In this article, we will explore the fascinating history of Wikipedia:Mailing lists, exploring its origins, its impact on today's society, and its evolution over time. From its beginnings to the present, Wikipedia:Mailing lists has played a crucial role in various aspects of human life, from politics to culture, technology and science. Throughout these pages, we will examine the many facets of Wikipedia:Mailing lists, from its most controversial aspects to its most notable contributions, with the aim of fully understanding the importance of Wikipedia:Mailing lists in the contemporary world.
The projects of the Wikimedia Foundation have a number of mailing lists which are open to anyone who subscribes and a few private mailing lists open only to selected users.
Please see the list descriptions for posting information. Most lists are moderated, so that posts by non-members need to be manually approved. Some lists disallow any posts by nonmembers.
Please respect Wikiquette and avoid personal attacks on the mailing lists, especially in the subject header as this is likely to be repeated by those replying. File a request at Phabricator for problems with mailing lists or for starting a new list.
Mailing lists are available in a number of formats: via a web archive, by email, or by NNTP using the mail-to-news gateway Gmane. Offsite archives of Wikipedia's mailing lists can be found at Gmane, MARC, Gossamer Threads, and Nabble Forums.
Email addresses are currently obfuscated in the downloadable archives, making them unreadable by some mail readers. To convert one of these archives to mbox format, you could use perl -p -i -e '/^From/ && s/ at /@/' filename or sed '/^From /s/ at /@/' obfuscated.mbox > clear.mbox.
Overview
Public mailing lists
There is a complete list of public mailing lists for all Wikimedia Foundation matters at meta, including:
Projects other than Wikipedia
Languages other than English
Local chapters serving predominantly non-English-speaking users
The public mailing lists for the Wikipedia project include:
Wikimedia-l for announcements, cross-project matters and Wikimedia Foundation issues
MediaWiki-l for people with questions about their own installation of the MediaWiki software (i.e., not Wikimedia projects)
Wikitech-l for any Wikimedia development issues, technical discussions, and hardware purchases
Wikipedia-l for issues specific to Wikipedia (and not sister projects such as Wiktionary) but affecting editions of Wikipedia in more than one language
Private mailing lists
There are various private mailing lists hosted by Wikimedia Foundation servers, although some of them allow public messaging. They facilitate internal communication among Wikimedia Foundation board members, and certain committees and subcommittees.
oversight-l, the oversight mailing list, used for oversighter group discussion only (only those with oversight rights can send to or read it, non-member emails are automatically rejected) NOTE:Please do not send requests for oversight to this list any longer. Instead, use oversight-en-wp mentioned below.
oversight-en-wpwikipedia.org, the oversight request VRT queue (anyone can send messages and requests to this address, but only users with oversight rights can view those messages).
checkuser-l, the global checkuser mailing list (only those with checkuser rights can send to or read it, non-member emails are automatically rejected)
checkuser-en-wpwikipedia.org, the checkuser request VRT queue (anyone can send messages and requests to this address, but only users with checkuser rights can view those messages).
Other
accounts-enwiki-l mailing list for discussion of account requests and the ACC tool interface
wikipedia-en-editfilters mailing list for discussion of edit filters (anybody can send to the list, but only edit filter helpers, edit filter managers and administrators may read it)
unblock-en-l mailing list for discussion of unblock requests and the UTRS tool interface (note: this list was used for unblock requests, but was phased out for that purpose in March 2012 with the deployment of UTRS)
otrs-en-l mailing list for discussion between English-speaking OTRS members of all queues.
For a listing of current collaborations, tasks, and news, see the Community portal. For a listing of ongoing discussions and current requests, see the Dashboard.