Hard email to read, but Galder's are quite of indisputable thoughts and the harsh reality of Wikimedia's technological state of the art.

Yet this incontestability is, at the same time, the very profound problem: the WMF will not refute it, nor structurally change it, besides silences and inspiring words in progress and strategic reports. Such a change requires millions of dollars that the projects are actually able to annually fundraise for the institution, but that the institution prioritizes to maintain its own (questionable) corporative structure and not the digital one of the projects.

Hopefully someone else prove us wrong with data, factual progress and optimism.

Xavier Dengra
El dimarts, 23 de gener 2024 a les 12:02, Galder Gonzalez LarraƱaga <galder158@hotmail.com> va escriure:
Dear wikimedians,
Nearly one year ago, the Graphs extension was disabled from all wikis, because there was a security issue that should be solved (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T334940). A wide team from the WMF worked on a solution for some weeks, but after Northern Hemisphere spring ended, summer came, then the monsoon season, and now it is again summer in the Southern Hemisphere... and Graphs are still disabled. All the solutions proposed have been dismissed, but every two months there's a proposal to make a new roadmap to solve the issue. We have plenty of roadmaps, but no vehicle to reach our destination.

Seven years ago, we were discussing our Strategy for 2030. We used thousands of volunteer hours, thousands of staff hours and millions of dollars to build a really well-balanced strategy. There we concluded that "By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge". We also made some recommendations to improve the User Experience (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Recommendations/Improve_User_Experience) and claimed that we wanted to Innovate in Free Knowledge (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Recommendations/Innovate_in_Free_Knowledge). Well, the situation is now worse than it was seven years ago, let me give some examples:


The list can go on an on ("which phase the moon is today?"), but I think that the idea is clear. We could have interactive content, but we are going in the opposite direction, and every year we are further from our goal, because other platforms are doing it better, way better. And this seems like some wild ideas, but then I read the 2023-2024 annual plan section called "Wiki Experiences" (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024/Goals/Infrastructure#Bucket:_Wiki_Experiences) and it looks like we should be going there. But we aren't.

I'm sorry if this e-mail feels bitter. My experience in the last years is that we are now further of what we need that we were before, even if many chapters and volunteers are trying to overturn it.

Thank to everyone who have been trying.

Galder