User talk:Mdennis

 Welcome! I am the Community Liaison for the Wikimedia Foundation and the volunteers of all the communities supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. You can read more about me here. Do you have questions for the Wikimedia Foundation? Do you have ideas? Please let me know! See Answers. If you have questions or ideas for me personally, you can leave me a publicly visible note here or e-mail me at. Thank you!

Answers/Process
I didn't really understand [ this]. Was there some problem with those revisions? --MZMcBride 04:06, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Hi. :) There was some clarification from legal as to what kind of promises I could and could not make regarding confidentiality. Since earlier revisions contained some seriously inaccurate information and we had not yet received any responses, it seemed best to eliminate any chance of confusion by pulling it down. While the seriously inaccurate information was earlier in the histories (as they were incrementally corrected), it seemed expeditious to just leave the last edit standing. :D --Mdennis 10:04, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

Follow-up to my questions on Meta some time ago: Contact us still lists answers@ as an address, but doesn't clarify the role of the address. Is it active? Can you please clarify its function on the page? Thanks, Nemo 21:07, 15 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Yes, it's very active. :) We receive emails daily from people who have requests or questions for the Wikimedia Foundation. I'm not sure what I would add to the contact us page - basically, it's for everything that doesn't fit into another category. --Maggie Dennis (talk) 21:21, 15 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks. "Everything that doesn't fit into another category" seems more like info@ as described on the page: «Questions related to Wikipedia or other projects» is so generic as to cover everything we may be talking about. At least one of the two needs to be clarified.
 * Also: donations, press and business are very clear categories, but info@ and answers@ are extremely mysterious as regards who replies etc. As long as there's only info@ this doesn't matter much, but having two mysterious addresses means people will be confused. --Nemo 06:16, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Of course, there's a pretty big distinction between the Wikimedia Foundation and the projects. :) I do not answer questions about whether somebody can write an article about their garage band, and info@ does not answer questions about whether a visiting group from Oxford can tour the office. Sometimes people do get confused - they send inquiries for and about WMF to info@ and the people at info@ send them to me. Sometimes people send questions about content to answers@, and I send them to info@, but on the whole the system seems to have been working pretty well for the past year and a half. :) Are people complaining about confusion somewhere that I haven't noticed? Finding out specifically what is confusing them might help determine if clarification is needed. --Maggie Dennis (talk) 10:10, 16 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Confused people who don't know where to write won't know where to express confusion either.
 * As 1) saying "projects" for our wikis is jargon, and 2) you seem to imply that answers is about the office/staff of the WMF (which makes sense given that the board has its own address), I've tried [//wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Contact_us&diff=91500&oldid=91492]. Please correct/clarify if wrong.
 * Now we only lack some clarifications about audience: press@ and business@ have an obvious audience, info@ is for everyone willing to contribute/comment/etc. the projects, now is answers@ for readers or what else? How does it relate to liaison@ (for community members) or legal@ (for any legal-related request, but including or excluding "community liaison-ing"?), etc. etc. --Nemo 10:34, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Oh, believe me, Nemo, they do. :) They write to all of them. It happens frequently. As to the change you've proposed, I guess we can see what happens. If the number of misdirected emails rises, then we might need to revert and figure out a different way, although I'm not sure this is an actual problem so much as a theoretical one. Answers@ is used by readers and editors - anyone who has a question for the WMF. They come in regularly, daily. Its audience seems to be finding it okay. :) --Maggie Dennis (talk) 10:47, 16 April 2013 (UTC)


 * So I guess said audience doesn't include me, because I, for one, am confused and don't know who to write. --Nemo 11:51, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Okay, let's start there. What is your problem? If you tell me, then I can help you figure out who to write, and we can determine if the contact page can be changed to clarify. --Maggie Dennis (talk) 11:53, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

Page protections
Hi. Why did you protect Terms of Use (2012) and its subpages? --MZMcBride (talk) 22:09, 19 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Because I was told to. :) --Maggie Dennis (talk) 23:10, 19 April 2012 (UTC)


 * By whom and why? The protections seem like a very poor idea for a variety of reasons (some of which you seem to already have personally discovered). --MZMcBride (talk) 23:22, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Foundation_wiki_feedback&oldid=3665286#Terms_of_Use_.282012.29.2Fpl

And of course this is just the beginning.

Please look into who asked you to do these full protections and why. It's your name attached to the actions. If you can't stand behind them, I strongly urge you to remove the protections and have whoever is standing behind them make them (or not, as the case should be). (And&mdash;not that it's really all that relevant&mdash;but the maner in which you protected the pages was rather daft. There's a title blacklist which would have meant one edit [or three, I guess] instead of 11 protections/unprotections/re-protections and it allows for future-proofing for future translations.) But that's completely tangential, really, as the point is that this is a wiki and you've fully protected a bunch of pages with the summary "policy," rather than "X said I must do this or we'll all surely lose our legal immunity and die the death of a thousand lawsuits."

I'm in no particular rush, but these protections seem wholly out-of-spirit with wiki principles and traditions and they seem as though they're only going to cause a headache going forward. People will inevitably want to change the link syntax on the Old Scots version or will want to fix an accent in the Klingon copy.

The annoying part here is that you're a wiki editor at heart and I don't even imagine you really disagree with me. But there you go, protecting all of these pages. Anyway, please look into this and get back to me when you have a chance. --MZMcBride (talk) 03:54, 20 April 2012 (UTC)


 * It was Philippe who gave me the assignment. I do not know if Philippe was conveying the request from higher up the command chain, although it's certainly possible. If you would like me, as community liaison, to ask Philippe for more information, I can do that, but given that you have a relationship with Philippe I'm not sure if you'd want me taking up this question on your behalf. Just let me know, though, and I'd be happy to send him an email to let him know that you'd like more information about this decision. --Maggie Dennis (talk) 00:00, 21 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Philippe and I connected here: . Thanks for your help. I hadn't realized you'd been traveling. I hope you got some sleep. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 22:37, 22 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Thank you; I did, although I will be a while getting back into my own timezone. :) I do not make that transition well. --Maggie Dennis (talk) 15:22, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

DMCA Random House Mondadori tweaked
Hey, I just wanted to let you know I tweaked DMCA Random House Mondadori a little. Let me know what you think. (I also want to tweak the deletion log msg but I guess that's impossible. so that the link to this wiki were clickable. and maybe make it an interwiki.) --Jeremyb (talk) 20:40, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Fine by me. :) Easier to read and looks more cohesive. Thanks, Jeremy! --Maggie Dennis (talk) 20:43, 21 March 2013 (UTC)