[Wikimedia-l] Re: The Endowment, again

Fascinating, the WMF are saying they have answered the question on Meta, yet a simple fact check, by reading the page, shows they have not answered the obvious simple yes/no needed. A vague reply of "We are in the process" must set off red flags for any logical reader. The huge amount of money under scrutiny is either controlled by Tides or it isn't. The fact that the WMF has evaded the yes/no question several times indicates there is a problem here that they are not prepared to confirm in public, such as using interim "holders" or incurring significant fees. Though the fast reader might think the answer was "yes", it does not actually say "yes", nor does it give any fixed dates that anyone could be held accountable to, like for example "the funds are controlled by Tides until the end of February 2023" which would be specific, accountable and verifiable. Happy to be confirmed wrong, with *facts* rather than more opinions and defensive non-answers. For some unknown reason, the WMF official reply was not included in the email, here it is for anyone to fact check where it can't be edited later on a wiki: "This question was also raised in a thread on Wikimedia-l. SJ’s message there summarized the situation very well. The Wikimedia Endowment has received its 501(c)(3) status from the US Internal Revenue Service. We are in the process of setting up its financial systems and transitioning out of Tides. This is in line with the direction from the 2021 resolution from Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. We plan further updates in the next few months.The statement made by the recent broadcast in Italy was unfortunately an incorrect representation of the answers we sent them; a further clarification was made on establishment of the Endowment in January also linked from the show’s page. Considered as a whole, there are lots of inaccuracies in the broadcast despite engagement with the show by the Foundation and Wikimedia Italia over a period of six months to ensure the movement and Wikipedia’s editing model were represented correctly.Best regards JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 07:11, 24 January 2023 (UTC)" Thanks, Lane (for the avoidance of doubt, I have no connection to Wikipedia Signpost) On Tue, 24 Jan 2023 at 07:13, Julia Brungs <jbrungs(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Endowment#Is_the_money_still… ? wrote: moved, or it has not been moved. didn't move it to a separate 501e3 entity?" Foundation. According to SignPost ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-05-29/Opi…) on March 2017 Lisa Seitz-Gruwell said: “The WMF board has already given us the direction to move it into a separate 501c3 once the endowment reaches $33 million. [...] WMF's Executive Director is supportive of moving it to a new 501c3 once it reaches $33 million." The Endowment has reached $33 million and passed them reaching $100 million today. Why the Wikimedia Foundation didn’t move it to a separate 501e3 entity? Being entrusted into the Tides Foundation is not available to the public any financial report about Wikipedia Endowment. Don't you think there is a lack of information and transparency about a fund that is created through worldwide donations? affairs – i.e., the 501c3 has been set up, but it takes time to get the org ready, so for now the money is still with Tides – then the answer should, I feel, have looked something like this: when it reached $33 million, but then our board decided to postpone that move. We have now revived the plan to move the funds. We have established a new organisation for that purpose, which received its 501c3 status in 2022. We are currently getting that organisation ready to manage the Endowment and expect to move the funds from Tides to the new org in (month/year). had already been moved. And that is what the programme communicated to the Italian audience – that the WMF said the Endowment had been transferred to a dedicated new entity a few months ago in 2022. Endowment page on Meta-Wiki, which says that the Endowment is "currently managed by the Tides Foundation as a Collective Action Fund". in the public domain. transparency common to our movement. Our financials are available for public review and we ensure our community and benefactors stay informed on developments related to the endowment by publishing regular information such as the list of donors, announcements about Endowment Board members on the Endowment Website. We also publish current updates and new policy updates on Wikimedia Meta and regular updates on our Diff blog, as well as on the Wikimedia Foundation website. the Endowment reflects January 2022 status – figures describing where things stood a full year ago. And even then, nobody added the updated info to the Endowment page on Meta. I added it, sourced to board meeting minutes.[1] financial statement for the Endowment showing revenue and expenses etc. in all the seven years it has existed. To me this falls short of the "principles of transparency common to our movement" (a point that, incidentally, was also made in the Italian programme). ago on Meta.[2] There has been no reply from the WMF to date. million that were to be used for Annual Plan Grants to Wikimedia affiliates in the July 2020 – June 2021 financial year.[3] I have looked through the Form 990 disclosures Tides Advocacy has filed for the 2020 and 2021 calendar years (their 2021 Form 990 only became available a few weeks ago), hoping to find US and non-US expenditure items corresponding to that 2020/2021 APG amount over Tides Advocacy's 2020 and 2021 calendar years. I have not been successful. My sums fall about $400,000 short of the $4.223 million total. reading in who feels so inclined) be able to have a look through the forms as well, to see whether you come to a different result? The forms are linked in the discussion.[2] It is always possible that you with your WMF board experience might see an error I made or an item I have missed that happily resolves the apparent discrepancy. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Endowment&diff=p… https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fund#Tides_Agreement https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… wrote: and what one might expect from governance decisions to date. working on its structure. It will start emitting 501c3 reports this year. It will need staff to take over any of the investment management Tides currently provides; I would expect the current endowment fund (the collective action fund) to remain there until an alternative is in place. organizatFascinating, the WMF are saying they have answered the question on Meta, yet a simple fact check, by reading the page, shows they have not answered the obvious simple yes/no needed. A vague reply of "We are in the process" must set off red flags for any logical reader. The huge amount of money under scrutiny is either controlled by Tides or it isn't. The fact that the WMF has evaded the yes/no question several times indicates there is a problem here that they are not prepared to confirm in public, such as using interim "holders" or incurring significant fees. Though the fast reader might think the answer was "yes", it does not actually say "yes", nor does it give any fixed dates that anyone could be held accountable to, like for example "the funds are controlled by Tides until the end of February 2023" which would be specific, accountable and verifiable. Happy to be confirmed wrong, with *facts* rather than more opinions and defensive non-answers. For some unknown reason, the WMF official reply was not included in the email, here it is for anyone to fact check where it can't be edited later on a wiki: "This question was also raised in a thread on Wikimedia-l. SJ’s message there summarized the situation very well. The Wikimedia Endowment has received its 501(c)(3) status from the US Internal Revenue Service. We are in the process of setting up its financial systems and transitioning out of Tides. This is in line with the direction from the 2021 resolution from Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. We plan further updates in the next few months.The statement made by the recent broadcast in Italy was unfortunately an incorrect representation of the answers we sent them; a further clarification was made on establishment of the Endowment in January also linked from the show’s page. Considered as a whole, there are lots of inaccuracies in the broadcast despite engagement with the show by the Foundation and Wikimedia Italia over a period of six months to ensure the movement and Wikipedia’s editing model were represented correctly.Best regards JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 07:11, 24 January 2023 (UTC)" Thanks, Lane On Tue, 24 Jan 2023 at 07:13, Julia Brungs <jbrungs(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Endowment#Is_the_money_still… ? wrote: moved, or it has not been moved. didn't move it to a separate 501e3 entity?" Foundation. According to SignPost ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-05-29/Opi…) on March 2017 Lisa Seitz-Gruwell said: “The WMF board has already given us the direction to move it into a separate 501c3 once the endowment reaches $33 million. [...] WMF's Executive Director is supportive of moving it to a new 501c3 once it reaches $33 million." The Endowment has reached $33 million and passed them reaching $100 million today. Why the Wikimedia Foundation didn’t move it to a separate 501e3 entity? Being entrusted into the Tides Foundation is not available to the public any financial report about Wikipedia Endowment. Don't you think there is a lack of information and transparency about a fund that is created through worldwide donations? affairs – i.e., the 501c3 has been set up, but it takes time to get the org ready, so for now the money is still with Tides – then the answer should, I feel, have looked something like this: when it reached $33 million, but then our board decided to postpone that move. We have now revived the plan to move the funds. We have established a new organisation for that purpose, which received its 501c3 status in 2022. We are currently getting that organisation ready to manage the Endowment and expect to move the funds from Tides to the new org in (month/year). had already been moved. And that is what the programme communicated to the Italian audience – that the WMF said the Endowment had been transferred to a dedicated new entity a few months ago in 2022. Endowment page on Meta-Wiki, which says that the Endowment is "currently managed by the Tides Foundation as a Collective Action Fund". in the public domain. transparency common to our movement. Our financials are available for public review and we ensure our community and benefactors stay informed on developments related to the endowment by publishing regular information such as the list of donors, announcements about Endowment Board members on the Endowment Website. We also publish current updates and new policy updates on Wikimedia Meta and regular updates on our Diff blog, as well as on the Wikimedia Foundation website. the Endowment reflects January 2022 status – figures describing where things stood a full year ago. And even then, nobody added the updated info to the Endowment page on Meta. I added it, sourced to board meeting minutes.[1] financial statement for the Endowment showing revenue and expenses etc. in all the seven years it has existed. To me this falls short of the "principles of transparency common to our movement" (a point that, incidentally, was also made in the Italian programme). ago on Meta.[2] There has been no reply from the WMF to date. million that were to be used for Annual Plan Grants to Wikimedia affiliates in the July 2020 – June 2021 financial year.[3] I have looked through the Form 990 disclosures Tides Advocacy has filed for the 2020 and 2021 calendar years (their 2021 Form 990 only became available a few weeks ago), hoping to find US and non-US expenditure items corresponding to that 2020/2021 APG amount over Tides Advocacy's 2020 and 2021 calendar years. I have not been successful. My sums fall about $400,000 short of the $4.223 million total. reading in who feels so inclined) be able to have a look through the forms as well, to see whether you come to a different result? The forms are linked in the discussion.[2] It is always possible that you with your WMF board experience might see an error I made or an item I have missed that happily resolves the apparent discrepancy. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Endowment&diff=p… https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fund#Tides_Agreement https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… wrote: and what one might expect from governance decisions to date. working on its structure. It will start emitting 501c3 reports this year. It will need staff to take over any of the investment management Tides currently provides; I would expect the current endowment fund (the collective action fund) to remain there until an alternative is in place. organizational structure, timelines, goals and budgeting, coordination with WMF, practicalities of how an endowment functions) are only partly related to the mandatory reports of a charity. Lodewijk, agreed that those sorts of clarifications are great, and relevant to how we all plan for the future; perhaps we can catalyze a public conversation about such things. for maximizing project functionality on a minimal budget) guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.orgional structure, timelines, goals and budgeting, coordination with WMF, practicalities of how an endowment functions) are only partly related to the mandatory reports of a charity. Lodewijk, agreed that those sorts of clarifications are great, and relevant to how we all plan for the future; perhaps we can catalyze a public conversation about such things. for maximizing project functionality on a minimal budget) guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org… guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@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