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User:Mdennis (WMF)

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Maggie Dennis
January 2019.
Maggie Dennis
Vice President, Community Resilience & Sustainability, Wikimedia Foundation
Conflict is inevitable, but combat is not.

This is not the actual quote, which is a fine quote - "Conflict is inevitable, but combat is optional" - by Max Lucado. It has a better ring to it, the original, but my alteration suits me better. Nothing kills a quote, even an altered one, like overexplaining.

About me

Hi. Call me Maggie. Please don’t call me Angela (my legal name) unless you’re my mother.

A happy reader of Wikipedia, I edited as an IP a few times before deciding finally to register an account Moonriddengirl in April 2007. Not entirely sure how to help out, I pressed "random article" in the toolbar until something came up that looked like it needed fixing. This was the article I found. I didn't exactly know what I was doing (obviously), but I left it better than I found it. The next day I found w:en:Wikipedia:Cleanup and things progressed from there.

From the beginning, I loved Wikipedia. I love that a diverse group of people from all over the world can come together to build something so incredibly useful. While not without challenges, it is an ambitious and admirable goal, and I have tried to do my bit towards advancing it since 2007. My enthusiasm for our work only increased as I discovered the diversity of our projects. While I have put most of my volunteer time into Wikipedia, I have tried my hand at some of the other projects as well, contributing content to Wikimedia Commons, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikisource, and Wikidata.

I am based on the east coast of the United States with my family. I have previously worked in education, publishing and law (as a paralegal).

My work

In January 2020, I became Vice President of Community Resilience & Sustainability for the Legal department, after serving a three year transitional role as Chief of the Community Engagement department and a year as its Vice President of Support & Services. Legal is a Wikimedia Foundation staff department of over 50 people focused on the goal of protecting the movement and its stakeholders from threats. In the Community Sustainability and Resilience wing of that department are teams focused on the Trust & Safety of the projects, including operations to respond to threats and policy approaches; focused on evaluating and assembling essential staff to respond to unanticipated human rights threats to movement participants; and focused on supporting many of the key governance committees and groups who liaise with the Foundation, its Board of Trustees, and its legal or Trust & Safety staff.

Disclaimer: I work for or provide services to the Wikimedia Foundation, and this is the account I try to use for edits or statements I make in that role. However, the Foundation does not vet all my activity, so edits, statements, or other contributions made by this account may not reflect the views of the Foundation.

Contact me

You can reach me at my email address at mdennis(_AT_)wikimedia.org

For general concerns about content on Wikipedia or matters related to Wikipedia, contact:
info(_AT_)wikimedia.org

For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation, see
Answers.