User talk:GVarnum-WMF

edit this template Welcome to the Wikimedia Foundation wiki

Thanks for being here! Please do not be shy in editing this site. There is ample work for everyone. :-)

If you haven't already, please create your user page with a short biography and other introductory information about yourself and the work you do. You may want to use the {{user info}} template. Feel free to look at other user pages for examples. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:11, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Categorization

Hi. Re: this edit and similar, I'm not really sure I understand the purpose of this category. I read Category:Maintained by Advancement department. Is this some team at the Wikimedia Foundation staking a claim to a bunch of pages on this wiki? Does this team really want all of these pages? Some of them are pretty old and probably no longer used or needed. Is this team now committing to keeping these wiki pages accurate and up-to-date? Should this team now be a point-of-contact for questions about these pages? If so, who specifically should be contacted? --MZMcBride (talk) 23:39, 8 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@MZMcBride: Thank you for checking. It is for tracking purposes and as the description mentions, is for active and historical maintenance. It is not meant to imply that they are actively maintaining it and does not impact maintenance practices. --GVarnum-WMF (talk) 23:51, 8 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

While you've added yourself to the "flooder" user group, it looks like many of your edits are not being marked as bot edits, for what it's worth. Looking at https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&hidebots=0&limit=500 currently, I only see one edit with a little 'b'. --MZMcBride (talk) 23:48, 8 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@MZMcBride: Strange - I will take a look. Thank you for heads up. --GVarnum-WMF (talk) 23:51, 8 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

How we will see unregistered users

Hi!

You get this message because you are an admin on a Wikimedia wiki.

When someone edits a Wikimedia wiki without being logged in today, we show their IP address. As you may already know, we will not be able to do this in the future. This is a decision by the Wikimedia Foundation Legal department, because norms and regulations for privacy online have changed.

Instead of the IP we will show a masked identity. You as an admin will still be able to access the IP. There will also be a new user right for those who need to see the full IPs of unregistered users to fight vandalism, harassment and spam without being admins. Patrollers will also see part of the IP even without this user right. We are also working on better tools to help.

If you have not seen it before, you can read more on Meta. If you want to make sure you don’t miss technical changes on the Wikimedia wikis, you can subscribe to the weekly technical newsletter.

We have two suggested ways this identity could work. We would appreciate your feedback on which way you think would work best for you and your wiki, now and in the future. You can let us know on the talk page. You can write in your language. The suggestions were posted in October and we will decide after 17 January.

Thank you. /Johan (WMF)

18:15, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

"Volunteers" and "community members"

Since we were talking about language the other day, I thought I'd float this here :)

I've started to notice places where community groups are referred to as 'volunteers' in a context that excludes anyone working as staff or contractor of a movement entity, or in some other professional role. In most of these places, the relevant discussions apply to all community members, not just that subset of the community.

This language is generally used by WMF staff, in communication with parts of the movement, and the implication is that the speaker doesn't consider themselves or their colleagues in the mentioned group
This creates an unnecessary self-imposed barrier between parts of the community
The distinction is fuzzy, as thousands of people have at one point been staff or contractors, gotten grants, or worked as liaisons within other orgs.
For newcomers, the distinction can convey the sense that [volunteer] community members are less experienced than [staff of some org] community members, or than [external contractors]. Whereas in practice, some of the more experienced developers, architects, legal scholars, arbitrators, analysts, non-profit execs, data archivists, db optimizers, regional experts, &c. are part of the non-staff community.

I wonder whether we've unintentionally been exacerbating arbitrary divides rather than taking those opportunities to reaffirm that we're all part of a shared community of creation, empowerment, communication, and defense of our shared work.

While there are a few places where we explicitly mean the 'volunteer' subset of the community as a whole, what do you think about using 'community member' where possible? Recognizing again that as you note not everyone uses the same style guide. SJ + 00:12, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]