply here. Ask on Administrator requests on vrt-wiki instead.
- If you currently don't have access to VRTS, but had access in the past, even under a different user name, please advise accordingly during your application.
- Permissions queues: users that already have strong knowledge of and experience with copyright issues, like administrators or license reviewers on Wikimedia Commons, are highly appreciated and invited to volunteer. Users without such skills should apply for info queues instead.
- German-speaking volunteers
If you'd like to volunteer for the info-de queue, please apply locally by following the instructions at de:Wikipedia:Support-Team#Mitarbeit im Support-Team.
- Dutch-speaking volunteers
If you'd like to volunteer for the info-nl queue, please apply below and send an email to contact-nl
lists
wikimediaorg for the team to assess your application.
 | Please add your application and also send an e-mail to volunteers-vrtwikimediaorg linking to your application on this page and giving your age. Please do so each time you apply. |
Firstly, I know this is an unusual request, and you probably would normally reject someone applying on behalf of others, but please read my reasoning and help our small wiki.
I (Rooiratel) come from afwiki. We are a rather small wiki with very few active users. And out of those there are very few who have a tech background, and/or are willing to figure out the broader wikimedia ecosystem, and prefer to just focus on editing. So I am here as the "tech" representative of afwiki.
We've recently encountered the problem where the public tries to contact our wiki through "official" channels. Thus we found they are sending emails to the email addresses on our "contact page" ( af:Wikipedia:Kontak ) this was set up many years ago by people who are no longer here. We were wondering who owns the mailboxes that those emails go to, and after a long investigation I figured out it was the VRT team and the software you use for this task.
We have identified 3 people from our wiki that we would like to join the VRT team to specifically have access to, and respond to all the afwiki email addresses so that we can engage with the public and not miss any communication that might be coming our way that we would otherwise be unaware of.
The 3 users are myself (Rooiratel) in a temporary capacity. Once I have access, I will figure out and document how the whole thing works so I'm not a bus factor on this scenario for our wiki. Then we have Oesjaar, who is an admin and bureaucrat on our wiki. He has been very active on our wiki for the last 17 years. I will show him how to use the software and he is more than capable and willing to enage with the public with whatever communication we might recieve. He has been doing this for many years via many unofficial channels. Lastly we have Elmarie Waltman, who has not been part of our wiki for very long nor is very active, but Oesjaar recruited her IRL specifically for the role of assisting with the communication with the public. She is a professional librarian, and will double check all wiki related stuff with Oesjaar and myself. She is here to help with the admin load of our wiki.
Once again, I know this is unusual, but please help our small wiki. Not everyone is comfortable engaging with things outside of afwiki, I am just trying my best to help everyone involved.
- User1 links: Rooiratel (talk • contribs • CentralAuth • global • count • blocks)
- Babel/Languages you can reply in: English, Afrikaans
- Your most active user talk page(s): afwiki
- Queues you would like access to: all afwiki queues
- Email sent? yes.
- User2 links: Oesjaar (talk • contribs • CentralAuth • global • count • blocks)
- Babel/Languages you can reply in: English, Afrikaans
- Your most active user talk page(s): afwiki
- Queues you would like access to: all afwiki queues
- Email sent? yes (by Rooiratel)
- User3 links: Elmarie Waltman (talk • contribs • CentralAuth • global • count • blocks)
- Babel/Languages you can reply in: English, Afrikaans
- Your most active user talk page(s): afwiki
- Queues you would like access to: all afwiki queues
- Email sent? yes (by Rooiratel)