Everyone’s relationship with English Wikipedia, including the Wikimedia Foundation’s 

"For various reasons, the Foundation and some parts of the communities are stuck in an uneasy relationship where the Foundation admires but fears the communities’ power, like a beautiful but dangerous animal – the tiger might attack you – and the communities, not least English Wikipedia, distrust the Foundation."

My experience so far has been that we have a very contentious relationship with English Wikipedia. The Foundation raises most of the revenue to support a global movement from English Wikipedia, and it’s often where volunteers raise most of the concerns and objections to the Foundation’s work. 

It's painfully affecting volunteers and staff that are trying to maintain content and code, and make important improvements to all the websites, as with the launch of Vector 2022 this year. It has made product and engineering teams very conservative in their approach to rolling out features, making each change take 12 or 18 months, or years!, to get valuable features to users. And it impacts our ability to collaborate with communities on and off English Wikipedia on big goals like knowledge equity and the movement strategy recommendations. As Yoda noted, fear is the path to the dark side. This is a bummer, and I’d like it to change. 

So how do we break this cycle? What I’m doing now is directly engaging. Today, for example, I participated in an office hours session to talk about Vector 2022. Some of the product senior leadership in the recent past have specifically avoided talking directly with people on English Wikipedia, and this approach will no longer be applied. Engaging human to human is the best way I know to help resolve some of the mystery, fear and anger that are present. However, that will absolutely not fix what’s wrong here. We need systemic solutions. Today, there’s no way to make lasting and mutually binding agreements with volunteers, and that isn’t a sustainable way to create and maintain infrastructure software. My hope is that, with a more open and direct approach to engage and also through the work of the Movement Charter Drafting Committee, we will chart out a path for more lasting, productive collaboration.