OTRS/Volunteering

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Volunteering for OTRS The OTRS team 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 OTRS administrators are a group of highly-trusted and experienced volunteers who assess your application to join the OTRS team. 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 OTRS team. 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 OTRS/Recruiting for information about what the job entails. Feel free to join #wikimedia-otrsconnect to ask any questions that you might have with regard to Wikimedia OTRS. 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 OTRS 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 OTRS team 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. Please also add links to help desk posts, talk pages, or other discussions you think are relevant. 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 OTRS, and you'd like to get access to additional queues, you typically don't need to apply here. Ask on otrswiki:Administrator requests instead. Permissions queues: users that already have strong knowledge of and experience with copyright issues, like administrators or 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-nllists.wikimedia.org for the team to assess your application.

Please add your application and also send an e-mail to volunteers-otrswikimedia.org linking to your application on this page and giving your age. Please do so each time you apply.

Masumrezarock100

• User links: Masumrezarock100 (talk • contribs • CentralAuth • global • count • blocks)
• Babel/Languages you can reply in: en-3, bn-N
• Your most active user talk page(s): commons:User_talk:Masumrezarock100
• Queues you would like access to: permissions-commons
• Email sent? yes
• Link to previous application: Special:Permalink/19108394#Masumrezarock100

I have been contributing to Commons for a while now and doing mainly maintainance related tasks. These days I am more involved in counter-vandalism work (crosswiki patrolling including SWMT). But I often patrol OgreBot's new user upload gallery and sometimes Special:NewPages and Special:NewFiles. When patrolling uploads tagged with OTRS pending sometimes catch my eye and I want to help out by responding to emails to permissions-commons@wikimedia.org. I can't say that my knowledge in copyright is best, but I definitely have acquired and polished my file patrolling skills during my time on Commons and I am still learning. Please note that I never had OTRS access before so I may make mistakes and I will be happy to get directions from an existing OTRS member. Thank you for considering this request. Masum Reza^📞 11:32, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

• Support - I've worked with Masumrezarock100 on multiple projects. Good working knowledge of copyright. No concerns. GMG^talk 14:53, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
• @Masumrezarock100: Please explain how you would review the following hypothetical tickets.
  1. A ticket for File:Arlene Dickinson 1.jpg from alkanphotographygmail.com. The email contains the standard form with no further details.
  2. A ticket for File:Karolina Wójciak.jpg from "Karolina Wójciak", also with the standard form and no further details.
• I'm more interested in hearing why you would do or say something than what that would be. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 19:05, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

  1. For the first image, I have found similar photographs on the Internet. (Tineye search and GI search) There are many copies of the above photograph, which likely originate from her twitter account. I also found [1] and [2], looks like there were multiple cases where Arlene Dickinson had herself photographed by Alkan Emin. In addition, I have searched for Alkan photography on the internet and I found alkanphotography.com. Looks like he is a professional photographer, and the only email on the site is alkan@alkanphotography.com. As you can see alkanalkanphotography.com != alkanphotographygmail.com. Gmail accounts can be created by anyone, which is why it is difficult to verify someone's identity. I would decline this one, as this looks like a fraud case with no further details provided about the authorship of the file.

  Thanks for your questions. I will answer about the second case shortly. Masum Reza^📞 20:24, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

  This is a good answer. Though just a point in passing, it wouldn't necessarily be a "decline" so much as a "please send this from your official email address, such as alkanalkanphotography.com which is listed on your website". GMG^talk 20:29, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

  Thanks. I should have thought more. I get your point though, the majority of our customers are not familiar with Wikimedia. They may have sent the permission from their personal Gmail account and the image has EXIF intact, so asking them to send the permission from his official email address seems to be a better option. Masum Reza^📞 20:37, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

  1. I could not find a duplicate/similar image on the internet. I tried both Google images and Tineye. I looked up the name Karolina Wójciak and found out that she is an author and her website is karolinawojciak.com. I would first check the email address of the permission sender. If the email doesn't match with karolinakarolinawojciak.com (it was listed on her official site), I would reply back and ask them to send the permission from her official email address (as GMG advised above). If the email does match, I would ask for more information since the subject of the photograph is not necessarily the copyright holder of the photograph. To my knowledge, usually the author of a photograph holds the copyright. Thanks Masum Reza^📞 21:17, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

  @Masumrezarock100: Your responses to those questions are good and well thought out. A few minor things: For the first example, you seem to have missed http://alkanphotography.com/contact/. Website creators seem to enjoy hiding things like contact information and license statements for some reason, so you have to be quite thorough. If that page wasn't there, I'd agree with your logic entirely. For the second example, you did notice all the things I was looking for (email is from subject not photographer, nothing on reverse-image search). As you noted, the copyright holder in a photograph is the photographer unless the copyright has been transferred by law, contract, or the work is a work made for hire. Because of this, establishing if the original sender is the copyright holder should be done before worrying about their email address. It doesn't really matter if we're talking to the real subject or not if they can't release the file in the first place. And no bonus points for finding https://www.instagram.com/p/B3_rUWKh_vl/ (instagram isn't indexed by search engines). Overall, good for someone who has handled 0 real tickets so far. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 22:06, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

MB-one

• User links: MB-one (talk • contribs • CentralAuth • global • count • blocks)
• Babel/Languages you can reply in: de, en
• Your most active user talk page(s): User talk:MB-one
• Queues you would like access to: permissions-commons, permissions-de
• Email sent? yes

I'd like to help out on OTRS. As a Commons admin, I regularly deal with files, that have pending OTRS tickets. Having access to OTRS would therefore enable me to quickly make decisions regarding copyvio etc. and not have to rely on another OTRS volunteer to support me. MB-one (talk) 18:43, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

• Support Obvious need. Commons admin should be granted access on request because we have large backlog at the permission queue. Masum Reza^📞 03:38, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
• Comment Masum Reza: FYI, we actually don't have much of a backlog on the Commons or DE queues (i.e. tickets in these queues are being cleared at an appropriate rate). --Ìch heiss Nat ùn ìch redd e wenig Elsässisch!^{Talk to me in EN, FR, PL, GSW-FR(ALS).} 11:01, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

  Yes, you are right. I checked the backlog a month ago and it was over 10 days. I guess some very active volunteers joined recently. Anyway, more helping hands would not hurt, especially when it is coming from an admin. We will just get a little less work. :) Masum Reza^📞 14:20, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

• Support - Even if the backlog is down at the moment, I'd rather have a lot of people contributing a little than a few people contributing a lot, to help prevent burnout and put us in a situation where losing one or two volunteers would be precarious. Also, just having more people who can both review deleted content and review tickets is always helpful. I know there's been situations where I've misinterpreted some detail and was thankful to have another agent explain my mistake. GMG^talk 14:28, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

LakesideMiners

• User links: LakesideMiners (talk • contribs • CentralAuth • global • count • blocks)
• Babel/Languages you can reply in: en-N
• Your most active user talk page(s): en:User_talk:LakesideMiners
• Queues you would like access to: info-en
• Email sent? Yes!

I'd like to help out on OTRS because I feel like being able to assist others with questions relating to page issues and other various problems that can be found with pages on the enwiki is something that we need more people doing, and I believe that I will be of use to the team. (note:I will be sending email tomorrow. its late over here) Never mind, I sent it. LakesideMiners (talk) 02:01, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

I believe Lakeside is sufficiently qualified and trustworthy to volunteer as an OTRS agent. Vermont (talk) 02:06, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Support Has the potential to make a good OTRS volunteer. Operator873^talkconnect 03:16, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

• Support Having interacted with this user on IRC, I can say that this requestee is not a jerk, clueful, and experienced. Masum Reza^📞 03:35, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Masumrezarock100Thank you, I try not to be a jerk and I am glad I am coming across well! LakesideMiners (talk) 15:41, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

• Support I've interacted some with LM on and off wiki. No concerns. GMG^talk 14:23, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Hispano76

• User links: Hispano76 (talk • contribs • CentralAuth • global • count • blocks)
• Babel/Languages you can reply in: Spanish (es)
• Your most active user talk page(s): eswikipedia, eswikivoyage
• Queues you would like access to: info-es, permissions-es
• Email sent? yes

I want to help out as an OTRS volunteer. I have experience with Creative Commons licensing and copyright Hispano76 (talk) 01:03, 23 January 2020 (UTC)