Annual Report | 2014

Introduction: 2014—A Look Back

Documentation and Policies

One of the priorities of the OTRS admin team in 2014 was to improve existing documentation to allow for easier on-boarding of new members. One of the outcomes from this was the development of a new step-through guide to OTRS’ interface, which many new agents find hard to get accustomed to, particularly if volunteers lack prior experience with ticketing systems (as most do). The guide has been received well with the agent community, and is currently being translated by the community into more languages.

A short excerpt from the new guide.

To make help and policy pages easier to comprehend for non-English speakers and yet maintain the continued factual accuracy of the translations, the Translate extension was enabled on OTRS Wiki. Fortunately, this has also prompted a very desirable boost in translation activity.

In an effort to make account creation and activity-based account closures more consistent, the OTRS admins published two policy documents in December which clarify the underlying (largely long-standing) procedures. The Access Policy and the Activity Policy are available from Meta.

Meet-ups at Wikimania and locally

German members of the Volunteer Response Team gathered in Hamburg, Germany, in April for their 10th workshop since 2008. 13 volunteers attended the two-day event, which this time revolved primarily around legal aspects, hosting Ansgar Koreng, an attorney specialized in media and copyright law, who regularly advises and represents the German chapter, and John Weitzmann, attorney and Legal Project Lead of Creative Commons Germany.

The Volunteer Response Team also had some presence at Wikimania, the annual conference of Wikimedians and people interested in the Wikimedia projects, last year taking place in London. Keegan gave a talk on the response team’s tasks and responsibilities (recording on Youtube), and a couple of OTRS admins hosted a meet-up as part of the pre-conference track with about 20 team members in attendance. The meet-up provided an opportunity to exchange ideas and lessons learned among volunteers from queues in different languages, who don’t normally work with each other.

Inspired by conversations at Wikimania, French volunteers held their very first-ever workshop at Wikimedia France’s Paris office in November. On the first day of the event, a general training session was offered for both current Volunteer Response Team members and others with OTRS access (e.g., members of Wikimedia France with access to the chapter queues). 14 people attended. On day two, “info-fr” members held a closed session that enabled them to touch upon confidential issues from their day-to-day OTRS work. Both regional workshops, the French and the German one, were extensively supported by the respective local chapters.

Meet-up of French OTRS volunteers in Wikimedia France’s office

Photo by Pymouss (license: CC-by-sa 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons

In September, the OTRS admins held their first admin meeting, which is discussed in more detail below.

Staffing

In December 2014, we introduced an Access Policy, which, among other things, defines different account types, and the corresponding activity requirements and account creation/closure process. The following table makes use of these account types to provide a nuanced overview of last year’s changes in the composition of the agent base.

With this, we had 660 open accounts on OTRS at the end of 2014, on top of roughly 850 closed since installation.

Info Queues

These queues are the general information addresses that are displayed on the “contact us” pages on the Wikipedia projects. (See the English Wikipedia’s page, for example.) They usually deal with questions from readers of Wikipedia and from the subjects of articles. They are typically divided based on the language that they are written in, not the project that they relate to, because the queues are staffed by Wikimedia volunteers speaking a certain language, not from a certain project.

Workload Distribution

This chart shows how many agents contributed to working on a given queue. Each color represents an agent for that particular queue and shows how many tickets they handled in relation to others. Do note that if you spot two same-colored areas, this does not mean they represent the same agent—we’ve just run out of easily distinguishable colors :). The numbers in parantheses correspond to the total number of tickets handled in that queue.

While, per se, it is great to see that a particular volunteer brings the dedication to handle the lion’s share of inquiries in “their” queue, a high dependence on just a few individuals also poses risks for the robustness of the queue’s efficient processing. For instance, in the chart above, the Czech queue (info-cs) stands out with one volunteer handling 403 out of 411 tickets. In this circumstance, it seems particularly desirable to recruit new volunteers from the Czech Wiki community.

Response Time

The following chart shows the distribution of the amount of time it took for the team to send the first response to a new ticket. (Tickets that were not replied to, for instance because they contained off-topic material, were ignored.) It provides the answer to the question which share of emails has received an initial reply within a given amount of time. (Only provided for the largest queues.)

Response times in the major info queues do not seem to give much reason for worry. Some highlights: The “info-en” team managed to reply to half of its roughly 22,000 tickets within less than four and a half hours, and the Polish team sent their initial reply to 90% of all tickets within just slightly more than two days. The English-language team responded to 77% of its tickets within 24 hours (ar: 84%, pl: 80%, nl: 73%, de: 70%, fr: 56%, es: 33%).

Sister Projects Queues

As the numbers below show, there are not many tickets that relate to non-Wikipedia projects, but the Sister projects queues were created to give them special attention so that they could be handled by people who know more about the specific project.

Workload Distribution

Response Time

Permissions Queues

Sometimes Wikimedians would like to use images in articles that do not have clear cut licensing information. These images might not be licensed already, might have a license that is not permissive enough for use on Wikipedia, or might otherwise need confirmation that the copyright holder has agreed to the license shown on the projects. Wikimedians often contact the copyright holders of various images and ask them to license them so that they can be used on Wikimedia projects.

The permissions team on OTRS is the one that processes these “permissions” e-mails and attempts to verify that the copyright holder releases the images under an allowable license, that they do so clearly while understanding what that means, and that they actually are allowed to license the images in such a way (e.g., they hold copyright). These e-mails are then stored in the ticket system so that they can be verified by anyone with appropriate access. For more information, see Commons’ page on the topic.

Workload Distribution

Response Time

While the above chart only provides a top-level view of response behavior, it does suggest that the first-response time distributions of the major permissions queues are much more long-tailed than those of the major info queues, a fact often overlooked when claims are made about “the ‘permissions’ backlog.” For instance, 50% of tickets in “permissions-commons” were responded to within 79 hours—a little more than three days; on the other hand, the 8th decile is already at 638 hours, or 26-odd days. This will be covered in more detail in a future monthly report.

Photosubmission Queues

Wikimedia projects often lack good, freely-licensed images for certain articles, especially biographies of living persons. To mitigate this, the photosubmission queues were created on OTRS. They allow readers of Wikipedia and article subjects (or their agents) to easily submit photos to illustrate their articles. The photosubmission team performs the same checks as permissions, but in addition helps to add the images to the relevant articles.

Response Time

Queue Changes

Among the new queues created in 2014 were those for Admincon and Wikicon, two regular meet-ups of users from the German-language Wikimedia projects. We also saw the addition of several mobile-related queues, which are primarily curated by Wikimedia Foundation staff, but also volunteers helping with handling feedback and crash reports. As the “Wiki loves” family grew bigger, we re-organized the queue structure and now operate a generic “Wiki loves” queue (wlx) with subqueues currently in place for Wiki Loves Monuments (wlm) and Wiki Loves Earth (wle).

To understand the table below, note that OTRS formats subqueues after two colons. So, for example, mobile::Android (Wikipedia) is the Android (Wikipedia) subqueue of the mobile queue.

In addition to that, the “info-en::(Mohammed)” queue was renamed to “info-en::Campaigns.” Originally set up to handle complaints about the English-language Wikipedia’s use of images depicting the Prophet Muhammad,⁴ the queue is now used to provide coordinated responses to emails relating to a wide variety of disputes, such as the recent controversy dubbed “Gamergate.”

Admin Activity

Overseeing the OTRS resources are a small team of experienced OTRS agents who have become OTRS administrators. They handle system maintenance tasks such as the spam blacklist, monitor queues and compile information to improve response times and quality; they remove inactive agents and evaluate new applications. And of course, the OTRS administrators assist in answering tickets, just like all OTRS volunteers.

In September, the OTRS administrators held their first-ever meeting at the Wikimedia Foundation office in San Francisco. On the one hand, it served as an opportunity to enhance the exchange with Wikimedia Foundation staff regarding key aspects of the Volunteer Response Team’s work, such as the process for addressing software issues and the proper handling of enquiries with potential legal relevance. Primarily, however, it provided an opportunity for the OTRS administrator team to reflect on the team’s practices and reporting. More information on the agenda and the results of the meeting can be obtained from Meta.

Later in the year, the admin team expanded by two with the addition of Matthewrbowker and Krd who were welcomed in December. With this additional staffing, we hope to be able to improve our team’s overall abilities within OTRS.

While many of the administrators’ activities are not readily quantifiable (such as, say, the creation of this report), the following table provides an overview over the administrators’ activity in some of the more routine technical areas (because they are always accompanied by an entry in the admin log).

Outlook

As far as the admin team is concerned, some of our key priorities for 2015 are:

• Improve reporting: This report being a first step towards more comprehensive reporting, we will introduce monthly reports starting 2015, with the January report due in March. This reflects a general feeling within the admin team that, in particular with respect to smaller queues, there is a need for both the admins and the entire community to be able to identify mounting backlogs and other problems as soon as possible. We will also explore posting activity counts on the internal OTRS Wiki (as had been done a couple of years ago), which might have a motivating effect on OTRS volunteers. As a first step, of course, we will consult with the agent community on what would be most helpful for them.
• Secure funding: Agents have repeatedly pointed out to the admin team existing flaws with the software that make working with OTRS harder than would be necessary, and some also suggested potential improvements that could make their OTRS experience better. Most of the reported bugs likely require only limited programming efforts—however, the Wikimedia Foundation lacks the necessary in-house expertise, and attempts to convince the relevant departments to fund this directly have proven unsuccessful. We have explored a dedicated grant request to do this through the Grantmaking team and plan to work out the details in the coming months, after a consultation with the community to gain a comprehensive assessment of existing needs
• Expand documentation: We still see much work ahead to bring our documentation in line with new members’ needs. This concerns, in particular, non-technical information, such as how to respond to certain types of inquiries and general best practices. Knowledge-sharing is a key challenge for the Volunteer Response Team, and it is fundamentally important for ensuring the continued quality of our work.

If you have any questions or comments on this report, we invite you to leave a message on Meta. Thank you!