[Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

[Tomasz W. Kozlowski]

Hi all,
for those of you who do not watch the RecentChanges on the Foundation 
wiki <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges>, I 
think it might be somehow surprising to see that in a top-level 
decision, almost all volunteer administrators of the wiki have been 
stripped off their adminship yesterday evening (UTC time).

As far as I know, community members have been helping out maintaining 
this wiki for as long as 2006, spending countless hours of their free 
time on categorising existing pages, importing translations from Meta, 
and recently, deleting unnecessary and broken pages left over by WMF staff.

Apparently, this is something that not only isn't appreciated, but 
unwelcome. Let me repeat that: the WMF does not wish volunteers to help 
out with running their wiki, even if they have been helping out almost 
since the very start of the wiki.

Some questions come to my mind right now:

1) Who made the decision to remove adminship from all community members? 
(I'm assuming it was Gayle, but it could've be someone from the 
Communications department for all we know.)
2) Why did you make this decision now? What changed?
3) Why did you decide to desysop people straight away instead of 
discussing things with them first?

These are questions directed at the WMF—for you regular folks, I have a 
riddle (I'll give a WikiLove barnstar to the first person to submit a 
correct answer). There is /at least/ one community member who does not 
hold any official position within the WMF, and who has not been 
desysopped in yesterday's purge—do you know who this person is?

	-- Tomasz