Wikimedia Stewards User Group/Reports/2020

Report of the Wikimedia Stewards User Group for activities since its establishment on 22 September 2019 until October 2020.

Governance

Membership to the User Group is open to anyone interested in steward recruitment, tool development, or any of the other topics included in the user group mandate. Voting membership is restricted to current and former stewards in good standing. In the first quarter of 2020, the annual steward elections within the global Wikimedia community took place, resulting in 7 new stewards. 1 Steward resigned during the annual confirmations, 2 were removed by community and steward consensus, both in good standing. The user group did not develop formal hierarchical structures but remained consensus-drived among members. Co-contacts are Base and DerHexer, after Ajraddatz stepped down from this position.

Communications

Due to the nature of our members who work in security-related fields, an internal wiki was used where experiences about global abuse was shared (documentation of cases, processes, etc.). We also used a private mailing list (steward-l) where Wikimedia Stewards discussed various cases in more than 1,100 emails in the reported period. Wikimedia Stewards handled more than 5,500 tickets sent to the OTRS stewards queue in the reported period, mostly queries about previous actions of Wikimedia Stewards.

Wikimedia Stewards changed the frequence of their bi-monthly hour-long calls with WMF departments to a monthly base due to in increased need of internal cases and advisory needs by WMF. Recently, advice for IP blocks on ptwiki and ruwiki was given. Within the reported period, Wikimedia Stewards advised WMF on several topics and joined additional calls, e.g. about IP masking, changes to user agents. Wikimedia Stewards helped select member of the Trust and Safety Case Review Committee and gave intensive feedback to the proposal of the Community Resilience & Sustainability department to the Board of Trustees which resulted in a statement on the next steps on Community Health (like Universal Code of Conduct).

Online activities

Standard onwiki activities of Wikimedia stewards are visible on a new activity statistics page: Stewards/statistics. For editcounts of the user group please also have a look at these statistics (~ 200,000 edits and log actions). Besides that we completed annual activities like the admin activity review/2019 for administrators on small wikis.

Offline activities

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic we couldn't hold our annual gatherings at the Wikimedia Summit or Wikimania. The last in-person meeting with the WMF happened in 2015; another one was under discussion but put on hold due to the pandemic. Other in-person meetings did not happen due to the scattering of its members around the world.

Official statements

The Wikimedia Stewards User Group discussed the Community open letter on renaming and decided to support the letter with internal consensus.

Publications

Members of the Wikimedia Stewards User group helped finalize the reports for the “Thriving in Safety Space” which they conducted together with members of the Trust and Safety team of the WMF. A presentation on banners and translations, both handled also by Wikimedia Stewards, in German language was published.