OPEN LETTER
Dear Katherine Maher,
The WMF home website landing page (https://wikimediafoundation.org) yesterday featured a full-page banner directing all visitors globally to https://www.earthdaylive2020.org. This is a site used for Americal political lobbying, refer to the email discussion attached.
Could you, or the responsible member of your management team, please explain exactly how this happened?
There is zero doubt that this was a serious operational error, misuse of WMF development time and a misuse of the Wikimedia brand. It is certain that you will agree that the buck stops with the CEO. The decision to use the Foundation's website for American lobbying is in conflict with your not for profit status and is in conflict with the charitable status promoted to donors worldwide.
If the management team and yourself are going to continuing political lobbying and using WMF resources to raise funds for Americal political organizations which have no agreed relevance to the mission of the Foundation, there must be a published transparent governance review by the WMF board of trustees to examine and agree on this significant operational change to the public Foundation strategy and the terms for the CEO.
Thank you in advance.
Link to Phabricator task to implement the banner: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T250508 CC: María Sefidari as WMF Chair.
Fae
On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 at 05:50, K. Peachey p858snake@gmail.com wrote:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T250508
On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 at 09:53, Chris Gates via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi,
It seems that they just gave a link to that website, which...eh... When I opened it, I heard one sentence of the stream before I stopped it and read the rest of the webpage: "and then we give thanks to spirit, for the air we breathe, for the earth..." After reading the rest of the webpage, I un-paused it, and am currently listening to a bit of propaganda promoting unions and more extensive labor laws.
The linked website is explicitly political, explicitly on the American left, and explicitly in favor of certain highly contentious American political proposals. I would like to hear the reasoning for why that link has been shown, and it seems to me simply unjustifiable. The WMF is the host of a series of community-built projects, not a political activism organization.
Regards, Vermont
On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 5:12 PM Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com wrote:
Hello, I can confirm that I see the same also here in the Netherlands. Which is strange, there are no general elections here before 2021... An explanation about this link would be interesting. Kind regards Ziko
Am Mi., 22. Apr. 2020 um 22:50 Uhr schrieb Yair Rand <yyairrand@gmail.com
:
The WMF corporate site (wikimediafoundation.org) currently has a full-page ad with the text "We are watching Earth Day Live today. Will you?". This links to an external site with the text "Click here to sign
on
to the US Youth Climate Strike Coalition Earth Day Demands - From
congress
and the next president, we demand a People’s Bailout, a Green New Deal,
and
Land Back for Indigenous Peoples", and prompting readers to "Pledge to
vote
for our future" and to subscribe to "US Climate Strike".
Everyone here already knows how unacceptable this is, and why, so I don't think this requires any further explanation. The WMF should immediately take this down, and make certain that this kind of thing can't happen again. They've failed yet again at preventing inappropriate political activism in WMF's communications, and must take serious action
to
fix this constant stream of terrible failures.
-- Yair Rand