Everyone’s relationship with English Wikipedia,
including the Wikimedia
Foundation’s
"For various reasons, the Foundation and some parts of the communities are
stuck in an uneasy relationship where the Foundation admires but fears the
communities’ power, like a beautiful but dangerous animal – the tiger might
attack you – and the communities, not least English Wikipedia, distrust the
Foundation."
My experience so far has been that we have a very contentious relationship
with English Wikipedia. The Foundation raises most of the revenue to
support a global movement from English Wikipedia, and it’s often where
volunteers raise most of the concerns and objections to the Foundation’s
work.
It's painfully affecting volunteers and staff that are trying to maintain
content and code, and make important improvements to all the websites, as
with the launch of Vector 2022 this year. It has made product and
engineering teams very conservative in their approach to rolling out
features, making each change take 12 or 18 months, or years!, to get
valuable features to users. And it impacts our ability to collaborate with
communities on and off English Wikipedia on big goals like knowledge equity
and the movement strategy recommendations. As Yoda noted
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fear#L>, fear is the path to the dark
side. This is a bummer, and I’d like it to change.
So how do we break this cycle? What I’m doing now is directly engaging.
Today, for example, I participated in an office hours session to talk about
Vector 2022. Some of the product senior leadership in the recent past have
specifically avoided talking directly with people on English Wikipedia, and
this approach will no longer be applied. Engaging human to human is the
best way I know to help resolve some of the mystery, fear and anger that
are present. However, that will absolutely not fix what’s wrong here. We
need systemic solutions. Today, there’s no way to make lasting and mutually
binding agreements with volunteers, and that isn’t a sustainable way to
create and maintain infrastructure software. My hope is that, with a more
open and direct approach to engage and also through the work of the
Movement Charter Drafting Committee, we will chart out a path for more
lasting, productive collaboration.
Related to the other thread about English I remembered this. It is good
that the WMF talks to English Wikipedia. Many of us just wish WMF
leadership would talk directly to the other wikis too.
John S.