Universal Code of Conduct/Coordinating Committee/Election/2025/Candidates/Denis Barthel
| User account | Denis Barthel (talk • meta edits • global user summary • CA) |
|---|---|
| Summary |
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| Selected home wiki | German Wikipedia |
| Type of seat (regional; community-at-large; or both) (division of regional seats) | community-at-large |
| Introduction and expectations (max. 600 words for both questions) | |
| Tell us who you are, why you are applying, and your relevant experience. | I am Denis Barthel from Berlin, Germany. I joined the German Wikipedia in 2003 and I have been a contributing Wikipedian as much as a Wikimedian ever since. The latter because I have always kept an eye on the environment of Wikipedia as a result of my contributing work to it. What is necessary to foster project growth? What are the challenges and obstacles? How can communities steer through changes and challenging times? How can their strengths be enhanced and their weaknesses overcome? It is these questions that have repeatedly drawn me into roles as a Wikimedian.
As a result, I have taken on a variety of roles over the last two decades, both professionally and as a volunteer. Throughout the years, I have been a.o. an admin on German Wikipedia, an employee of Wikimedia Deutschland (Community Support Team) and a board member of Wikimedia Austria. Most recently, I worked for the Wikimedia Foundation as a Community Facilitator for the NWE region (2021-23), after which I was a member of the U4CBC that wrote the charter for the U4C (2023-24), and am currently a member of the ArbCom of the German Wikipedia (since 2023). |
| Please describe what do you hope to do if elected. | The focus of my work as a Wikimedian was and still is the “community”. It's the magic word of the wikiverse, and I strive for it to have as much ownership, involvement, reasoning and decision-making as possible. For me, the U4C is an important part of this - members of communities that serve to resolve conflicts when there is no other body actively doing so and thus have been (at best) in the hands of the WMF before. But that's only half of it: I hope for a Wikiverse where way more local conflict resolution bodies are active. This means creating, developing and evolving best practices, document them and establish trainings to share with communities so that they are able to resolve conflicts among themselves on a larger scale than before.
To set a foundation for the future, it is necessary to have a well-functioning U4C with an appropriate set of rules and guidelines and a stable workflow to be documented and properly shared in a further step. Although the current U4C has done a lot of remarkable work towards this goal within a year already, there is still much to be done and I would like to join the group and support it in this endeavor. |