I know Medeyko as he started long time ago and may be it was also in the Affcom if I remember well. That time it was strange to consider how a person that basically was not able to communicate in English (or in other language than Russian) was part of a committee.

What is strange is the time taken by the chapter to react to this situation.

I strongly agree that the problem of governance in chapters and user groups is quite serious.

Sometimes the capacity of reaction to situations of bad governance is on the shoulders of the same chapter.

The disconnection from the community stresses more that because the chapter misses one important stakeholder that in some cases can unblock the situation of renovation.

This resume is quite shocking honestly and also the naivity of Medeyko to fork a collaborative project without a community.

Good luck

On Thu, 25 May 2023, 20:13 Yaroslav Blanter, <ymbalt@gmail.com> wrote:
This story made some headlines in Russian-language media, and I guess it could be of general interest here.

Vladimir Medeyko, who has been the president of Wikimedia.ru, the Russian chapter of WMF, since its foundation in the 2000s, announced yesterday that he is starting a Russian Wikipedia fork [1]. The media on the payroll of the Russian government, which for a long time were saying that Wikipedia is an anti-government and anti-Russian project and must be blocked in Russia, supported the initiative, commenting that this is exactly the start of a pro-government encyclopedia which would replace the Russian Wikipedia.

Wikimedia.ru, whose main (or even exclusive) activity was to raise money to pay salaries to the functionaries including Mr. Medeyko was suddenly pissed off and held a meeting yesterday. Before the meeting, Mr. Medeyko said he does not see a problem with his actions, however, being in danger of getting expelled from the chapter he resigned and quit the chapter.

The Russian Wikipedia community, which knew that Mr. Medeyko supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and which was critical against his activity on advocacy for his paid editor friends, was pissed off as well.[2] He first responded that he has taken the only correct decision, and everybody else eventually would understand why the decision was correct. However, later he resigned his admin flag, was blocked indef, and now has an arbitration case pending against him. The discussions are ongoing whether having a chapter in Russia at all is now beneficial, however, the chapter was for many years totally disconnected from the community anyway.

I could add my personal perspective, since on- and off-wiki activity of Mr. Medeyko was one of the reasons why I stopped editing the Russian Wikipedia in 2011, after having served two terms as an arbitrator, and never came back, but I do not think this is important at the moment.

Best
Yaroslav


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