Hello everyone, I'd like to give my two cents in a few points.

* Self-introduction
* Modship
* Wiki Cap Situation

== Self-introduction ==

I've seen in the IRC people rightfully question who am I, and so forth. I'm Yossef (duh), I was born and raised in a small country in South America called Ecuador, but currently live in the Middle East, due to my heritage and such. I started playing TF2 in late 2010s, back then I used to play in SourceOP's TF2 servers, a community where eventually I became a regular a staff member. In the somewhat early days of TF2 Trading, SourceOP (SOP) was the pioneer in Reputation Threads in it's forums, for the people who are not familiar, basically it consisted on a thread of people giving you +rep for outside Steam trades (eg: Paypal, BTCs, etc.) in order to build credibility and trust. My main role as a Mod there was to check that the trades and reputations were legit, but I also cracked down scammers that used alts in order to infiltrate the forums and stuff. Part of the role as well was to work with other trading communities like now defunct TF2Outpost and Steamrep, in order to prevent these scammers to scam users.
Somewhere around in 2013 I joined the Wiki, but due to my roles in SOP and real life, I couldn't be active, until much later.

Now present day.

I started being active to the wiki after finishing college and starting my job, since Spanish in the end of the day is my mother tongue, I felt perhaps I could help around translating stuffs. Thanks to some wiki users (you guys know who you are!) that helped me a lot on being familiar with the wiki, I felt welcomed and enjoyed contributing on what I could until this day. As mentioned, I mostly do /es translations, but once in a while I also upload images mainly in order to improve Galleries. Moreover, me and another user sent a pilot to Wind for a Weapon Demonstration for TFC, and we are currently waiting for his approval/feedback.

== Modship ==

Since the hiatus, I was looking to expand more my possibilities for contributions, since Staff inactivity sadly is something that is bound to happen, I talked to some staff members about me volunteering in becoming a staff member, and hopefully help mitigating this situation, furthermore one extra Cap voter could help process the nominations faster. One staff member was very supportive in me becoming one, and despite the fact that I appreciate the support, I believe that the approach that Wookipan made is the right one, by having other staff members on voting in the candidate they seem fit. I completely 100% understand if people seemed doubtful in voting for me, since I'm not a Cap holder myself, for someone who doesn't know me, there is nothing that can back me up asides from the words of other users. Again, I completely understand, and I'm happy regardless of the outcome, my main goal is to help as much as I can, and hopefully have some middle ground and have this hiatus over.

== Wiki Cap Situation ==

As we all know, people have been suggesting maybe some reforms in the current nomination process. Taking in account the historical context in which the nominations were built, it makes perfect sense, but things always change and we have to adapt, as everything in life. I don't know if it is my place to say this, but I don't think that closing the Cap nominations is a solution, at least not until one day Valve decides to shut the TF2 servers down for good, then we could enter archive mode. In the meantime we can adapt on how things currently are.
Since you don't only have to be a translator in order to be awarded the Wiki Cap, I came across some few ideas that could help ease the process on valuable users:

= For image/video makers =
I suggest on giving Cap holders, that were awarded in the matter, a say in the nomination. Meaning that their votes would equally be worth as a one from a staff member.

= For translators =
We all know how hard it is now that the STS is gone, and the difficulties that comes in fairly reviewing a language that not everyone speaks, and the solution that I can think of in the meantime is having a mix of from what some users suggested. For languages that are active, we could keep the traditional method of having a third party (or even a staff member that knows the language), in giving a review so people can vote based on the review, but keep in mind, translation reviews should not be the only factor, I believe that the voters should keep in mind the participation in discussions, IRC, community engagement, etc.

For not so "common" languages, I'd suggest on having a more private discussions between the staff members, meaning that the nominee does not need to be nominated on the traditional way, since the chances of that user in question being nominated is very unlikely compared to someone that belongs in an active language team. A way to review the nominee's contributions, is by bringing natives from other popular wikis (maybe Wikipedia?). One thing that could be done is handling to the third party (or parties) a handful of randomly selected articles on different topics such as items, patches, maps, TF2 lore, etc. and let those third parties review the nominee's contributions. Of course, the aforementioned considerations (participation in discussions, IRC, community engagement, etc.) should always be considered before voting.

Thanks for reading, I hope that this helped in some way~