It's really disappointing to me that the Structured Data work has been used to blow up Wikipedia's copyleft.

On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 1:20 PM Lisa Gruwell lgruwell@wikimedia.org wrote:

Thank you, Christophe and SJ. You both were great supporters of this effort when you were on the WMF board and it wouldn't have gotten off the ground without you. It takes a lot of vision and trust to do something long-term like an endowment. Thanks for giving that to us!

Best, Lisa

On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 1:52 AM Christophe Henner < christophe.henner@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Congratulations Lisa and team, I know how much energy you pour into it! That is an amazing step. And great to see the endowment becoming its own organization.

And "welcome" to the "new" endowment board members! :)

Few people might know Doron, but he is not a stranger. He has been supporting the movement for a very very long time and knows us very well. I remember back in 2016, he understood very very fast why it was critical to invest in Wikidata and that lead to the Structured Data grant: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data/Sloan_Grant.

Phoebe, Doron and Patricio are great additions to the endowment board!

All good news, thank you again Lisa!

-- Christophe

On Wed, 22 Sept 2021 at 16:58, Lisa Gruwell lgruwell@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

Dear all,

Today I am very happy to announce the Wikimedia Endowment [1] has reached its initial $100 million goal. The Endowment was started in 2016 as a permanent fund to support the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity [2].

My deep gratitude goes out to our generous donors, the Endowment board, Foundation staff, and volunteers who made this possible. I am grateful to the future-focused community members who began considering the idea of an endowment years ago, to those who participated in community conversations on Meta [3] to help us think through initial decisions regarding its launch, and to all contributors whose work creating Wikimedia content has brought free knowledge to the world.

As part of this milestone, the Wikimedia Endowment Board has also welcomed three new members: Phoebe Ayers, Patricio Lorente, and Doron Weber, bringing in important expertise of the Wikimedia movement and priorities as well as in nonprofit management.

You can read more about this milestone, what it means for the movement, and what comes next for the Endowment on Diff [4] and the Endowment Meta page [5]. We invite you to share any questions or feedback on the Endowment talk page [6].

Thank you to everyone who has made this incredible achievement possible.

Best regards,

Lisa

[1] https://wikimediaendowment.org/

[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/mission/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/mission/

[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Endowment_Essay

[4] https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/09/22/the-wikimedia-endowment-reaches-100-mi... https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/09/22/the-wikimedia-endowment-reaches-100-million-milestone-and-welcomes-three-new-members-to-its-board-more-on-what-these-developments-mean-for-the-projects-and-movement/

[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment [6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Endowment

--

Lisa Seitz Gruwell

Chief Advancement Officer

Wikimedia Foundation https://wikimediafoundation.org/

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Chief Advancement Officer

Wikimedia Foundation https://wikimediafoundation.org/

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Sorry for not being explicit; the connection is that protection of copyleft would be inconvenient to major endowment donors such as Google and Amazon. WikiData is a Wikimedia project that converts copylefted content into (what Wikimedia asserts to be) copyright-free content.

On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 5:40 PM Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk wrote:

On Thu, 23 Sept 2021 at 19:27, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:

...

It's really disappointing to me that the Structured Data work has been

used to blow up Wikipedia's copyleft.

1. Your message has nothing to do with the endowment

2. You offer no evidence that "the Structured Data work has been used

to blow up Wikipedia's copyleft."

3. You do not explain what you mean by "blow up Wikipedia's copyleft."

If you wish to discuss copyright and/or structured data, please start a new thread; and be clear there about the point you wish to make.

-- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing https://pigsonthewing.org.uk _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

The Cunctator's point about Wikidata's copyright-free CC0 licence is actually one issue that I had meant to include in the list of WMF ethical lapses in my other post .

Wikidata has imported very large amounts of content from Wikipedia, which, as The Cunctator points out, has a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. This was not the original plan, as it was thought doing so would infringe the licence under which Wikipedia contributors had released their contributions.

In 2012, for example, while he was still a Wikimedia Deutschland employee, Denny wrote on Meta,[1]

Alexrk2, it is absolutely true that Wikidata under CC0 would not be allowed to import content from a Share-Alike data source. Wikidata does not plan to extract content out of Wikipedia at all. Wikidata will ''provide'' data that can be reused in the Wikipedias. And a CC0 source can be used by a Share-Alike project, be it either Wikipedia or OSM. But not the other way around. Do we agree on this understanding? --[[User:Denny Vrandečić (WMDE)|Denny Vrandečić (WMDE)]] ([[User talk:Denny Vrandečić (WMDE)|talk]]) 12:39, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

Denny then moved to Google in October 2013, and subsequently argued strongly in favour of making Wikidata CC0, which is the viewpoint that prevailed and led to large-scale importation of Wikipedia content in Wikidata.

The legal situation is admittedly fairly complex[2] but it stands to reason that when a person moves from Wikimedia to Google, loyalties and priorities will change along with such a move. That is only natural. Nobody would or should make such a move if they weren't prepared to be loyal to their new employer. (I've cc'ed Denny as a courtesy.)

What is equally certain is that the CC0 licence served the interests of Google and other Big Tech companies. All of this of course happened at a time when Google and Silicon Valley were particularly strongly represented on the WMF board.[3]

As far as the Wikimedia projects are concerned, Wikidata's shift to CC0 substantially increased the risk of disintermediation that Guillaume mentioned in his post. If content is CC0, there is no need for attribution, so unlike the present Knowledge Graph panels, which at least have a link to Wikipedia, there is no need for any attribution to a Wikimedia site at all when others use Wikidata content.

Content is then widely disseminated and presented as truth without any indication that it comes from a Wikimedia volunteer project. As Heather Ford has pointed out in her chapter of the Wikipedia @ 20 book, "Rise of the Underdog"[4], this obscuring of provenance is undesirable for other reasons as well – it becomes harder to contest information. Users lose agency.

Now, in the context of the grand aim of Knowledge Equity, I believe it is absolutely the wrong thing for the WMF to enter into any association with Big Tech companies that results in any preferential treatment being extended to them.

Companies like Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook are surveillance capitalists. Their entire business model is based on tracking user behaviour. It is diametrically opposed to professed WMF core values concerning privacy and data protection.

Moreover, these companies have become trillion-dollar companies – really the 21st-century equivalent in many ways of what oil companies were in the last century, and wielding the same kind of covert influence – in part because of their diligent effort to avoid paying taxes in the countries they operate in.

The way these companies are set up, this will never change: shareholders will always demand maximum return on their investments, which necessitates minimising tax. I believe anyone who would try to change these companies' tax-avoidance behaviour, volunteering to pay the billions of dollars of tax these companies morally owe the global south and other jurisdictions, would simply be axed.

What this means, given that all these companies are based in the US, is that as their already overwhelming market share grows globally, the economic imbalance disadvantaging the global south – which is the root cause of unequal access to knowledge – will only grow. It's a bit like 21st-century colonialism: wealth streaming out of poor countries into a rich one.

For both of these reasons, privacy and tax avoidance, I believe the WMF has absolutely no business aiding these companies to any extent where it would give them any additional advantage over regional or global competitors. Of course I acknowledge that it is impossible to avoid interacting with Big Tech, but where competitors such as DuckDuckGo are available whose values are at least partially more aligned with the WMF's own, they should be clearly preferred as WMF partners.

For that reason I was really glad to read about a joint WMF/DuckDuckGo study the other day that shed some interesting light on another aspect of disintermediation. This study found that knowledge panels increase rather than diminish click-throughs to Wikipedia[5], much the opposite of what I and others thought a few years ago. While this is a single study whose conclusions may not necessarily hold true in all contexts, it is an interesting and encouraging result.

Andreas

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Wikidata&diff=3876137&... [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Database_Rights#Conclusion [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-01-13/News_a... [4] https://wikipedia20.pubpub.org/pub/fcgjp9ul/release/2 [5] https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/09/23/searching-for-wikipedia-duckduckgo-and...

On Sun, Sep 26, 2021 at 7:35 AM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

Hoi, Facts are in and of themselves not copyrightable. Collections of data may be copyrighted.We choose not to and as a result Wikidata is the powerhouse that it has become.The CC-by-sa license is our license of choice for Wikipedia however, the way it has been enforced so far has been defensive, we are quite happy when our material is used.

At Wikidata we are long past the point where the majority of the data is from a Wikipedia. From day one Wikidata has provided essential services to every Wikipedia, Wikidata can provide superior services to Wikipedia. Because like Commons, we have to maintain the data only once and have it available everywhere. Wikidata is instrumental in sychronising death information among our projects. It has been shown over and over again to have more complete information as can be found in Wikipedia lists and categories. Wikipedians choose to stick with their arguably substandard practices.

The notion that a Google or an Amazon are not capable of extracting facts from a Wikipedia is silly. They have the capacity and the skills and the software to do just that. Wikidata provides them additional information making their information more complete. They have their reasons to be model citizens and contribute to the Wikimedia Foundation. We now provide paid for services to them making their bot activity less of a strain to our services and provide them a (paid for) service. Thanks, GerardM

On Sun, 26 Sept 2021 at 04:32, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:

...

Sorry for not being explicit; the connection is that protection of copyleft would be inconvenient to major endowment donors such as Google and Amazon. WikiData is a Wikimedia project that converts copylefted content into (what Wikimedia asserts to be) copyright-free content.

On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 5:40 PM Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk wrote:

...

On Thu, 23 Sept 2021 at 19:27, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:

...

It's really disappointing to me that the Structured Data work has been

used to blow up Wikipedia's copyleft.

1. Your message has nothing to do with the endowment

2. You offer no evidence that "the Structured Data work has been used

to blow up Wikipedia's copyleft."

3. You do not explain what you mean by "blow up Wikipedia's copyleft."

If you wish to discuss copyright and/or structured data, please start a new thread; and be clear there about the point you wish to make.

-- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing https://pigsonthewing.org.uk _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

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Thanks, Mike.

My comments about Denny were definitely off the mark in one respect: in the 2012 snippet I was quoting, Denny was already arguing for CC0.

What changed was that at that time, Denny felt and said that CC0-licensed Wikidata would not (and should not) extract content out of ShareAlike Wikipedia.

That position was later abandoned, as we all know, and Wikidata imported masses of content from Wikipedia.

It's a subtle, but material difference, and I am really sorry about getting that bit wrong.

I really don't want to relitigate the CC0 issue or lay into Denny; what's done is done.

However, going forward, I do stand by my comment that I'd much rather see the WMF partner with, say, DuckDuckGo, who are committed to not tracking and monetising users' online behaviour, than with the Googles of this world.

And I hope every care will be taken to make sure Wikimedia Enterprise and its pricing structure will not unfairly advantage Big Tech, and will not help to further entrench their monopolies.

Andreas

On Mon, Sep 27, 2021 at 10:18 PM Mike Peel email@mikepeel.net wrote:

Hi Andreas and Cunctator,

I partially agree with you with the WMF's budget and fundraising. It's a lot of money that is being raised, and there seems to be a big disconnect between the fundraising messages being used and the actual expenditure. The money is being well spent and on worthwhile things, though, which mitigates - but doesn't solve - the issue. It's a big ethical problem that I hope the WMF can improve on in the near future.

With CC-0, though, I disagree. From my perspective/understanding, it's not about supporting big businesses, and I think your comments about Denny and Google are off the mark.

A key part of the Wikimedia movement is that we understand, and follow, copyright law. We may not like it much, but we follow it as accurately as we possibly can (given legal ambiguities etc.). When it comes to Wikidata, we're storing factual information in short segments (triples), which by law can't be copyrighted. It doesn't matter where the information comes from - whether CC-BY-SA, full copyright, or elsewhere. You can argue about database rights, but on the whole, it's not information that *should* be CC-BY-SA, it's public domain information, so CC-0 makes the most sense.

It's like planting trees. They produce oxygen, which benefits us all. They may also benefit big tech as well, but that's not why we plant them.

(Full disclaimer: I run bot scripts that copy info from Wikipedias into Wikidata, including short descriptions, via Pi bot. My understanding is that none of the information copied is copyrightable. Feel free to argue about this on-wiki if you want.)

Thanks, Mike

On 27/9/21 14:02:23, Andreas Kolbe wrote:

...

The Cunctator's point about Wikidata's copyright-free CC0 licence is actually one issue that I had meant to include in the list of WMF ethical lapses in my other post .

Wikidata has imported very large amounts of content from Wikipedia, which, as The Cunctator points out, has a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. This was not the original plan, as it was thought doing so would infringe the licence under which Wikipedia contributors had released their contributions.

In 2012, for example, while he was still a Wikimedia Deutschland employee, Denny wrote on Meta,[1]

Alexrk2, it is absolutely true that Wikidata under CC0 would not be allowed to import content from a Share-Alike data source. Wikidata does not plan to extract content out of Wikipedia at all. Wikidata will ''provide'' data that can be reused in the Wikipedias. And a CC0 source can be used by a Share-Alike project, be it either Wikipedia or OSM. But not the other way around. Do we agree on this understanding? --[[User:Denny Vrandečić (WMDE)|Denny Vrandečić (WMDE)]] ([[User talk:Denny Vrandečić (WMDE)|talk]]) 12:39, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

Denny then moved to Google in October 2013, and subsequently argued strongly in favour of making Wikidata CC0, which is the viewpoint that prevailed and led to large-scale importation of Wikipedia content in Wikidata.

The legal situation is admittedly fairly complex[2] but it stands to reason that when a person moves from Wikimedia to Google, loyalties and priorities will change along with such a move. That is only natural. Nobody would or should make such a move if they weren't prepared to be loyal to their new employer. (I've cc'ed Denny as a courtesy.)

What is equally certain is that the CC0 licence served the interests of Google and other Big Tech companies. All of this of course happened at a time when Google and Silicon Valley were particularly strongly represented on the WMF board.[3]

As far as the Wikimedia projects are concerned, Wikidata's shift to CC0 substantially increased the risk of disintermediation that Guillaume mentioned in his post. If content is CC0, there is no need for attribution, so unlike the present Knowledge Graph panels, which at least have a link to Wikipedia, there is no need for any attribution to a Wikimedia site at all when others use Wikidata content.

Content is then widely disseminated and presented as truth without any indication that it comes from a Wikimedia volunteer project. As Heather Ford has pointed out in her chapter of the Wikipedia @ 20 book, "Rise of the Underdog"[4], this obscuring of provenance is undesirable for other reasons as well – it becomes harder to contest information. Users lose agency.

Now, in the context of the grand aim of Knowledge Equity, I believe it is absolutely the wrong thing for the WMF to enter into any association with Big Tech companies that results in any preferential treatment being extended to them.

Companies like Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook are surveillance capitalists. Their entire business model is based on tracking user behaviour. It is diametrically opposed to professed WMF core values concerning privacy and data protection.

Moreover, these companies have become trillion-dollar companies – really the 21st-century equivalent in many ways of what oil companies were in the last century, and wielding the same kind of covert influence – in part because of their diligent effort to avoid paying taxes in the countries they operate in.

The way these companies are set up, this will never change: shareholders will always demand maximum return on their investments, which necessitates minimising tax. I believe anyone who would try to change these companies' tax-avoidance behaviour, volunteering to pay the billions of dollars of tax these companies morally owe the global south and other jurisdictions, would simply be axed.

What this means, given that all these companies are based in the US, is that as their already overwhelming market share grows globally, the economic imbalance disadvantaging the global south – which is the root cause of unequal access to knowledge – will only grow. It's a bit like 21st-century colonialism: wealth streaming out of poor countries into a rich one.

For both of these reasons, privacy and tax avoidance, I believe the WMF has absolutely no business aiding these companies to any extent where it would give them any additional advantage over regional or global competitors. Of course I acknowledge that it is impossible to avoid interacting with Big Tech, but where competitors such as DuckDuckGo are available whose values are at least partially more aligned with the WMF's own, they should be clearly preferred as WMF partners.

For that reason I was really glad to read about a joint WMF/DuckDuckGo study the other day that shed some interesting light on another aspect of disintermediation. This study found that knowledge panels increase rather than diminish click-throughs to Wikipedia[5], much the opposite of what I and others thought a few years ago. While this is a single study whose conclusions may not necessarily hold true in all contexts, it is an interesting and encouraging result.

Andreas

[1]

https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Wikidata&diff=3876137&...

...

<

https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Wikidata&diff=3876137&...

...

[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Database_Rights#Conclusion https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Database_Rights#Conclusion [3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-01-13/News_a...

...

<

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-01-13/News_a...

...

[4] https://wikipedia20.pubpub.org/pub/fcgjp9ul/release/2 https://wikipedia20.pubpub.org/pub/fcgjp9ul/release/2 [5]

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/09/23/searching-for-wikipedia-duckduckgo-and...

...

<

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/09/23/searching-for-wikipedia-duckduckgo-and...

...

Congratulations on developing a useful service for the most profitable and powerful corporations on the planet.

On Sun, Sep 26, 2021 at 2:34 AM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

Hoi, Facts are in and of themselves not copyrightable. Collections of data may be copyrighted.We choose not to and as a result Wikidata is the powerhouse that it has become.The CC-by-sa license is our license of choice for Wikipedia however, the way it has been enforced so far has been defensive, we are quite happy when our material is used.

At Wikidata we are long past the point where the majority of the data is from a Wikipedia. From day one Wikidata has provided essential services to every Wikipedia, Wikidata can provide superior services to Wikipedia. Because like Commons, we have to maintain the data only once and have it available everywhere. Wikidata is instrumental in sychronising death information among our projects. It has been shown over and over again to have more complete information as can be found in Wikipedia lists and categories. Wikipedians choose to stick with their arguably substandard practices.

The notion that a Google or an Amazon are not capable of extracting facts from a Wikipedia is silly. They have the capacity and the skills and the software to do just that. Wikidata provides them additional information making their information more complete. They have their reasons to be model citizens and contribute to the Wikimedia Foundation. We now provide paid for services to them making their bot activity less of a strain to our services and provide them a (paid for) service. Thanks, GerardM

On Sun, 26 Sept 2021 at 04:32, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:

...

Sorry for not being explicit; the connection is that protection of copyleft would be inconvenient to major endowment donors such as Google and Amazon. WikiData is a Wikimedia project that converts copylefted content into (what Wikimedia asserts to be) copyright-free content.

On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 5:40 PM Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk wrote:

...

On Thu, 23 Sept 2021 at 19:27, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:

...

It's really disappointing to me that the Structured Data work has been

used to blow up Wikipedia's copyleft.

1. Your message has nothing to do with the endowment

2. You offer no evidence that "the Structured Data work has been used

to blow up Wikipedia's copyleft."

3. You do not explain what you mean by "blow up Wikipedia's copyleft."

If you wish to discuss copyright and/or structured data, please start a new thread; and be clear there about the point you wish to make.

-- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing https://pigsonthewing.org.uk _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

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Is not only about "fulfilling wishes". Is about solving the enormous lag of tech problems we have. We may be the only top-10 site in the world with links to features in all the pages that are not working (as the book creator). We may have 100 million USD to mantain our legacy forever. It will be a nice museum of how Internet looked in the 1990s. We may have lots of money, but we lack any strategy to invest this money in making our platform better.

thanks

Galder ________________________________ From: phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com Sent: Friday, September 24, 2021 1:16 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikimedia Endowment reaches initial $100 million goal and welcomes new board members

Thanks Christophe, SJ and all! Lisa, agreed - it's taken a lot of work over the years from many people to get here. A big thanks to all of the endowment staff past and present and especially to you Lisa, who has been there as an advocate from the very beginning "what if we made an endowment?!" days. Also thanks to my fellow current and former trustees on the WMF & Endowment boards who have supported this effort. I'm honored and excited to be a part of the next chapter of the endowment, and I hope to hear community members' thoughts on the best way an endowment could support the very long term future of the Wikimedia projects and free knowledge too.

Galder -- though the endowment may only ever indirectly support this, yes to a wishlist system that fulfills more wishes. I want to see this too. Cunctator -- this seems like a different topic for a different thread? Vito -- Good meme usage. I can't find the perfect meme to answer so I'll just say that (as I expect you know) the endowment is meant to support the projects in perpetuity, which means it isn't there to replace daily operation funding or annual fundraising. The 100M is meant to generate investment income (which best case scenario will still only be a fraction of the current WMF budget.) Changing fundraising strategies really means changing the size and scope of the WMF annual plan, including affiliate grants; the need for fundraising follows from the budget. While that's a good conversation to have, I don't think the existence of the endowment will direct it (or our larger movement strategy conversations).

cheers, Phoebe

On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 1:21 PM Lisa Gruwell <lgruwell@wikimedia.orgmailto:lgruwell@wikimedia.org> wrote: Thank you, Christophe and SJ. You both were great supporters of this effort when you were on the WMF board and it wouldn't have gotten off the ground without you. It takes a lot of vision and trust to do something long-term like an endowment. Thanks for giving that to us!

Best, Lisa

On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 1:52 AM Christophe Henner <christophe.henner@gmail.commailto:christophe.henner@gmail.com> wrote: Congratulations Lisa and team, I know how much energy you pour into it! That is an amazing step. And great to see the endowment becoming its own organization.

And "welcome" to the "new" endowment board members! :)

Few people might know Doron, but he is not a stranger. He has been supporting the movement for a very very long time and knows us very well. I remember back in 2016, he understood very very fast why it was critical to invest in Wikidata and that lead to the Structured Data grant: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data/Sloan_Grant.

Phoebe, Doron and Patricio are great additions to the endowment board!

All good news, thank you again Lisa!

-- Christophe

On Wed, 22 Sept 2021 at 16:58, Lisa Gruwell <lgruwell@wikimedia.orgmailto:lgruwell@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Dear all,

Today I am very happy to announce the Wikimedia Endowment [1] has reached its initial $100 million goal. The Endowment was started in 2016 as a permanent fund to support the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity [2].

My deep gratitude goes out to our generous donors, the Endowment board, Foundation staff, and volunteers who made this possible. I am grateful to the future-focused community members who began considering the idea of an endowment years ago, to those who participated in community conversations on Meta [3] to help us think through initial decisions regarding its launch, and to all contributors whose work creating Wikimedia content has brought free knowledge to the world.

As part of this milestone, the Wikimedia Endowment Board has also welcomed three new members: Phoebe Ayers, Patricio Lorente, and Doron Weber, bringing in important expertise of the Wikimedia movement and priorities as well as in nonprofit management.

You can read more about this milestone, what it means for the movement, and what comes next for the Endowment on Diff [4] and the Endowment Meta page [5]. We invite you to share any questions or feedback on the Endowment talk page [6].

Thank you to everyone who has made this incredible achievement possible.

Best regards,

Lisa

[1] https://wikimediaendowment.org/

[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/mission/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/mission/

[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Endowment_Essay

[4]https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/09/22/the-wikimedia-endowment-reaches-100-mi... https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/09/22/the-wikimedia-endowment-reaches-100-million-milestone-and-welcomes-three-new-members-to-its-board-more-on-what-these-developments-mean-for-the-projects-and-movement/

[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment

[6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Endowment

--

[https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/7MN96V6or1Y0lu_IHLjdwlbWcRXHAjJfO14_U7F5Ld...]

Lisa Seitz Gruwell

Chief Advancement Officer

Wikimedia Foundationhttps://wikimediafoundation.org/

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--

[https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/7MN96V6or1Y0lu_IHLjdwlbWcRXHAjJfO14_U7F5Ld...]

Lisa Seitz Gruwell

Chief Advancement Officer

Wikimedia Foundationhttps://wikimediafoundation.org/

_______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

-- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers <at> gmail.comhttp://gmail.com *

Phoebe,

You say,

"Vito -- Good meme usage. I can't find the perfect meme to answer so I'll just say that (as I expect you know) the endowment is meant to support the projects in perpetuity, which means it isn't there to replace daily operation funding or annual fundraising. The 100M is meant to generate investment income (which best case scenario will still only be a fraction of the current WMF budget.) Changing fundraising strategies really means changing the size and scope of the WMF annual plan, including affiliate grants; the need for fundraising follows from the budget. While that's a good conversation to have, I don't think the existence of the endowment will direct it (or our larger movement strategy conversations)."

Changing fundraising strategies for the Endowment has no impact whatsoever on affiliate grants. This past year, for example, during the height of the pandemic, people like Jason Adams, the WMF's Senior Planned Giving Specialist, emailed past Wikipedia donors, impressing on them how prudent it would be to make a will leaving money to the Wikimedia Endowment in the event of their death. "It's a great way to protect your loved ones and the causes you care about most all at once," he wrote. "When you leave a gift to the Wikimedia Endowment, you become part of Wikipedia's legacy."[1]

This fulfils at least some people's definition of aggressive, if not "creepy" fundraising.[2][3]

You can't blame Jason – it's what he was hired to do – but clearly the WMF feels it has a captive and lucrative product, Wikipedia, and should monetise the hell out of it in the most professional manner possible while the going is good – to the point where its spending struggles to keep pace with its rising revenue (which is the precise situation that led to the Knowledge Equity Fund[4]).

Again, that approach is surely common enough in the US and elsewhere – make money first, think about how to spend it later –, but the problem is that Wikipedia isn't just a product, but a community of volunteers.

Monetising the hell out of a volunteer community feels different from monetising a product.

As for "Changing fundraising strategies really means changing the size and scope of the WMF annual plan, including affiliate grants", I suppose that was meant to make people afraid they might lose funding. But the fact is that the size and scope of the WMF annual plan "changes" constantly: it balloons more and more each year.

While budgeted expenses for 2020/2021 were $108M[5] (and the WMF generally underspends), this year's 2021/2022 annual plan[6] budgets for a total expenditure of $150M – a year-on-year increase of nearly 40 per cent. Someone clearly thought, let's throw all caution to the wind.

I am reminded of the way Mozilla ballooned ...

Meanwhile, fundraising banners continue to tell the public money is urgently needed to "protect Wikipedia's independence", make people believe the WMF "often struggles to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running"[7], and Wikimedia's upbeat, invariably "excited" PR resembles more and more the output of an Orwellian propaganda ministry.

No doubt the architects of this development will eventually leave the WMF with résumés highlighting by how much they increased revenue over such-and-such an amount of time, how they built a $100M endowment in half the time planned (this target was achieved five years early), and move to a different employer who values these abilities.

As for how the WMF and Wikipedia will be viewed by donors, the public and the volunteer community, time will tell what their legacy will be.

Andreas

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Fundraising&oldid=2176... [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Fundraising&oldid=2176... ?? [3] https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1400129061142163460 [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019/A... [6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019/A... [7] https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/

On Fri, Sep 24, 2021 at 12:17 AM phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:

Vito -- Good meme usage. I can't find the perfect meme to answer so I'll just say that (as I expect you know) the endowment is meant to support the projects in perpetuity, which means it isn't there to replace daily operation funding or annual fundraising. The 100M is meant to generate investment income (which best case scenario will still only be a fraction of the current WMF budget.) Changing fundraising strategies really means changing the size and scope of the WMF annual plan, including affiliate grants; the need for fundraising follows from the budget. While that's a good conversation to have, I don't think the existence of the endowment will direct it (or our larger movement strategy conversations).

cheers, Phoebe

On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 1:21 PM Lisa Gruwell lgruwell@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

Thank you, Christophe and SJ. You both were great supporters of this effort when you were on the WMF board and it wouldn't have gotten off the ground without you. It takes a lot of vision and trust to do something long-term like an endowment. Thanks for giving that to us!

Best, Lisa

On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 1:52 AM Christophe Henner < christophe.henner@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Congratulations Lisa and team, I know how much energy you pour into it! That is an amazing step. And great to see the endowment becoming its own organization.

And "welcome" to the "new" endowment board members! :)

Few people might know Doron, but he is not a stranger. He has been supporting the movement for a very very long time and knows us very well. I remember back in 2016, he understood very very fast why it was critical to invest in Wikidata and that lead to the Structured Data grant: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data/Sloan_Grant.

Phoebe, Doron and Patricio are great additions to the endowment board!

All good news, thank you again Lisa!

-- Christophe

On Wed, 22 Sept 2021 at 16:58, Lisa Gruwell lgruwell@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

Dear all,

Today I am very happy to announce the Wikimedia Endowment [1] has reached its initial $100 million goal. The Endowment was started in 2016 as a permanent fund to support the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity [2].

My deep gratitude goes out to our generous donors, the Endowment board, Foundation staff, and volunteers who made this possible. I am grateful to the future-focused community members who began considering the idea of an endowment years ago, to those who participated in community conversations on Meta [3] to help us think through initial decisions regarding its launch, and to all contributors whose work creating Wikimedia content has brought free knowledge to the world.

As part of this milestone, the Wikimedia Endowment Board has also welcomed three new members: Phoebe Ayers, Patricio Lorente, and Doron Weber, bringing in important expertise of the Wikimedia movement and priorities as well as in nonprofit management.

You can read more about this milestone, what it means for the movement, and what comes next for the Endowment on Diff [4] and the Endowment Meta page [5]. We invite you to share any questions or feedback on the Endowment talk page [6].

Thank you to everyone who has made this incredible achievement possible.

Best regards,

Lisa

[1] https://wikimediaendowment.org/

[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/mission/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/mission/

[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Endowment_Essay

[4] https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/09/22/the-wikimedia-endowment-reaches-100-mi... https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/09/22/the-wikimedia-endowment-reaches-100-million-milestone-and-welcomes-three-new-members-to-its-board-more-on-what-these-developments-mean-for-the-projects-and-movement/

[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment [6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Endowment

--

Wording could had been better, but it's not an attack. Nobody blames fundraising people for their ability, not even the sense of urgency in banners is their fault in absence of an explicit guideline.

Andreas pointed out a problem which lies in the performance indicators of fundraising along with its goals.

Vito

Il giorno ven 24 set 2021 alle ore 12:09 Christophe Henner christophe.henner@gmail.com ha scritto:

I will answer to the end of your email only as it shocked me.

Le ven. 24 sept. 2021 à 10:33 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com a écrit :

...

No doubt the architects of this development will eventually leave the WMF with résumés highlighting by how much they increased revenue over such-and-such an amount of time, how they built a $100M endowment in half the time planned (this target was achieved five years early), and move to a different employer who values these abilities.

This is totally out of place. First of, it's their work and praising on their achievements is nothing shameful. I hope they see their work as good work.

Second, the Fundraising team is made of deeply engaged people. I will not list them all, but I am pretty sure that teams have some of the "older" employees in the Foundation. If you take the three first names of the staff list, the three (Lisa, Megan and Guillaume) all have been at the Foundation for over 10 years.

So your attack is out of place, unfounded and totally wrong. They are staff, they are professionals, they are highly engaged people and part of our movement as we all are.

So please, stop attacking people.

---

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The other source of income for the endowment is investment earnings.

On Mon, Oct 4, 2021 at 11:03 AM Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:

Dear Lisa and all,

According to Meta and the just-released WMF Advancement fourth-quarter tuning session deck, the Endowment actually passed the $100-million mark not this month, but three months ago – in June, before the start of this current financial year. The Meta page e.g. says:

The Endowment reached our initial $100 million goal in June 2021. The goal was set as part of a ten-year plan from 2016-2026.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Endowment&diff=22...

This means the Endowment grew by around $40 million in the 2020/2021 financial year alone – about as much as in the three previous years together – based on this Meta edit by Endowment Director Amy Parker, who stated that on June 30, 2020, the Endowment stood at $62.9 million:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Endowment&diff=ne...

I say "around $40 million" because if the Endowment grew from $62.9 million on June 30, 2020, to over $100 million sometime during June, 2021, at least $37.1 million (and probably a little more) must have been added to it in the 2020/2021 financial year.

Now, according to the just-released WMF Advancement fourth-quarter tuning session deck, in the 2020/2021 financial year the Foundation raised ...

– $154 million for the Foundation (vs. an initial target of $108 million) – $18.9 million (vs. a target of $5 million) for the Endowment

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWikimedia_Foundation_...

I've been told by WMF staff that the WMF receives two kinds of moneys for the Endowment:

– Some are "pass-through" donations to the Endowment. These are moneys received by the Foundation that are passed straight on. They enter the Endowment directly and do not appear in the Foundation's Revenue, Assets or Expenses figures. – Some are ordinary WMF revenue, reflected in WMF Support and Revenue totals, which is then used to make a Foundation grant to the Endowment. Such WMF grants to the Wikimedia Endowment are included in the Foundation's expenses total, under Awards and Grants. My understanding was that this has been $5 million per annum (equalling the target mentioned in the above slide), for the past six years.

So what are the $18.9 million for the Endowment in the tuning session deck? Does that mean that the WMF, in the last financial year, took $172.9 million in revenue ($154M + $18.9M) and made an $18.9 million grant to the Endowment?

Or are these $18.9 million pass-through gifts to the Endowment, which won't show up in the Foundation's financial statements at all, and the annual $5 million came on top of that, out of the $154 million?

At any rate, given that the Endowment evidently grew by at least $37.1 million in the last financial year, the $18.9 million mentioned in the tuning session deck are about $20 million short. Where did the other money come from, given that it seems to have been so much more than in previous years?

Were there any particularly large gifts from companies or foundations? The only major gift mentioned on the Meta page is a $1 million gift from Amazon.

I am sorry for the many questions, and apologise in advance for any errors or misunderstandings on my part, but I find the Endowment set-up completely impenetrable and non-transparent.

There is no Form 990 documentation, because the Foundation says on the Form 990 it does not have any Endowment assets, and there are no timely updates or audited financial statements about money going into the Endowment or coming out of it. I wish this were different.

I will copy these questions to the Endowment talk page as well.

Regards, Andreas

On Wed, Sep 22, 2021 at 3:58 PM Lisa Gruwell lgruwell@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

Dear all,

Today I am very happy to announce the Wikimedia Endowment [1] has reached its initial $100 million goal. The Endowment was started in 2016 as a permanent fund to support the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity [2].

My deep gratitude goes out to our generous donors, the Endowment board, Foundation staff, and volunteers who made this possible. I am grateful to the future-focused community members who began considering the idea of an endowment years ago, to those who participated in community conversations on Meta [3] to help us think through initial decisions regarding its launch, and to all contributors whose work creating Wikimedia content has brought free knowledge to the world.

As part of this milestone, the Wikimedia Endowment Board has also welcomed three new members: Phoebe Ayers, Patricio Lorente, and Doron Weber, bringing in important expertise of the Wikimedia movement and priorities as well as in nonprofit management.

You can read more about this milestone, what it means for the movement, and what comes next for the Endowment on Diff [4] and the Endowment Meta page [5]. We invite you to share any questions or feedback on the Endowment talk page [6].

Thank you to everyone who has made this incredible achievement possible.

Best regards,

Lisa

[1] https://wikimediaendowment.org/

[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/mission/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/mission/

[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Endowment_Essay

[4] https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/09/22/the-wikimedia-endowment-reaches-100-mi... https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/09/22/the-wikimedia-endowment-reaches-100-million-milestone-and-welcomes-three-new-members-to-its-board-more-on-what-these-developments-mean-for-the-projects-and-movement/

[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment [6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Endowment

--

Lisa Seitz Gruwell

Chief Advancement Officer

Wikimedia Foundation https://wikimediafoundation.org/

---

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