Volunteer Response Team/Volunteering

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The Volunteer Response Team (VRT) 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 VRTS administrators are a group of highly-trusted and experienced volunteers who assess your application to join the VRT. 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 VRT. 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 VRT/Recruiting for information about what the job entails. Feel free to join #wikimedia-vrt^connect to ask any questions that you might have with regard to the Wikimedia Volunteer Response Team. 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 VRTS 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 VRT 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 VRTS, and you'd like to get access to additional queues, you typically don't need to apply here. Ask on Administrator requests on vrt-wiki instead.
• Permissions queues: users that already have strong knowledge of and experience with copyright issues, like administrators 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-nllistswikimediaorg for the team to assess your application.

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Habst

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

I'd like to help out on the Volunteer Response Team because I'd like to contribute to quickening the response time and securing the rights for more files on Commons. I'm an experienced editor on the English Wikipedia that is familiar with both the workings of Wikimedia and communicating with new users in a friendly way, and I've also uploaded both original works and copyright-free works to Commons.

I also have an eye for detail and can catch important errors -- for example, I recently noticed that commons:Category:Samuel Kosgei was being incorrectly conflated with Samuel Kiplimo Kosgei (Q958655) for years (in effect, this meant a living person's photo was being displayed on the article of a deceased person on several language Wikipedias), so I renamed the category and did the plumbing on Wikidata to ensure they aren't confused again. I like fixing these sorts of mistakes and would be happy to help with VRT. Habst (talk) 22:41, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Ternera

• User links: Ternera (talk • contribs • CentralAuth • global • count • blocks)
• Babel/Languages you can reply in: en-N
• Your most active user talk page(s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ternera
• Queues you would like access to: info-en
• Email sent? Done

Hello! I am interested in joining the VRT to provide support related to the English Wikipedia! I am familiar with the editing policies on the English Wikipedia as well as providing technical support for software. Although I do not have hundreds of thousands of edits, I feel that I could be a great help to the team because I have experience with content moderation online. As of today (5/14), I have experience moderating multiple Reddit communities (subreddits) with millions of members. Because of this, I have to interact with community members frequently by answering questions, providing tech support, and fixing posts for the many members who reach out to our moderator team. If you take a look at my interactions with others on Wikipedia, I believe you will find that I am polite and courteous to fellow Wikipedia editors in my interactions. I found Wikipedia ominous when I began first began editing, so I do my best to educate new editors because I know the feeling! Please reach out to my on my en-wiki talk page if you need to follow up on anything I've said! Thank you for considering my application! Ternera (talk) 19:09, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

alachuckthebuck

• User links: alachuckthebuck (talk • contribs • CentralAuth • global • count • blocks)
• Babel|/Languages you can reply in: en-n, es-1
• Your most active user talk page(s):C:user talk:alachuckthebuck
• Queues you would like access to:permissions-commons
• Email sent? working on it

I'd like to help out on the Volunteer Response Team because I believe that a 7-day backlog is far too long. I am very familar with copyright law as most of my time is spent tagging copyvios and making sure new images are in scope. If you look at my talk page, you can see how I handle the (often confused, sometimes angry) new users who visit my talk page after their file is tagged. I also spend some time helping with the mass diffusion of the IBM Plex Sans font. This is an ongoing project, as new files are added. Commons has always had many key functions critically understaffed, and the backlogs show this, with DRs sometimes taking 3 months to be closed. Recently, VRT has reached the 7-day mark, meaning that by the time the file has been checked, If the uploader didn't add the pending tag, it will have been deleted.

If you have any questions, please reach out at either my talk page or email me. Thanks for your consideration!

All the best -- Chuck ^Talk 18:36, 16 May 2024 (UTC)