Re: [Wikimedia-l] Something

Milos Rancic wrote: Poe's law dictates that this thread may or may not be taken at face value. I'll choose the former. For many people, the Something is Lila. The buck has to stop somewhere and as noted on Meta-Wiki and elsewhere, since her accession to the Executive Director position, there has been a very high level of shake-up at the Wikimedia Foundation. Some points of reference, looking at the "Staff and contractors" page: * As of 2014-01-01: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Permalink/94980 * As of 2015-01-01: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Permalink/100668 * As of 2016-01-01: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Permalink/104377 No more Sue, no more Erik, no more many, many others. With the exception of Geoff, we have a full turnover of the leadership/executive/whatever team of the Wikimedia Foundation. This, in addition to two vacancies for Chief Technology and Chief Financial Officers, along with a recent-ish massive re-organization of the engineering team that ruffled feathers. I like to remind people that Sue's start as Executive Director wasn't exactly drama-free, but at no point in her tenure can I remember anyone, inside or outside of the Wikimedia Foundation, suggesting holding a vote of no confidence for her. The same hasn't been true of Lila, unfortunately. I personally am still in the "wait and see" camp regarding the past two years at the Wikimedia Foundation. But my personal views are less relevant if public confidence among nearly everyone else is non-existent. All that said, the underlying issue probably rests more with the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees itself than with its Executive Director. We return, yet again, to this post by David Gerard: <http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/?p=630>. The Executive Director's role is to implement and execute on the organization's goals. The organization's goals are ultimately set by the Board of Trustees. Rather than tackling the hard problem of what the Wikimedia Foundation wants to accomplish over the next 1, 3, and 5 years, the Board has been instead concerning itself with trying to maintain secrecy (lovingly branded as confidentiality) and hierarchy, as it fumbles forward. Quite literally, the Wikimedia (Foundation) Strategic Plan expired at the end of 2015 and the efforts to write a new plan have been horribly haphazard, late, and lacking. It's possible that the secrecy is hiding all of the work taking place in the background, with people diligently studying the past five years, associated goals, and figuring out what went wrong and what went right. But the suspicion I have, as a somewhat-informed observer, is that the high-level vision for what comes next for the Wikimedia Foundation is missing. And that's what driving the low morale and high discomfort. Perhaps ironically, this tumult and anxiety comes at a time when there's so much to be excited about in the tech space. We have all kinds of new tools: arbitrary Wikidata access, graphing/visualization libraries, more powerful transclusion, Scribunto/Lua modules, VisualEditor, etc., along with steady performance and operations improvements that have made the sites faster and securer to load and more enjoyable to use. There are reasons to be hopeful about the next few years, but also reasons to be concerned. It's unclear what the precise ratio is currently. Thyge wrote: Wrong wiki. ;-) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/NDA> has the answer. Asaf Bartov wrote: I kind of skimmed over "IEP" and half of me assumed it was related to Individual Engagement Grants (IEG). Luckily Meta-Wiki again comes to the rescue: <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IEP> and <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IEG>. Maybe we should start selling decoder rings. Acronyms and abbreviations are fine, especially in a long document, but at minimum the first reference should always be spelled out. MZMcBride