Wikimedia Affiliation or Identity

Affiliation with Wikimedia

Wikimedia is a global non-profit organization with a vision that includes the entire world ("Every single human being...Sum of all knowledge..."Jimmy Wales).

Wikimedia is a global community of people with different interests, goals and reasons for being involved.

Wikimedia is a congregation of free, open educational resource projects.

What does it mean to be affiliated with Wikimedia if all of these statements might be simultaneously true? The reasons to explore what affiliation means to Wikimedia are many including:

• Developing support for individuals and groups that support the mission and/or the projects
• Understanding the current roles and identities that people involved currently have enabling:
• Reduction in barriers to affiliation and strategies to increase the number and diversity of people supporting the mission and/or projects
• please add others

Existing Roles for Wikipedia/Wikimedia Volunteers

This is a list started by WMF staff to get a sense of what roles people already identify with and to begin exploring what makes a Wikimedian or any of the other identities that people who affiliate with our organization may have.

Roles within the projects

Content

• Editor – someone who makes an edit, irrespective of how large the contribution is
• Author – contributor of original writing (remark: in this context, "originality" refers to "coming from someone as the originator/author")
• Copyeditor – editor who improves style and accuracy (but not content) of an article (not being member of the Wikipedia Cleanup project)
• Photographer - Someone who takes photographs and contributes them to Wikipedia
• Image creator - someone who creates images such as maps and contributes them to Wikipedia

Quality and Reliability

• Recent changes patrol – vandal fighting; initial quality control
• Reviewer (Sighted versions, only Wikipedia editions w/ FlaggedRevs turned on, e.g. German Wikipedia) – people involved in a light-weight validation process, flagging articles that are free from vandalism
• Member of the Small Wiki Monitoring Team – see meta:Small Wiki Monitoring Team for more information
• Member of the Wikipedia Cleanup project – helping with improvements on the formal level (wikification, spelling, grammar, tone; exists under different names on several language editions)
• Reviewer (Peer review) – participant of Wikipedia's internal Peer review process
• Member of a WikiProject (Content) – see w:en:WikiProject:Oregon for an example
• Editorial staff member (German Wikipedia only) – subject matter expert; the editorial team has the right to delete inadequate articles, regardless of the normal deletion process, see w:de:Wikipedia:Redaktion Biologie for an example
• Member of the writing contest jury (German Wikipedia only) – see w:de:Wikipedia:Schreibwettbewerb
• Member of the Zedler medal jury (German Wikipedia only) – see w:de:Wikipedia:Zedler-Medaille (only one community member, others: members of the Academy of sciences and editors of a scientific journal)
• Featured article director or delegate (English Wikipedia only)
• Flickr Image reviewer (Wikimedia Commons only) – Trusted user who reviews images imported from Flickr for license compatibility.
• PD Image reviewer (Wikimedia Commons only) – Similar to above but verifies validity of public domain license tag on uploaded images.
• Bot account operator – Individual, usually with some programming experience and an account on the toolserver who operates an account which does automated processes like cleanup, conversion, and other maintenance activities.

Administrative

• Rollbacker (not in all language versions, e.g. not on the German Wikipedia) – someone entrusted to do automatic reverts of copyedit (generally vandalism) to previous version.
• Administrator (Wikiversity: en: Custodian, de: Pedell, fr: Bibliothécaire) – experienced and trusted user who can protect, delete and restore pages as well as block users from editing
• Bureaucrat – promote other users to administrator or bureaucrat status; grant and revoke an account's bot status; and rename user accounts
• Checkuser – permission to examine user IP information and other server log data under certain circumstances, for the purposes of protecting Wikipedia against actual and potential disruption and abuse (e.g. Sockpuppets)
• Oversight – prevent revisions from being viewed by anyone except other users with the "oversight" permission
• Steward – users with complete access to the wiki interface on all Wikimedia wikis, including the ability to change any and all user rights and groups

Mediation

• Wikipedia mediation committee member – community members volunteering to assist in resolving disputes between users
• Wikipedia Arbitration committee (en: ArbCom, de: Schiedsgericht, fr: Comité d'arbitrage) member – elected editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process, having the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors (does only exist on bigger language editions)
• Arbitration Committee Clerk (English Wikipedia only) – editors selected by the Arbitration Committee to assist the committee with procedural aspects of its work

Other

• Ambassador – contacts for non-native speakers, see meta:Wikimedia Embassy for more information

Roles on the meta (Wikimedia) level

Promoters

• Wikipedia evangelist (irrespective if chapters member or not)

Technical support

• Volunteer developer
• Volunteer server administrator (e.g. Toolserver)
• OTRS Administrator
• Mailing list administrator / moderator

Members of the support/response team

• OTRS Agent – different roles: local support team member, local permissions team, see http://otrs-wiki.wikimedia.org for more information

Members of the Meta translation team

• Volunteer translator – see the meta-wiki translation portal for more information

Wikimania

• Wikimania program committee member
• Wikimania jury member
• Wikimania bidding team
• Wikimania organizing team

Research

• Wikimedia Chief Research Coordinator – see http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Chief_Research_Coordinator for details
• Wikipedia researcher

Ombudsman commission

• Wikimedia Ombudsman commission member – investigating complaints about violations of the privacy policy (in particular concerning the use of CheckUser tools) on any Wikimedia project for the board of trustees in an official manner, see meta:Ombudsman commission for details

Board elections

• Board elections committee member – see meta:Board elections for more information

Chapters, Foundation and "Inner Circle"

• Chapters members
• Member of internal-l mailinglist – chapters representatives, Wikimedia staff and trusted community members
• Chapters board members
• Wikimedia committee member: ComCom, LangCom, ChapCom, etc.
• Advisory board member – see http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Advisory_Board for more information
• Member of the Wikimedia Foundation's board of trustees – see http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board for more information

Others

• Local press/community contact (Wikipedia or other project's language versions without chapter)

Others

• Benevolant dictator (English Wikipedia only)
• Discussant on foundation-l mailinglist
• Pro bono lawyer (e.g. JBB attorneys, Berlin)

Potential Roles for Wikimedia Volunteers

• Project Lead: Wikimedia in Education
• Project Lead: Wikipedia Academies
• Project Lead: Wikimedia & 55+
• Speaker (endorsed member of Speakers Bureau)
• Speaker's Bureau Coordinator
• Endorsed Trainer (Communications, Customer Service, OTRS, Conflict Resolution, Training of Trainers/TOT, Wiki-Editing, etc....
• Local Team -"WikiPod" leader/member (enthusiast)
• OTRS Volunteer Manager
• …

Links

Volunteering