Dear Leila

[I apologize for the longish response, and I will do what I can to take the rest of this offlist as needed. I just see a couple of places where I need to add more explanation.]

​(​Side-note. We should take this part offline but for the record: I couldn't find a place where transparency was listed as an agreed upon and shared value of our movement as a whole. There are subgroups that consider it a core value or one of the guiding principles, and it's of course built in in many of the things we do in Wikimedia, but I'm hesitant to call it /a core value of our movement/ given that it's not listed somewhere as such. btw, for the record, it's high on my personal and professional list of values.)

​While I agree that transparency is a value for many of us, it is not very clear, to at least me, how we as a whole define transparency to the level that can be used in practice. In the absence of a shared practical definition for transparency, each of us (or groups of us) define a process as transparent as a function of how big/impactful the result of a process is at each point in time, our backgrounds/cultures/countries-we're-from, how much personal trust we have in the process or the people involved in the process, etc. If this is correct, this means that in practice we as individuals or groups define what transparency means for us and we will demand specific things based on our own definition. So, while in theory you are requesting/demanding something that is likely a shared value for many of us, in practice, you are entering your own checklist (that may be shared with some other people's view on transparency in a specific case) that once met, you will call the process transparent. That's why I interpreted what I heard from you as "I" demand transparency, versus "we, as a movement" demand transparency in this case.

To give you a more specific example: as an Iranian involved in Wikimedia movement who knows Markus through his contributions to Wikidata and at a professional/work level, I trusted Markus' words when he said that those in early stages of the project didn't think of Wikidata as a project that one day becomes as big as it is today. I believe it that this was a fun project that they wanted to see succeed, but they were not sure at all if it gets somewhere, so the natural thing to do for them was to spend time to see if they can help it take off at all as opposed to spending time on documenting decisions in case it takes off and they need to show to people how they have done things. If trust between Markus and I were broken, however, I would likely not be content with that level of response and I would ask/demand for more explanation. In case (ii), and in the absence of a shared practical definition of transparency, my personal priors and understandings of the case would define when I call the process transparent.

 

​Point taken. Those 3 categories and descriptions are not very carefully crafted, partly because I wanted to share the general signals that I've received from your messages (which btw, also touches on another topic: you may or may not mean certain things when you say them, but your audience, based on their own priors can understand them differently.). They are supposed to signal to you how in a broad sense what you had written had translated in my mind. I acknowledge that this thread is about one specific topic (not "any topic") and "right" to transparency can be much stronger than what you had in mind. The intention was not to exaggerate what you had said. Thanks for calling it out.