Commons:Requests for comment/Commons and OTRS

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OTRS is a tool used by the Wikimedia projects, including Commons, to manage and archive e-mail conversations. The main use of OTRS in relation to Commons is the verification and archiving of licensing permissions by volunteers.

Sending e-mail to OTRS may be required in order to provide evidence that the copyright holder has given permission to publish a file under a free license. Such evidence should be sent to permissions-commons@wikimedia.org (or a language specific queue). OTRS is also used to handle e-mail reports of copyright violations.

The current Commons-related OTRS queues are:

• permissions-commons
• permissions-commons-ar (Arabic)
• permissions-commons-de (German)
• permissions-commons-es (Spanish)
• permissions-commons-fr (French)
• permissions-commons-he (Hebrew)
• permissions-commons-pl (Polish)
• permissions-commons-pt (Portuguese)

Although the total number of Commons OTRS currently stands at 250, the overall number of active Commons OTRS volunteers is miniscule. At the time of this RFC, the Commons OTRS backlog is 7 days.

Volunteers gain access to Commons OTRS queues by applying at Meta where individuals can comment on the application. All decisions relating to Commons OTRS personnel are made by a small group of OTRS administrators. The Meta OTRS administrators may take individual comments into account, but they are not bound to.

Decisions on the revocation of access to Commons OTRS queues is also done completely at the discretion of the same Meta administrators, and they do so without discussion with the individual, nor are their decisions subject to oversight by the Commons community.

As the Commons OTRS queues are an essential part of the operation of Commons a discussion on how this process can be brought under the wing of the Commons community should take place.

Proposal 1

All Commons administrators be given the OTRS flag and access to Commons Permissions queues listed above.

Comments

Commons administrators during the course of their normal duties on the project often need to make decisions on whether to keep or delete files based upon information which is sometimes found in OTRS tickets. As Admins are entrusted by the community to hold the tools, which can entail having access to private information (such as revision deletions), it stands to reason that they should be entrusted to hold access to Commons OTRS permissions queues.

•  Support - I have no problem with that reasoning. Amatulic (talk) 19:01, 22 November 2014 (UTC)
•  Support - Sounds like a good idea. Admins need better access to OTRS emails to better and quickly verify copyright status. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 00:54, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
• Comment: Technically speaking, consensus built on a Commons' page can't be valid for such proposal. It has to be done at Meta Wikimedia OTRS page somewhere as the flag-distributor team is actually sitting there. §§Dharmadhyaksha§§ {Talk / Edits} 14:58, 20 December 2014 (UTC)
  •  Support Sound. Do folks agree with the above comment? Was it done (or attempted) there? --Elvey (talk) 03:58, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Proposal 2

Access to the Commons OTRS permissions queues shall be granted to non-administrators upon request to the Commons community.

Comments

Currently bureaucrats are the only group which can add or remove the OTRS flag from editors.

• In addition, access to any OTRS area is not decided by individual project communities like Commons, but by the OTRS community. The OTRS flag does not determine access to tickets, it's just an identifier flag. I've been an OTRS volunteer for a long time and someone only just recently slapped the flag on my account. Amatulic (talk) 18:59, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

• Additionally, there are already non-administrators with OTRS access to commons-related queues. IMHO this point is moot. Platonides (talk) 12:20, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

Questions

Virtue of using OTRS

For a while I've had the feeling that using OTRS for file permissions is kind of strange and doesn't really scale well. It also lacks transparency (albeit intentionally... OTRS is typically used for private communication). I'm not sure how much I trust the OTRS database to be easily accessible in perpetuity (we could switch software at some point), unlike the wiki database, which have downloadable dumps and are a public record that's much closer to the files themselves.

I think we should explore ways to integrate file permissions with the wiki and remove the dependency on OTRS. What's stopping us from doing this? Why is OTRS necessary to this process? Just for e-mail address verification purposes? A lack of a proper licensing form? --MZMcBride (talk) 18:44, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

Cross-reference: m:OTRS/Reports/2013#photosubmission. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:52, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

@MZMcBride: I suppose the good thing about this system is it means people do not need to disclose any additional documentation required to verify permission (eg. invoices, letters etc etc). I've had a few people come to me for photosubmissions, for example, as they didn't want to create an account, or didn't understand the whole system, which is fair enough. Most permissions require a statement of permission from an "official" address, which means that it is easier to verify; Anyone could set up an account with any email address, while spoofing addresses on emails is harder to get away with. --Mdann52talk to me! 09:54, 30 November 2014 (UTC)

Mdann52: I think e-mail (or more generically, identity) verification problems are solvable. We already have infrastructure to store and verify e-mail addresses (we do it with user accounts, of course). We could build a MediaWiki extension around that functionality.

Another idea I'd like to explore is the ability to upload a file by e-mail. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 02:50, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

Email Address Access

Just so the community is clear, OTRS access includes the power to use an *@wikimedia.org email address (support@wikimedia?) in order to send emails and create tickets. Inherent in Proposal #1 above is the idea that all administrators should be allowed access to this feature. Whether this is a good or bad thing is a separate idea. It should be clear, however, that this power is available. Killiondude (talk) 23:04, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

The email addresses have queue-related names, if you have access to read emails sent to permissions-commonswikimedia.org, you can send an email from there too (in addition of being able to reply from that email). support would be quite a bad name, but if we really wanted a queue for handling normal support questions (I don't think it'd be a good idea) it could be created. Platonides (talk) 12:15, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

I wasn't proposing an email address but rather putting forth the notion that OTRS users have access to a *@wikimedia.org address. Thanks for the info about exactly how creating a ticket worked. I guess I didn't pay attention the few times that I did it. :) Killiondude (talk) 21:46, 1 December 2014 (UTC)