Refugees ... don't have anything to do with the
WMF
Someone forgot to tell that to the Foundation volunteers working on
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/12/24/refugee-phrasebook/
which is directly linked from that section of the Annual Report.
messages like this "empower" only those who
agree with them
Should the Mission be amended to exclude those who government
officials have decided are no longer allowed to have freedom of
movement across borders?
This sort of thing can be pretty exclusionary and
disempowering if
you do not agree with the rather unsubtle political stances being taken.
Is there any actual evidence of this? People said the same thing about
the SOPA/PIPA protest, but there was no change to editing levels and
the responses from the community and donors were very strongly
positive when they were asked directly. There was just a familiar
vocal minority who were adamantly complaining that the Foundation's
purity of essence had been corrupted.
It also just provides more fuel for those arguing that
Wikipedia is a
left-wing advocacy organisation rather than a credible, neutral, and
trustworthy source of bias-free information.
On the contrary, the left-wing is the only source of credible,
trustworthy, and bias-free information on a wide variety of topics
such as climate change. Equating neutrality with credibility and
trustworthiness is a clear mistake, because political bias is not
orthogonal to factual bias.
imagine it is October.... The Comms team begins
writing a report. If
Hillary Clinton had won, it's likely that these would not have looked so
terribly much like political statements. It may have looked like a normal
affirmation of acceptable values.... But America went another direction
and now things that could have been considered normalish suddenly
look like a shot fired round the world.
Exactly; well put, Anna!
it's ultimately not mission aligned
This, again, is the real dispute, whether the word "empower" in the
Mission means anything about actual power beyond mere facilitation.