Pine,
It is nice of you that you thought about including these topics in the WMF
strategy process, which I assume it is an ongoing process and not a one-off
event. However as the 2017 cycle ended, I am unable to find the way to
incorporate new ideas into the process. I would have expected to find a
discussion page where new input can be taken into consideration, but it
might not be the case.
I consider that the importance of admin decline in Wikipedias is really
high, and at the same time I understand why you or anybody else would not
like to do some tasks as volunteer. For this reason, while I do not like
the idea of employees doing project activities, I feel that by creating a
scheme where volunteers become empowered/liberated from work through direct
donations could be part of a practical way of addressing the issue. I'm
very sensitive to potential pitfalls and for this reason I consider that
the feedback given by Yaroslav is extremely important, and that any
donation to volunteers should happen only if they are committed to a
personal transformation, that involves developing the capacity for
listening, humility, and other values important for the project. I think
this is only part of the story so far, and at this point the only thing I
can do in my capacity as volunteer is to steward the conversation, and
bring it to an increasing number of people as the understanding on this
topic increases.
These are difficult topics indeed, but only by dealing with them we can
grow as a movement.
Regards,
Micru
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Micru )
On Mon, May 28, 2018 at 8:10 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Based on the limited information that I have, it seems
to me that there
are already numerous contribtors who are paid to engage in promotional
activity on Wikipedia, whether declared or undeclared, and the community
does not have adequate human resources to patrol and investigate all of
these. I expect that the problem will continue to get worse unless WMF gets
more energetic about investigating TOS violations involving undeclared COI
and WMF becomes predictable about extracting financial penalties that are
severe enough to deter most of the undeclared COI contributors.
Unfortunately, as far as I know, WMF has been largely passive about the
problem of undeclared COI and has not announced any plans to become more
aggressive.
As nice as it would be if everyone could afford and was willing to work
for free, this is not the case. If it was then we could safely eliminate
the salaries of the entire WMF staff. However, I think that financial
support makes sense for some paid staff to handle activities like network
operations, interface design, legal defense, and responses to safety
problems.
Some types of Wikimedia activities are better suited to volunteer work
than others. I encourage volunteers to avoid burning themselves out; there
are some activities that I did in the past that I would not do again as a
volunteer. Better to be an occasional and long-term contributor than to get
burned out.
I have some ideas about how to pay people to do certain types of work
that, so far, WMF has not funded. Unfortunately these are merely ideas and
not likely to become reality in the short term. Perhaps later this year or
in the next few years I will have specific proposals with reasonable
chances for sustainable success.
I share the concern that paid participants in the Wikiverse, like staff of
WMF and affiliates, WMF grantees, and potentially like the paid
contributors that I have in mind, may become so numerous that they can
drown out the consensus of the volunteers. Unfortunately I do not have easy
solutions for this issue. We could prohibit all paid contributors from
participating in RFCs and related decision processes, but we would be
largely relying on people to self-disclose their paid status, which seems
unlikely to be adequate.
Perhaps the issues that we are discussing in this conversation should be
included in the Structures and Systems prong of the WMF strategy process. I
am pinging Nicole to ask for her input about that idea. However, keep in
mind that the strategy process is financially sponsored by WMF, and it is
not free of potential conflicts with the interests of WMF.
I wish that I could be more optimistic. These are difficult topics.
Regards,
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
null
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