Dear all,
This is to invite you to the episode 14 of WikiAfrica Hour, titled
*WikiGovernance
"On Board"*, where we'll be discussing with the 2022 WMF Board of Trustees
election candidates from Africa, in the persons of Tobechukwu Precious
Friday, Gilbert Ndihokubwayo, Abderamane Abakar Brahim, Egbe Eugene Agbor
and Joris Quarshie. Come learn more about their motivations and aspirations
for the WMF Board if elected.
Date: 24th June 2022
Time: 4pm UTC
Details: w.wiki/3E6L
<https://w.wiki/3E6L?fbclid=IwAR2XbkfsgTUhwZ-KwSB-IA8wkWvARTjgJz_efBsFrADI5x…>
Regards,
Ceslause Ogbonnaya
*WikiAfrica Hour Host*
The question of support goes beyond financial.
As the volunteer who wrote and deployed the mirror of Our World in Data
used by WikiProjectMed and deployed the VideoWiki application, I have to
say that, unfortunately, I have not found WMF technical staff very
supportive.
This is all the more surprising given that there is a Developer Advocacy
team that is 'tasked with supporting the technical communities who use
Wikimedia web APIs and software projects to spread and improve free
knowledge' and 'to actively recruit and mentor new technical contributors',
but who seem to perceive their role as protecting the organization from
those very volunteers. I often encounter an attitude that says that we are
incompetent noobs that must be managed by staff, and any error or lack of
familiarity with WMF internal systems can be met with derision and sarcasm.
There is no doubt that WMF applications and infrastructure are an extremely
valuable resource, but it would be nice if volunteers could be similarly
regarded. I have spent much of the last 10 years working on projects that
further WMF goals and core values. I would prefer to do so in a collegial
or even collaborative way.
The staff who manage WMF systems and infrastructure are smart, competent,
and well organized, but they are not very generous. They seem to regard the
rest of us as barbarians at the gate.
I have hesitated to write this, but I think it needs to be said.
Tim Moody
Hello.
I happened to look at <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Design> earlier today and I noticed that the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. design team is about 24 people these days. I found this very surprising, as that's quite a few people. And it's even more perplexing if you have visited Wikimedia wikis previously, as they're somewhat infamously not known for cutting-edge design. The vast majority of the content is very simple headings, body text, and sometimes thumbnails, all wrapped within a site skin that very infrequently changes.
If we assume that each design person's salary is $70,000/year USD, which I think is a very conservative estimate, that's about $1,680,000 of donor money spent per year on just design team salaries. Again, the actual figure is probably much higher.
When $1.68M of donor money is spent each year, what are we getting in return? Concretely and specifically, what is the return on this very large amount of money being spent every year? I see the various titles listed such as design researcher and user experience designer, but I can't wrap my head around what all of this money is being spent on, having personally used Wikimedia sites and services for more than 15 years.
MZMcBride
Dear Wikimedians,
Volunteer Supporters Network would like to invite you to another
skillsharing meeting. This time it will be an event around writing LGBTIQ+
biographies in Wikipedia.
The event will happen at *June 28th at 4 PM UTC on Zoom.* During the
training conducted by Vic Sfriso from Wikimedia Argentina you will:
- learn tips and strategies to overcome barriers in writing LGBTIQ+
biographies in Wikipedia
- know more about a guide from Wikimedia Argentina focused on LGBTIQ+
biographies, which is currently being translated into English
You can learn more about the event and register here (registration is
required to get the link do meeting)
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_Supporters_Network/VSN_Training:_…
The event is a part of a series of open skill-share events organized by
the Volunteer Supporters Network - you can check other upcoming events
here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_Supporters_Network/Meetings
As always - we are looking forward to seeing you all!
--
Natalia Szafran-Kozakowska
Dear WMF accounts staff,
Could you kindly clarify whether the "Salaries, other compensation,
employee benefits" figure in Part I, line 15 of the Form 990 relates solely
to the 291 employees indicated in Part I, line 5, or whether it also
includes salaries, compensation and benefits for the 82 contractors listed
in Part V, line 1a of the Form 990.
Thank you.
Andreas
------- TL;DR -------
Wikimedia Deutschland is looking for a partner organization to jointly
design and run the WikidataCon 2023. This organization should be recognized
legally in their country, be located in the Global South, have previous
experience with running events and have a Wikidata-enthusiastic community.
If your organization is interested, please reach out directly to Léa
Lacroix before July 31st.
----------------------------
Dear Wikimedians,
As you may know, the last edition of the WikidataCon in 2021
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikidataCon_2021> was organized
jointly by Wikimedia Deutschland and Wiki Movimento Brasil. The result of
these intense 10 months of collaboration was an incredibly successful
online event with about 500 participants, more than 40% of which joined
from the Global South.
This partnership not only created an innovative event, hosting multiple
conversations about the future of Wikidata and reimagining it from the
margins, but also gave us the opportunity to examine our priorities and
points of views, to learn from each other’s experiences and to share
skills. You can find a summary of what we learned, tried and achieved in
our common documentation
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiProject_remote_event_participation/Docu…>
.
We’re starting to work on the concept and planning of a new WikidataCon
event for 2023, and so we’re very eager to form a new partnership with a
new organization in the Wikimedia movement. Together we would design and
organize the event and bring new perspectives to this important gathering
for the international Wikidata community.
We have defined baseline criteria to help select our future partner, based
on our vision of WikidataCon:
-
In order to broaden our perspectives and decenter from the existing
majority of Wikidata editors, we are looking for an organization located in
the Global South;
-
Those involved in co-organizing the conference should show a lot of
enthusiasm for Wikidata and have an existing connection to local
communities involved in Wikidata-related activities;
-
We are looking for a group of people with prior experience in organizing
events who are keen to experiment with new formats and design the future of
Wikimedia events together;
-
For administrative reasons, we can only partner up with a group legally
recognized as an organization in their country that is able to sign
contracts, issue invoices and receive funds from Germany.
This call for proposals will remain open until July 31st. If your
organization would like to apply, you need only to send me a private email
so we can start a conversation about your ideas and how this partnership
would work.
The selection of a partner will take place in August/September 2022. After
a public announcement, the collaboration between Wikimedia Deutschland and
this organization would run from October 2022 to November 2023. The event
itself would take place in a format to be later decided among the
organizers (online, onsite or hybrid) in October 2023.
Feel free to share this email with anyone who might be interested or on any
relevant channels.
I remain available for any questions, and I’m very excited to engage in
discussions with the many organizations of Wikidata enthusiasts in the
movement!
Best regards,
--
Léa Lacroix
Community Engagement Coordinator
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.
Hi SJ,
Re " Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and companies race to
enclose derivatives of our work." Not an easy task when work is licenced
Share Alike and By Attribution. But yes it is a real threat, and should be
one that both the WMF and the volunteer community can agree to combat. For
the WMF unattributed reuse reduces clickthroughs and thereby potential
donations. For some volunteers not being credited for the work you
contribute reduces motivation, for others it increases the difficulty of
avoiding circular referencing. Especially when Wikipedia winds up citing as
a source an article copied from a page on Wikipedia that has itself been
deleted.
Attribution and share alike are at times a pain to comply with, and I fear
that there are those in the movement who see this feature as a bug, and
that this contributed to the use of CC0 on Wikidata.
But the opportunity is still there. The WMF could employ some legal staff,
or fund a legal charity, that would strongly encourage reusers to respect
the CC-BY-SA licence. This would protect the work people have done from
being used to derive works that are neither attributed nor shared alike.
It would protect WMF revenue, maintain volunteer motivation and make it
difficult to "enclose derivatives of our work.
Employing a few dozen legals and paralegals in a country such as India
could make a real difference to this, and at least partially address the
issues others have raised about the lack of WMF spending in developing
countries.
WSC
>
>
> Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2022 17:48:12 -0400
> From: Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: what do we do with all this opportunity?
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <CAAtU9WL5yFXyArg5qpRr1wtwXQSq=010mhZa4YJ4+Shhy4HZ=
> Q(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
> boundary="000000000000b566b205e1bfd4c3"
>
> We face the paradox <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox> of
> choice <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice>, the lull of peace, and
> the fog of distributed bureaucracy.
> ~ With great possibility comes disfocus. (and a few things with focus!)
> ~ With no clear challenge or adversary, we've become comfortable fussing
> over small changes... Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and
> companies race to enclose derivatives of our work. This peace is coming to
> an end.
> ~ Our central overhead costs are quite high. So high^ that it seems to
> baffle everyone involved, each believing the bureaucracy must be caused by
> some other part of the system, outside of their or their org's control.
>
> Our projects are already a global standard for multimodal collaboration at
> scale, we should embrace that and rise to meet it. Building some of the
> world's best free, mulitilingual, accessible tools for is within our remit,
> experience, and budget.
> [Discourse raised a *total *of $20M over its lifetime. we could support +
> spin out free-knowledge free-software layers like that every year.]
>
> Let's practice working together, focusing on a few things each year that
> can change not only our projects but the world, honoring existing work and
> aggressively shedding anything we are doing that others are alreay doing
> almost as well.
>
> SJ
>
> *^* Up to 10-to-1 in some areas, plus delays of years inserted into
> otherwise continuous processes. This ratio can slip into the negative if
> one includes opportunity cost, or funded work that displaces or drives out
> comparable voluntary work; or that demands thousands of hours of input for
> little result.
> 🌍🌏🌎🌑
>
> On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 8:45 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
> galder158(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Or, maybe, just making Wikimedia a non-obsolete environment. I'm sure the
> > money can go to that effort.
> > ------------------------------
> > *From:* Felipe Schenone <schenonef(a)gmail.com>
> > *Sent:* Friday, June 17, 2022 12:51 PM
> > *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikimedia Foundation Inc. design staff
> >
> > I agree with the diagnosis, but maybe not with the solution. If Wikimedia
> > is getting "overfunding" and doesn't quite know what to so with it,
> there's
> > probably plenty of good things to do. We could start a community process
> to
> > decide it, because as you say, reducing funding efforts or saving
> > indefinitely for the future isn't likely to happen or even desirable,
> > considering the alternatives.
> >
> > Here are some ideas:
> >
> > * Investing in clean energy sources for Wikimedia servers.
> > * Funding of external developers and libraries on which MediaWiki
> depends.
> > * Funding of open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, to not stray too
> > far the original intentions of donors and volunteers.
> > * Funding of other non-knowledge altruistic projects (like buying land
> for
> > a natural reserve). I'm sure the funding team could rethink and
> generalize
> > the campaign to justify this use for future donations.
> >
> > On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 4:47 AM <tim.herb(a)gmx.de> wrote:
> >
> > The question of you is important. The Wikimedia Foundation hired a lot of
> > people in the last years and I do not see so big change in the output. It
> > is a question that is from my point of view relevant for different areas
> at
> > the Wikimedia Foundation. I dont support a too big focus on efficiency
> that
> > needs a lot of metrics to measure and to create these metrics needs then
> a
> > lot of staff. What is needed and what not is not easy to measure. With
> > increasing available resources the staff will probably increase. This is
> an
> > usual behaviour of humans that they try to use resources if available and
> > do not only allocate them for the future or say no and try to reduce the
> > needed resources if not neccessary. From my point of view the Wikimedia
> > Foundation should reduce the Fundraising acitivities and try to reduce in
> > the next years the yearly expenses or pay at least attention that they do
> > not increase further. The salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are
> > currently from my point of view in relation to Germany based NGOs high. I
> > think interesting documents to get an overview about the work of the
> > Wikimedia Foundation are the quaterly tuning sessions.
> >
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_tuning_ses…
> >
> > Hogü-456
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines
> > at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > Public archives at
> >
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org…
> > To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines
> > at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > Public archives at
> >
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org…
> > To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
Hi all,
When I started in January, I shared with you that one of my top priorities
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Chief_Executive_Office…>
coming to the Wikimedia Foundation was to actively step in and support the
Foundation’s product and technology teams while we recruited executive
leadership of these mission critical functions with a new Chief Product and
Technology Officer.
I am delighted to introduce you to Selena Deckelmann, who will be joining
the Wikimedia Foundation on August 1. She is based in Portland, Oregon in
the United States.
Selena is currently the Senior Vice President at Mozilla, where she has
been for the last nine years. She leads the Firefox organization of more
than 400 people responsible for all Firefox product and technology
functions including desktop, mobile, web platform, and browser services.
I have gotten to know Selena over several months and also learned from
people who have worked with her over many years. She is known for
successfully driving change by getting stakeholders aligned around what’s
needed, and being seen as a trusted partner. Selena has built strong
credibility over many years with colleagues and also with a broader
developer community. She is described as a leader who can make the tough
decisions, develop skills, grow diverse contributors, and inspire teams.
She also has a great laugh and looks for joy in her work!
As context for the recruitment process: given the critical need to get this
right, we used two firms with global search expertise who specialized in
product/technology executive leadership roles. This meant double the work,
but allowed us to more quickly build a large, globally diverse pool of over
500 candidates. Once we identified a smaller number of finalists, they
participated in real-life case studies of some of our current challenges
and met with Wikimedia stakeholders over the course of many months.
As you all know, we have a highly unique and sometimes difficult
environment with a multifaceted mission, complex structure, and often
competing stakeholders. This is going to be a challenge for anyone,
especially given the steep learning curve at Wikimedia (which I can confirm
from my own experience!). I hope you will sign up to help me successfully
onboard Selena as she gets started!
Selena will share her own message with you shortly, and she can be reached
directly at sdeckelmann(a)wikimedia.org.
Maryana
Maryana Iskander
Wikimedia Foundation CEO
***
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2022/06/13/wikimedia-foundation-welcom…
Wikimedia Foundation welcomes Selena Deckelmann as Chief Product and
Technology Officer
13 June 2022, San Francisco — The Wikimedia Foundation today announced the
appointment of Selena Deckelmann as Chief Product and Technology Officer.
Selena is currently serving as Senior Vice President of Mozilla, where she
was responsible for Firefox. She will officially join on August 1, 2022.
Selena will lead the product and technology teams at the Wikimedia
Foundation. These teams support the technology infrastructure and
innovation that powers Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, one of the
most visited websites in the world with more than 16 billion pageviews per
month. They also enable more than 300,000 global volunteers to edit
Wikimedia projects each month.
“Selena has a proven track record of delivering results by enabling
individuals and teams to tackle unique and often complex challenges,” said
Maryana Iskander, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. “She has dedicated her
career to open source technologies for empowerment and inclusion.”
At Mozilla, where she has been for nearly a decade, Selena currently leads
the Firefox organization of more than 400 people responsible for all
Firefox product and technology functions including desktop, mobile, web
platform, and browser services. She oversaw some of the company’s most
significant achievements including performance projects like Quantum Flow,
architectural changes like Project Fission, key features like Enhanced
Tracking Protection and Total Cookie Protection, and services such as
Firefox Monitor. In her nine years at Mozilla, Selena held various other
roles including Vice President for Firefox Desktop, Senior Director for Web
Platform Engineering and Gecko Runtime, and Senior Manager for Gecko
Security Engineering.
Selena also brings experience from her previous roles as co-founder of
Prime Radiant, a software as a service business that explored how to
improve business processes at scale with checklist automation software, and
as Consulting Director of Development for The Ada Initiative, an
organization that was dedicated to increasing the participation of women in
open source and technology communities. She was a major contributor to
PostgreSQL, one of the largest free and open source databases in the world.
“Open collaboration produces better solutions for the world, and technology
is a critical enabler of making this true,” said Selena. “I look forward to
contributing to Wikimedia’s inspiring free knowledge mission.”
As Chief Product and Technology Officer, Selena will work with Wikimedia
Foundation staff, technical contributors, volunteer developers,
researchers, and communities to support Wikimedia’s 2030 Movement Strategy
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction>
to advance free and open access to knowledge. The majority of the
Foundation is focused on product and technology development in service of
our mission.
Hello everyone,
The fifth workshop on the topic of "Hosting bots and scripts on Toolforge"
is coming up - it will take place on Thursday, June 30th at 16:00 UTC. You
can find more details on the workshop and a link to join here: <
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Small_wiki_toolkits/Workshops#How_to_host_a…>
[1].
This workshop will introduce participants to Toolforge, how to create a
developer account, access it via ssh, create and run bots and scripts, etc.
You can add your discussion ideas in the etherpad doc linked from the
workshops page. To participate in this workshop, you would need basic
familiarity with using command-line tools and technical knowledge of bots.
We look forward to your participation!
Best,
Srishti
On behalf of the SWT Workshops Organization team
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Small_wiki_toolkits/Workshops#How_to_host_a…
*Srishti Sethi*
Senior Developer Advocate
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>