Talk:Wikimedia Foundation contractors

E-mail address

I know that this is supposed to be true, but is it true? There are lots of different addresses (firstname@wikimedia.org, e.g. austin, philippe, kul etc. etc.), and I don't know if there is always a redirect from flastname@ or this "policy" is strictly enforced now. --Nemo 08:01, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

I know for a fact that Philippe and Kul redirect. I'm not sure about Austin, but I'm pretty sure that it's the policy for staff, contractors, and any other people who get new e-mail addresses. Cbrown1023 talk 16:14, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Either way, encouraging them to set it in their prefernces and to have "allow others to email me" works better than people can just use [[Special:EmailUser/<username>]] without having to worry about it being correct or not. Peachey88 ^{(Contribs) (Wikipedia: User) (Wikipedia: Talk)} 03:10, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

I don't think so, because usernames are way more inconsistent. --Nemo 07:17, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

If anyone's bored...

http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&offset=20100818075347&limit=4&type=newusers

These four people (and a few others, I think) are being hired to work on the fundraiser. They should be added to the chart at some point. --MZMcBride 00:55, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

Added with just the bare details (eg: their username). Peachey88 ^{(Contribs) (Wikipedia: User) (Wikipedia: Talk)} 01:53, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

Didn't you remove the temps? --Nemo 10:57, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

Microblogging account

Hoi. We should be all caught up with the microblogging account at this point. Thanks, --MZMcBride 03:05, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Page title

If anyone has an idea for a better page title, feel free to move this page. "Contractors" really isn't the Right Word, but I don't know of a better word. "Staff" is off the table. --MZMcBride 21:36, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Cronies. Killiondude 22:19, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Listing previous contractors

Does anyone have thoughts on what to do with people who are no longer contractors for the Wikimedia Foundation? Keep them in the chart with end dates? Banish them to the page history? Move them to a separate page? Thoughts and input welcome. --MZMcBride 22:00, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

It seems reasonable to leave them up by default. I do think we should honor requests from former contractors to remove details, if not entire entries, from the list. Emufarmers 09:59, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

While this list can probably never be complete, I don't think making it intentionally incomplete is a good idea. --MZMcBride 13:21, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

I think we should banish them to the page history. There's really no need to keep it around once they've severed their ties with the organization, or at least stopped being paid by them. We don't keep a list of former staff members, so I don't see why we need to keep a list of former contractors (who are usually less of a permanent part of the organization anyway). Cbrown1023 talk 21:04, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

I think it makes sense to keep them precisely because they're less stable: a contractor who is removed today after two months he finished his contract may be back tomorrow to continue his work; and I would need to dig a lot in the history to find a person. Given that we don't have reliable end dates in the relevant column to sort people by, an archive page may be the simplest solution. Nemo 21:40, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

<3 Emu. Cbrown is right, there is a record in the page history, you can archive it or something. Nemo there are already several contractors that have not been on this page and prob. never will, so far it's mostly people who have some presence on the projects that are listed. There is no point in linking to a contractor for years afterwards for the work they did for a couple of months. MZ would you like to mark them with a scarlet letter too? Theo10011 08:22, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

Updates on wikimediafoundation.org

What was previously wmf:Staff is now wmf:Staff and contractors. This page may soon be redundant, unnecessary, and worthy of soft-redirection. Stay tuned. --MZMcBride 14:38, 17 September 2011 (UTC)

Hmmm. A bunch more contractors are now at wmf:Staff and contractors, though I still see value in associating IRC usernames and SVN usernames with particular individuals. Perhaps those could be incorporated into user pages on wmfwiki? I'm not sure. It decentralizes the data (more difficult to index and search). :-/ --MZMcBride (talk) 01:17, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

There's also some on this page that aren't on wmf:Staff and contractors yet (such as Alex Zariv, Rod Dunican and myself, Timo Tijhof). –Krinkle^talk 06:08, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Interns

I was looking for someone to cc to a Phabricator report and I noticed there are some kinds of interns at WMF which are not listed at wmf:Staff and contractors, for instance (if I see correctly) OPW/Outreachy interns like phabricator:T148287. Finding who they are would be useful, for instance when people receive communications like mailarchive:wikitech-l/2016-December/087203.html or otherwise have to interact with them for higher productivity. I'm not sure however that this is the best page where to add them; maybe a reminder to search on mediawiki.org is in order? --Nemo 12:46, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

Self-editing

Somehow, I never noticed before that I was listed on this page. I was technically a contractor for about 3 months, following 15 months on staff; the entry (understandably) reflected some confusion about that unusual transition. I just edited it for accuracy. As a result, my entry is pretty long compared to the others; I'm not sure all that detail needs to be there, but I'll leave it to somebody else to decide whether to cut some or all of it. -Pete Forsyth (talk) 05:28, 7 April 2020 (UTC)