Thanks Samuel and James for the constructive approach in your messages.

I know that I have said this before, but there's a huge problem with accountability here. We have money to become a great platform and we have staff to do it, but there's no way to go forward, and that problem is seen clearly at every opportunity: migrating to Discourse because we don't have "good enough" discussing software, not having centralized templates or the completely broken wishlist survey (where only 1/4 of the projects voted by the community are done, and some of them in a sub-optimal and non-usable way).

James points out the integration of data from OurWorldInData. This is so impressive and useful that is hard to think how the WMF can't afford to expend staff time (or give 1.000 USD to someone) to do that. Instead, Wiki Project Med has to ask for it outside. The Basque Wikimedians User Group is funding this effort, and is doing it with its own funds. Do you know how we get these funds? Well, sometimes they call us for a lecture somewhere about free knowledge, copyright or whatever, and the money they usually give the speaker goes to a fund. Whenever we have a good amount of money there (like 1.000USD), we invest in free knowledge projects. So, at the end of the day, is volunteer's time, expressed as money, and re-invested in things that will make our experience better. Of course, we are happy to help with this project, but the question is why the WMF, with 400.000.000 USD a year, can't afford to do this. And the answer is that no one cares, and those who should care about that are not accountable.

Indeed, there's quite a big group of workers thinking in design, and they work to do some things, like the new Vector (but not only, they have a bunch of projects open). But every time they get a critic about the approach by a volunteer, there's an attack to the volunteer. Let's take some examples: here's a Phab ticket (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T293405) with a proposal to build a Main Page that will easily be copied by every project. You can read the answers and the attitude towards the proposal. Or this one, when they decided to move the interwiki links to the bottom of the main page because they didn't think that Main Pages where relevant (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T290480). Or here, when a bug report is closed because someone thinks that breaking things is not a bug: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T289212.

And I could continue, but the reality shows us that sub-optimal solutions are our way of finishing projects. The same teams that are moving things around in the Vector-2022, for example, decided to break the PDF creator (still has many issues) and decided that creating books wasn't relevant, so they broke it on purpose. No one cares, and if you do, you shouldn't: no one is going to fix it. No accountability. The same team has decided that hiding our sister projects from the main page, something that goes against the Strategic Direction, is a good idea at all (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T287609). And there we are, some volunteers, trying to make any sense of all of this, and trying to point that the Strategic Direction is something that should be granted at every decision. But, again, if there's no accountability, then every team will make what they think is better, they won't accept any proposal from volunteers, and our years-long strategy discussions will be a completely loss of time and donor's money, because no one is implementing what it was decided there.

Things are broken, and we could still be here discussing about that for ages. We have money and staff to fix this. Who is going to fix it? This is the great question.

Sincerely,

Galder