So. I ranted on this subject at some length in staff chat yesterday; probably a waste of time to do so. File that away for future reference. To summarize and recap my thoughts, from the discussion last night and numerous others in chat and on 05 across the last however many months now:
A member of Junior Staff should consult with their team captain first and, if the captain's word disagrees with this document, to take their captain's word.
I believe with a degree of conviction that this is a terrible way to treat the position of junior staff. Every other position in the staff structure has clearly defined responsibilities, applicable regardless of which team, if any, they are part of. It's a mistake to treat junior staff as the odd role out, with privileges and responsibilities solely at will of the their team's captain. This is a great way to foster confusion about what they can and cannot, or should and should not do. They will obviously do different tasks on different teams, but there should still be universal expectations and limitations for junior staff as a whole, applicable regardless of which team they're on. Rules and policies that can be ignored and discarded at will are neither.
I further disagree with the assertion that there are or should be two different types of junior staff. The role, at its inception, was very clearly outlined to be a trial: to see if someone could handle the most basic of tasks and assess if they were worth consideration for promotion to full staff. We are not so short-staffed that we need to have junior staff performing tasks which would otherwise be the purview of operational staff and above. I'm not really aware of any discussion taking place regarding whether or not the purpose of the role should be modified or expanded - this would be a pretty significant change of policy, and probably ought to be handled as such, unless I'm waaay off base here. As far as I can tell, people just started saying, "This is also what junior staff is for," or "This is what I use my junior staff for," disregarding the original intent. The sole exception here, as mentioned above, being Wikiwalk, which functions differently enough from all the other teams, and is uniquely intended to be temporary, that bending our definitions of what junior staff is to accommodate Wikiwalk seems silly. Treating the "helpers" attached to Wikiwalk as junior staff only muddles our definitions of what junior staff is. We're trying to jam a square peg through a round hole by doing so.
I'll come back and say the rest of my bit on the subject tomorrow. It's late.