Talk:Wikimedia Affiliation or Identity

Pasting WMF staff wiki discussion

Jennifer Riggs 19:34, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
This was a discussion that took place around the orientation of the Chief Program Officer. Please add in comments directly into questions if you'd like.

Some questions about Volunteer Roles

Please add in your ideas and questions you have with your signature

1. How many of these roles are defined?
   • Roles within the projects: the more official these roles are, the better they are defined, e.g. w:en:Wikipedia:Administrators and its equivalents in many other language versions. --Frank Schulenburg 21:10, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
   • Roles on the meta level: Many of these roles are not clearly defined. My personal experience: contributors who are not active on the meta level, even don't know they exist. --Frank Schulenburg 21:10, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
2. How did they evolve?
   • By the need to be created and (most often) by achieving consensus among the community members. --Frank Schulenburg 21:16, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
3. Are the requirements for attaining them known, set, negotiated by community?
   • Roles within the projects: known, set and negotiated by the community. --Frank Schulenburg 21:10, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
   • Meta level: Requirements might be different, depending on what your native language is (e.g. meta:OTRS/volunteering: the German-speaking OTRS team has its own rules, documented on Wikipedia itself: w:de:Wikipedia:Support-Team#Mitarbeit_im_Support-Team (see also http://otrs-wiki.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deutschsprachiges_Support-Team/Neue_Mitarbeiter), negotiated by the current members of the OTRS team). Some roles can be attained by appointment (member of the Wikimania jury, member of the Advisory Board), others are based on consensus or tradition (member of internal-l mailinglist, Jimmy's role on the English Wikipedia). --Frank Schulenburg 21:10, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
4. How many people know about them?
   • My personal experience: Very few people know about all the roles on the meta-level. We might even discover that we don't know all of these roles (or forgot some). --Frank Schulenburg 21:10, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
5. Could we have job descriptions made for them? If so - how might we go about it?
   • Within the projects: Job descriptions exist for all official roles. But it might be helpful to start a page on meta which gives an overview of all existing roles. Why don't we copy our existing "Volunteer Roles" page to the meta wiki and invite people to help us improving the list? --Frank Schulenburg 21:10, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
   • Meta level: We should (1) Copy the existing page to meta and (2) Invite the more experienced community members (or those who have/had one of these roles) to work with us on the job descriptions. --Frank Schulenburg 21:14, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
6. What role does WMF have in developing, recruiting and supporting these roles?
   • Within the projects: None. And should have none. --Frank Schulenburg 21:10, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
   • Meta level: Depends largely on what role we talk about. --Frank Schulenburg 21:18, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
7. What role can/should WMF have in developing, recruiting and supporting new roles?
   • Within the projects: We might never be able to develop, recruit or support new roles on the project level (how should we create or support a new volunteer role on the Arabic Wikipedia? and why?). And I think the projects are fine with developing their own roles. --Frank Schulenburg 21:37, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
   • Meta level: The WMF should play an active role in developing new roles. Recruiting should be transparent and open. Support depends on how much money we allocate for new staff positions. --Frank Schulenburg 21:23, 3 June 2009 (UTC)