I love this discussion, thank you all for speaking up. :)
One note on "the community can just do it," I do think it's the right direction, so please read the next couple of paragraphs as a friendly amendment (just to make sure everyone's on the same page) rather than a pushback.
"The community can just do it," feels very appealing right now: because we are missing ownership and leadership, self-organizing is kinda the only option with that vacuum. It probably is the best tool we have to rebuild/respark the ownership we are missing.
That being said, a couple of comments:
1. Community means staff too, to me. Many of the people the movement pays are also among its most committed contributors, so let us not run this as volunteers versus the Foundation/paid staff. I know it sometimes reads simplistic, but we're all in the same boat, or at least we should be.
2. At this scale the work will need people with dedicated time on it. Because the Foundation is not taking leadership doesn't mean it doesn't have a responsibility. The Foundation owns most of the resources in the movement, and if we, as a movement, are to change/evolve, we need those resources. It can't rely only on volunteers. However, I'm not saying we need X, Y or Z, just that we will need people with dedicated time at some point.
Brooke, to your comment on the Foundation being a service organisation, I would agree if the Foundation was being supportive. But it's neither leading the change nor being supportive on that topic, in my opinion. And don't anyone get me wrong, I do know how hard it is first hand to do either (or both), but I also know it can happen. And I hope they'll take the first opportunity to join in the discussion.
Speaking of opportunities, I've started a second thread with an invitation to meet next week. It's a bit of last minute notice, but I'd love to keep the momentum :)
-- Christophe
On Fri, 3 Jul 2026 at 00:10, Samuel Klein via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
Dear Nada, excellent framing. It is entirely in our control to fix outreach, build welcoming and forgiving environments, make strides with less-resource languages and communities.
Christophe, thanks again for persisting in this thread (and planning a range of activities around Wikimania!) I see many people engaged with these topics who don't want to engage in discussion about angst over current problems, but are deeply enthusiastic about, and actively engaged in, building new things / working on new possibilities.
Brooke writes:
Wikimedia is a participatory system... We have to put in the work
ourselves.
Absolutely. The civilized netizen's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco anything truly important from scratch.
Galder writes:
One correction: I'm not a trustee!
But we surely trust you, including to make the world's best Txikipedia.
We have many good ideas and talented people in the community. We do need persistent spaces to discuss and make plans, in part because in the last growth spurt we fragmented communication channels across hundreds of pages, sites, lists, and apps. Recombining many of those streams would be good for coherence and continuity.
But our wikis are better suited to experimenting, reverting, and iterating than distilling large-scale consensus. Quick decisions by ~sortition (or by the first few people to turn up) help polish the roughest edges. Having spaces that push back against the iron law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy of oligarchy and preserve freedom to experiment is essential, even when simultaneously waiting for delayed consensus.
Our strongest shared identity is as people committed to building freely-licensed knowledge together, in every language, accessible to the entire world. More people care about this today than ever before. We simply have to make space for it again.
𝐖♡, SJ
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