I'm really not sure we can say that we have let one of us die in prison! Especially that we did not care (lots of wikimedians talked about Bassel as soon as they learnt about his situation).
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/10/08/bassel-missing-syria/
2017-02-05 10:45 GMT+01:00 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
Hoi, Yair you are wrong. When our director spoke up against the ukaze of Mr Trump about people visiting our office, the only office of the Wikimedia Foundation, it directly affected our work, our mission. We have WMF employees that cannot come to the office any longer. We have employees that cannot visit their family when there are grave family situations.
The question is very much in what you call politics and the extend you want to excuse politics. When lawyers including the person responsible for prosecuting the law opine that an ukaze is illegal, it loses much of the excuse. There are things we stand for as an organisation; we stand for making our gender gap less. That is also very much political given that Mr Trump has it that women should dress like women.. Yair, you can not defend the inexcusable. We have values and when these values are threatened, when they become political, they are still our values.
We have let one of us die in prison [1]. The same argument. I will be honest; I hate this. I have trouble believing that people can argue this way. This was one of us and apparently we do not care.
Our reputation is in tatters [2] because of the way our servers are energised. This may be politics for you but it is not to me. I do live below sea level as it is. It is easy to compensate for this; we have the money and when the WMF invests money in green energy and allows people to invest with it to make our foot print smaller and help our readers, I will invest from the little that I have.
We seek to share the sum of all knowledge and for various reasons we could do much better. But to do better we have to want to do better and my experience is that we are not capable to do what is good for us because of politics. Internal politics.
Everyone may say what they want but politics affect us, they often affect us negatively and for us the one thing that should guide us is how we optimise our mission. When "politics" are required and have us say why what a government does negatively impact us, we should and we do. We did so in the past, we did so with China and now we need to do this with the USA, Thanks, GerardM
[1] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2015/11/missingbassel-wikidata-as- tool.html [2] https://rankabrand.org/websites/Wikipedia
On 5 February 2017 at 10:15, Yair Rand yyairrand@gmail.com wrote:
When and how the Wikimedia Foundation should associate itself publicly on policy and political issues is not a new topic, and (as I have quite recently discovered) official guidelines have been around for nearly five years now. The Guidelines on Foundation Policy and Political Association [1], established by WMF Legal for internal use, specifically bring up the issue of "public endorsement or critique" of political policies, listing several requirements for doing so, and further requiring that they
"should
protect and advance Wikimedia’s mission “to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.” Accordingly, we will not support causes unrelated to or inconsistent with that mission." The document goes on to list several examples such as anti-war activism and animal rights.
I think this is an excellent and necessary policy.
The recent blog post says "We strongly urge the U.S. administration to withdraw the recent executive order ... closing the doors to many refugees." I have yet to hear any arguments regarding how that statement specifically protects and advances our mission.
I have, on the other hand, heard on this list many arguments by people explaining reasons why they feel very strongly that actions must be taken against a certain country's administration, about how they expect that
many
expected policies on general issues will cause harm in areas that they value. Areas that are not directly related to our mission.
I can imagine that some may feel that certain areas of immigration and travel policy may be so closely associated to Wikimedia's functioning
that
action on that front must be taken. I would expect such an issue to be discussed independently of the personal political wishes of those
arguing.
If decisions are made on the basis that the only relevant issue is
whether
any action would further Wikimedia's goals, I would trust that such decisions were sufficiently reasonable.
However, if that is not the basis used, and some in the community and WMF are willing to have their own independent individual values and goals override those of the movement, to harm Wikimedia goals to support their own political goals... I would find it very difficult to support such a decision. I don't mean to speak too harshly, but the united goals and vision of the movement are the _only_ thing that holds this diverse community together, the only means by which Wikimedia exists, and if outside aims can take priority, we would likely find that many would not appreciate some using Wikimedia as yet another bullet in someone's
arsenal
to be sacrificed in a political crusade, to say the least.
"Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park.
It
is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others."
Please let us keep it that way.
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