The statements Yair quoted are appropriate unless you believe
"empower" in the Foundation's Mission statement merely means
"enable"
or "facilitate," without regard to economic or political power, so I'm
very glad to see them, as I am to see all of the eleven sections in
https://annual.wikimedia.org/2016/consider-the-facts.html
Yair omitted mention of the descriptions of how, in each of those
eleven cases, our volunteers are using Foundation projects to address
the identified issues. Those who think discussion of these issues
should be suppressed or are cause to leave could talk with the
volunteers whose work has been profiled so that both sides can
understand the motivations and concerns of the other. Maybe Roxana
Sordo or Andreas Weith are on this list and can address the concerns
raised about the description of their work directly? In any case, free
culture isn't compatible with prohibition of discussion and
censorship. And the impulses toward such suppression aren't rational,
given the extent to which the human endocrine system regulates
personal, group, hierarchical, and reciprocal relationships, as shown
in Table 1 on page 192 of Daphne Bugental's (2000) "Acquisition of the
Algorithms of Social Life: A Domain-Based Approach," in Psychological
Bulletin 126(2):187-219, at
http://talknicer.com/Bugental2000.pdf
Regarding the Annual Report financials, it looks like the investment
income the Foundation is earning has fallen below 1%. I don't think
it's fair to donors to hold $47 million dollars in cash and
equivalents as per
https://annual.wikimedia.org/2016/financials.html
-- Are people waiting for the Endowment Committee to meet before
investing? Does anyone know when the Endowment Committee will ever
meet?
On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 11:58 AM, Yair Rand <yyairrand(a)gmail.com> wrote:
An unscheduled CentralNotice just started running,
linking to a rather
bizarre page [1]. Purporting to be the WMF's 2016 Annual Report, it starts
off with some text about refugees. "FACT: Half of refugees are school-age",
followed by some completely unencyclopedic text about the topic: "That
means 10 million children are away from their homes, their communities, and
their traditional education. Each refugee child’s experience is unique, but
every single one loses time from their important learning years. Many of
them face the added pressure of being surrounded by new languages and
cultures." The linked page goes on to detail some of Wikimedia's vision and
how Wikimedia projects aid refugee populations. Following that, we have an
entire page on climate change and some of its effects, similarly written in
a style that is not befitting the movement: "In 2015, [Wikimedian Andreas
Weith] photographed starving polar bears in the Arctic. As the ice
declines, so does their ability to find food. “It’s heartbreaking,” he
says." After all that, we finally have some pages on interesting statistics
about Wikimedia, mixed in with some general odd facts about the world,
followed by a call to donate. There are also letters from the ED and
founder linked.
So, this could be a mix of coincidence and bad stylistic choices, and not
politically motivated at all, but it is getting increasingly hard to assume
good faith on this, especially with the blog post a month ago specifically
calling for a change in refugee policy.
Using Wikimedia projects to push politics is not okay. If the WMF does not
accept this, I suspect many projects will simply block CentralNotices,
avoid associating with WMF statements, and quite possibly fork/leave.
This is a serious problem.
-- Yair Rand
[1]
https://annual.wikimedia.org/2016/?pk_campaign=
WikiBanners&pk_kwd=AR2016_dsk_short
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