2017 AGM/Elections/Questions

2017 Annual General Meeting AGM: Elections (Candidate statements · Candidate questions — Resolutions Miscellaneous: 2017 Annual Review · 2017 Annual Report  · UK Wikimedian of the Year 2017 · Training refresher · Timeline

This page is for voters who would like to ask questions of the candidates for the 2017 Wikimedia UK Board elections. Candidates may choose to answer on this page, but they are not obliged to do so.

Further information is available at Candidate Statements.

Questions

For all candidates

Question One

For Michael Maggs

Question One

You were originally elected as an experienced Wikimedia contributor. What do you do on a regular basis to keep up with on-wiki trends so you don't lose touch with the online community? Deryck Chan (talk) 19:21, 11 July 2017 (BST)

Hi Deryck, thank you for your question. I'm not sure your premise is quite accurate as, if I remember rightly, my original platform back in 2013 was based mostly on my experience of governance and strategy as well as my legal and copyright expertise. Only at the very end of my initial statement did I say “and I'm also a bureaucrat on Wikimedia Commons”.

Anyway, to answer your question, I am very much aware that my workload as chair, particularly in the early days, has severely impacted my personal editing. And family issues over the last 12 months (the death of my father and the long-term serious illness of my mother) has made it impossible for me to be actively involved on more than an occasional basis. Nevertheless, a lack of editing doesn't mean a lack of interest, and I have always made it a point to keep up with recent community developments by checking my watchlists at least twice a week and subscribing to (and actually reading!) the main community mailing lists including Wikimedia-l, WikimediaUK-l, Commons-l and OTRS, as well as a variety of more specialist lists relating to Wikimedia public policy (copyright advocacy), the Chapters' list, the Chairs’ list, Wiki Research and several others. MichaelMaggs (talk) 14:14, 14 July 2017 (BST)

For Nick Poole

Question One

For Doug Taylor

Question One

You were originally elected as an experienced Wikimedia contributor. What do you do on a regular basis to keep up with on-wiki trends so you don't lose touch with the online community? Deryck Chan (talk) 19:21, 11 July 2017 (BST)

Hi Deryck, it's true that I was an experienced Wikimedian when I was elected two years ago (as well as at my previous stint in 2012-13), but I'd like to think that my volunteering with WMUK as a Lead Trainer, and the experience I bring as a trustee and chair of several charities over the last 30+ years were also important parts of what I brought to the role as a trustee of WMUK.

Nevertheless, to answer your question specifically, in the last two years since I was elected, I've made around 7,500 edits to the English Wikipedia and a few hundred or so to other projects and language Wikipedias. I am a very active member of WikiProject Medicine, WikiProject Accessibility and WikiProject Scuba. I've interacted regularly with many of the most active members of the community on Wikipedia and have provided technical help and development in several fields, most notably by writing Lua modules to fetch Wikidata into Wikipedia infoboxes, and I'm currently most pleased that the work I did in updating Template:Reflist to deal with deprecated parameters and incorporate the new 'responsive' functionality has now been consolidated into that template.

A full list of of my contributions is available at my contributions page and an overview can be found at wmflabs. --RexxS (talk) 19:51, 14 July 2017 (BST)