User talk:Daniel Phelps

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Page title casing
Hi. Typically sentence casing is used in page titles, including category titles. This is an old convention for wikis, especially ones that evolved from CamelCase. In addition to convention, sentence casing is typically viewed as more international.

I saw your deletion of Category:Job Descriptions due to syncing issues with the Wikimedia Office wiki. Would it be possible to change the Wikimedia Office wiki to use sentence casing?

Thanks! --MZMcBride 23:56, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi MZ,

I definitely understand the conventions. Unfortunately there is something of the order of 50+ Job Descriptions on the internal office wiki. While I'd love to fit things into more conventional standards, I don't have time to go through and make that kind of change. Hopefully, at some point things will slow down and allow for more gardening and cleaning up but right now we're doing the best we all can to keep up with the more mission critical work. For me that means recruiting, on-boarding, working on internal performance, managing benefits, payroll, etc. As anyone can tell you, my personality is much more OCD and it irks me that the systems don't match up properly too. I just have to choose my battles and keeping that upper case D is the best use of time for now.

The good thing is that this is an atypical wiki and while that doesn't make it correct per se, it does allow a bit more flexibility in how we proceed.

I will be slowly adopting the category sorting and have already started changing internal templates to work with that structure. I was also going to reach out soon to see if a Volunteer on the Foundation wiki could remove the Category:Job openings page and convert all the existing ones to Job Descriptions. Job openings implies current openings and the Job openings page should suffice for that since once they are removed from that page they are no longer open. Job descriptions allows for more archival storage of those openings and will remain on once they are removed from the active openings.

I hope that helps explain my logic for now. Don't worry though, as soon as things clear up I'll see if an admin can help transfer the internal JDs to the conventional naming system and then the Foundation wiki pages.

--Daniel Phelps 01:19, 9 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Fair enough, I guess we'll just leave this for later.
 * If you have tasks for this wiki, you should list them at To-do. If they're really tedious, someone can write and run (or install and run) a script to do the tasks easily enough. This is especially true for simple find and replaces like category renaming.
 * Thanks for the quick reply. :-) --MZMcBride 04:20, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Fellowship recipients
Hi Daniel. There's a discussion here regarding having Fellowship recipients on the Staff page. I'm not sure if you were aware of that discussion (yet). I don't think it makes any sense for them to be on the Staff page personally. It seems misleading and wrong. A separate page would also allow for greater flexibility in describing the broader program. Your input in the discussion would be great. --MZMcBride 20:34, 8 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks! Someone just brought that page to my attention.  Steven Walling is a Fellowship Recipient who for all intents and purposes is categorized as an employee during the year he will be here.  Depending on the type of work fellowship recipients will be doing and the duration they will either be treated as staff (as in the case of Steven), Contractors (Vicki and Maryana) and likely in the future several other types of relationships.  For that reason, to address the immediate, I have added the Fellowships section to the staff page to more specifically call out Steven Walling's relationship with us over the next year.


 * I'll also be working to find a way to list all recipients of Fellowships. The last thing we need is another Staff type page.  Until we can resolve the best mechanism, all Fellowship recipients are being Identi.ca and Twittered and blog posts have been written for more details and linked to those feeds.--Daniel Phelps 01:55, 9 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Cool. Thanks for the quick reply. :-) --MZMcBride 06:18, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Regarding staff and fellows
Hi Daniel. I saw this edit and don't really understand it. Is there something that distinguishes Steven from the other five fellows? --MZMcBride 21:57, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Hi Max. Yes, Steven is on payroll and is set to work in the office during the duration of his fellowship as a staff member. We have to process each Fellowship currently based on several criteria as to how we engage with them. Much of this is based on HR law. It's highly important that edits made by HR that involve staff or policies/procedures not be edited just as Finance and audit information not be edited on this wiki without prior discussion with me or Cyn Skyberg in HR. We're going to protect the page, just so that there's no misunderstanding in the future. I understand that there was no indication that it shouldn't be edited. --Daniel Phelps 22:11, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Has HR law changed?
 * Can Template:Staff be unprotected now? --MZMcBride 01:09, 17 September 2011 (UTC)

Storytellers
I can't edit the page, so could you add the links to the storytellers' usernames? They appear to be m:User:Mroth (or m:User:Matthew_(wmf)), m:User:Aaron_(WMF), m:User:Vgrigas. Thank you, Nemo 23:53, 16 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Done in this edit. I'm not sure why Matthew Roth has two accounts; someone should look into that. --MZMcBride 01:15, 17 September 2011 (UTC)