The Wikimedia movement grows and maintains one of the largest repositories of free knowledge in the world today. Our community of volunteers make Wikipedia and its sister projects possible by building community and inviting participation. Connecting with readers and editors is critical to organizing and creating a sense of community participation to make our work possible.
Central Notice Support Specialist (Part-Time Contract)
One of the key tools for communicating across the movement is CentralNotice. Central Notice is a massive banner-messaging system that helps our community reach billions of readers and thousands of editors through community-developed messages every year. Through these banners, our community invites editors to campaign events or to participate in strategic discussions, and invites readers to learn about and get more involved in the movement. At present, community access to Central Notice is managed by volunteer administrators. Through discussion with these administrators, we have identified a number of challenges that increase volunteer workload and make the user experience of banner requests challenging for community members. These include:
- The system for requesting and communicating about CentralNotice banners is built and maintained manually, using on-wiki templates and follows steps difficult for unfamiliar users that sometimes introduce errors.
- New users of Central Notice consistently face difficulty understanding the system and best-use of Central Notice, resulting in incomplete or confusing banner requests.
- Central Notice Admins do not have enough information about the impact of Central Notice banners to judge the success or failure of banner usage and make adjustments to policy.
- Central Notice Admins have also voiced a need for support in documentation (and improvement) of the admin workflow and recruitment/onboarding of new Central Notice administrators.
The Campaigns team at the Wikimedia Foundation seeks a Central Notice Support Specialist, who can work closely with volunteer Central Notice administrators, to help them better manage and support organizers and contributors wanting to use Central Notice. As an embedded supporter of the group, the Support Specialist will focus on making sure that the workflows for Central Notice administrators feel less burdensome, identifying ways to increase the overall impact of Central Notice, and developing and popularizing recommended Central Notice workflows for use by a greater diversity of stakeholders throughout the movement.
You are responsible for:
- Working with the Central Notice Administrators and Foundation staff to improve the on-wiki Central Notice workflow (including revisiting calendaring https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Calendar and request templates at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Request) and policies to reduce volunteer energy required to make effective Central Notice campaigns.
- Monitoring requests for Central Notice banners, and supporting Central Notice administrators in identifying and addressing problems related to requests. When problems arise, triage problems with Wikimedia Foundation stakeholders if appropriate.
- Improving access to design and analytics tools for Central Notice administrators to improve informed decisions about how the powerful tool can be used.
- Support learning opportunities for Central Notice Administrators, WMF, and key stakeholders to help grow understanding of the impact of Central Notice.
- Documentation and creation of new defaults for standard banner code, for easier re-use by current and future Central Notice Administrators.
Skills and Experience:
- Familiarity with technical or administrative processes on Wikimedia wikis, which preferably includes direct experience with Central Notice.
- Experience producing technical documentation and online workflows that help new or less technical users easily engage with products and tools.
- Experience collecting information from data systems and helping others interpret that data to make informed decisions.
- Experience teaching new users technology in a way that empowers them to make the most of complex systems, and producing simple training materials to support that.
Qualities that are important to us:
- The ability to problem solve, learn quickly, and learn how to use new technologies
- Experience working in community and volunteer environments, where diverse opinions, levels of experience, and skills are present and require compromise across needs to create impact.
- Comfort communicating in multilingual environments in a way that mitigates conflict or misunderstanding
- Proven ability to adhere to deadlines and to seek out learning and support
- A track record of creating supportive spaces for others in online environments like the Wikimedia Projects.
Additionally, we’d love it if you have:
- Technical skills useful for contributing to the front-end or end-user components of MediaWiki, including experience with Mediawiki Template Syntax, JavaScript, JSON, CSS, HTML, OOUI and/or Lua.
- A history of technical contributions to Meta Wiki or other Wikimedia projects and an understanding of the on-wiki technical environment.
- Experience with the Translate-wiki interface, especially as it used in multi-lingual Central Notice banners
- Experience communicating technology in languages or cultural contexts beyond the English-speaking internet.
- Experience with mass communications or marketing tools used on other websites and communications platforms, such as Ad systems, banner systems, chatbots, etc.
About the Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe that everyone has the potential to contribute something to our shared knowledge, and that everyone should be able to access that knowledge freely. We host Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible, and advocate for policies that enable Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive.
The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization that relies on donations. We receive donations from millions of individuals around the world, with an average donation of about $15. We also receive donations through institutional grants and gifts. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.