Wikivoyage:Volunteer Response Team
VRT
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Znuny is a free and open-source trouble ticket system software, in order to handle general inquiries, comments and complaints sent by email from third parties addressed to any of the wikis hosted by the Foundation. You can think of it as a large cross-project customer service email response system.
Members of the Volunteer Response Team, often designated as VRT agents, are granted access to VRT and as act as points of contact for third parties. If you are an experienced Wikivoyager or Wikimedian and you wish to help out with the VRT backlog, you can apply at meta:VRT/Volunteering (please read meta:VRT/Recruiting first), and then your membership will be considered by one of the VRT administrators as well as the consensus at Meta Wiki. If you would like to donate copyrighted text or media that you own to Wikivoyage or Wikimedia, please contact us at info@wikivoyage.org as outlined in the "contact us" page.
Tasks
[edit]The responsibilities of VRT agents include, but are not limited to, responding to:
- questions about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects
- grants of license for donated media
- reports of article errors
- issues concerning living persons, including defamation, libel and/or slander
- complaints of blatant vandalism
- inquiries about re-using text or media
- compliments and feedback
- information requests
Overview
[edit]Emails in Wikimedia's VRT are referred to as tickets and identified by their ticket number. They are then categorized and organized into queues, allowing agents to work on those queues they are assigned to. VRT allows multiple agents to work on and respond to many tickets simultaneously, contains persistence for the emails and archives them, and can allow merging of related emails to better organize and coordinate agent responses to a single incident report. Agents can easily create and manage FAQ texts to respond to emails. Agents are also expected to have great patience and exceptional discretion in handling responses to sometimes vicious, hostile, and difficult email requests.
When discussing the actions of VRT agents, the sensitive and discretionary nature of the tickets require that they can only give vague information, or more commonly no information at all, as to the actions committed, like the Office actions taken by Wikimedia Foundation staff members. If you disagree with the actions of a VRT agent, consider discussing with them via private channels, such as by email, where they are given more leeway to discuss their actions and the tickets than they are allowed by a public wiki like Wikivoyage.
VRT administrators
[edit]Volunteer Response Team leaders are known as VRT administrators.
As VRT administrators, their responsibilities are varied; they sometimes involve handling queries about Wikimedia's VRT itself and supervising VRT agents, which involve granting agents access to certain queues, or restricting access from certain agents at their discretion. If you have concerns about the actions of VRT agents, please send a private email to one of the administrators.
VRT administrators are also responsible for setting up queues. If you feel you would like to set up an independent queue for your particular project, please contact an VRT administrator.
For a list of VRT administrators please see: meta:VRT#VRT administrators
Contact
[edit]- General VRT queue for Wikivoyage, see Wikivoyage:Contact us.
- VRT queue for donating media contributions to Wikivoyage, see commons:Commons:VRT.
- IRC channel for discussion with VRT agents.
- Private wiki for use by VRT agents only.
- And other mailing lists related to Wikimedia VRT activities.
See also
[edit]- Wikivoyage:Contact us
- Wikipedia:Volunteer Response Team
- VRT information page on Meta Wiki