On Thu, 30 Dec 2021 at 11:52, nosebagbear@gmail.com wrote:
This year, we (that is, the WMF using movement funds) spent a huge amount of money ($4.5 million) just directly donating to external knowledge equity funds.
From https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund:
Many of the barriers that prevent people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge are rooted in systems of racial oppression.
What about many of the barriers to contributing thrown up by broken or defective systems? This disproportionately affects people without the technical skills to circumvent the issues and/or implement fixes and/or gain political capital to agitate for a fix from the "system". Considering the well-documented inequalities both on racial and gender grounds in STEM subjects and computing in particular, these technical defects strike harder at the already-disadvantaged groups.
Combine this with the adversarial system of actually getting things done by having to fight, grab and compete for the scant resources thrown down, combined with the need to advocate for your issue just-so to get what you want (which again disadvantages "system-outsiders") and again this is disadvantageous to the already-disadvantaged.
Even if we just ignore race or gender, also consider that deficient technical platforms are also a brutal filter against _anyone_ without a STEM background: also people the knowledge equity stuff is supposed to help. The WMF has contrived a system that almost seems perfectly designed to filter out many of the disadvantaged or vulnerable groups they profess to want to help by failing to actually provide support for them to make their contributions in the first place. A few bright pictures and fluffy press releases and slinging money around on wishy-washy initiatives surely keeps everyone looking busy, fills some nice FTE positions and gets Twitter cachet. However, a bug's a bug and a missing feature is a missing feature.
A simple example: there's not even a "blessed" way to ask for technical help: you get ignored at COM:VPT, ignored at Mediawiki.org's dead manual pages, find out that the Discord isn't even official, bounce around several random IRC channels (once you figure out IRC in the first place, let's not pretend most people in the world have even heard of it) looking for one that can help you, eventually off to Phabricator, ignored again if your issue isn't written up '"just so" to align with the priorities of some "team" that isn't actually documented anywhere and then...you give up.
Another example closer to my home wiki: the smaller Wikisources are very disadvantaged by technical limitations which the big Wikisources work around on an ad-hoc basis using local users' skills. Many features that the big ones have would be _more_ useful for the smaller ones. A good example here is the OCR, which for years worked only at a handful of big Wikisources until CommTech integrated the OCR tool this year into the Wikisource extension. But the big wikis didn't really need the OCR as much (though they still needed it), because upstream OCR is usually better in English or French, than, say, Marathi. I had a wish to "upstream" more local features to the core extensions so all can benefit. But it's taken so long to get anything done, that I am out of time and have to go to a day-job soon, so it's not going to happen. Who has the luxury of tens or hundreds of hours spare to learn PHP from scratch to fix an issue, submit, resubmit, rebase and massage patches? Guess what: not the knowledge-equity-disadvantaged.
Perhaps instead of a firehose of money at fighting the "far enemy" of racial/social/etc. injustice, a more directed attitude of fixing the platforms and making it attractive and/or even possible for these groups to contribute in the first place is in order. Some of it's not even hard, certainly not $4,500,000-hard. It doesn't matter, in wiki terms (and those are terms that donors believe their money is to be used) how well you train a group of Jordanian journalists if when they come to upload their video, the upload fails, does it? Or PattyPan, or whatever tool has been created to address the lack of "native" tools is broken _again_.
Even if the "magic money tree" doesn't extend to more than one engineering or technical staff member, just a single FTE rotating a day per week though the projects, dedicated to helping others contribute, linking up issues with teams and driving things forward when they stall out (rather than just waiting for the would-be contributor to give up and abandon it all) would be a huge force multiplier. Allegedly, there are _already_ Developer Advocates, but whatever it is they do does not seem to actually involve advocating for the ability of would-be contributors to actually contribute.
The most frustrating thing is that this could all work well: Mediawiki is a solid piece of engineering, running on a solid operational foundation. There is CI, code review, relatively clean code, a functional issue tracker, regular deployments, RelEng/Ops teams holding it together at the coal-face, the Toolforge/WMCS (which is a completely brilliant piece of gear), a 9-figure budget (not that much of it reaches engineering, but it _could_) all of the good stuff. Really all it needs is better documentation (which needs resources allocated to those who know the domain enough to write it), proper support for outside developer so that good and useful tools don't just bit-rot to unmaintained husks, and enough slack in the system to both start to burn down the backlog and (here's the real key) allow _others_ to assist without burning out or bouncing right off the barriers to entry.
--IL