Sean Whitton's user page

“

The unexamined life is not worth living.

”

— Socrates, Apology

Greetings, I am Sean Whitton (formerly Xyrael), Wikimedian.

I'm around here because I see the project as something that has the potential to make positive changes to this world. By empowering people with free knowledge I believe that we can improve lives and cross boundaries. We can do this by staying together as a community, encouraging more people to get involved, and spreading the word about how fantastic truly free knowledge is.

My old, significantly prettier (but less reliable) userpage is here.

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Current Wikimedia activities

My activities these days are generally as a volunteer for the Wikimedia Foundation, the charity behind Wikipedia, rather than working on the encyclopedia itself. I'm not as active as I used to be due to time commitments in real life, but when active I work in the following areas, generally related to communications.

I'm the chair of the IRC Group Contacts which means I'm the ultimate authority for Wikimedia's IRC presence as the liaison between the freenode team who host our channels and the Wikimedia community. While you should ping your individual channel operators for specific help in channels, I'm around as one of the final resorts of appeal for decisions and advice. You can find me on IRC under the nick seanw. I've been doing this since late 2006.
I'm an OTRS agent answering the info and press queues which means that I am one of the team responsible for replying to e-mails coming into Wikimedia through those funneled via the 'Contact Wikipedia' link in the sidebar. This can involve some on-wiki editing in order to help resolve problems. OTRS volunteers have been said to firefight in the sense that we try to deal with public concerns efficiently and privately before they blow up into far more serious issues. I've been doing this on and off since early 2007.
I deal with requests for accounts on the Wikimedia Foundation Wiki, the wiki that isn't publically editable that powers our public website. Established Wikimedians can request accounts here if they have a need. I've been doing this since mid-2008.

This is what I do actively. There are other various bits and bobs that I do time to time, like any Wikimedian.

Previous Wikimedia activities

I'm a mediator emeriti of the Mediation Committee here on the English Wikipedia. I've done other forms of dispute resolution, and plenty of general feather-smoothing (and ruffling).
I'm an administrator here on the English Wikipedia, so I've cleared backlogs, closed debates and blocked vandals a fair few times. I brought the total of admins to one thousand with my acquiring of the mop which was pretty cool.
I have focussed on reverting vandalism and welcoming new users, as well as checking newly created pages.
I've done lots of general PR for WMF with the Communications Committee and the Communication Projects Group.
I used to moderate the VandalProof application, now largely superceded by other tools.
I've taken a few pictures to add to articles. I'm not much of a photographer but they're better than large quantities of unillustrated text.
I've even received a few awards.