User talk:Cremastra/complaint

Comments

The WMF needs to choose between two approaches to funding. The first option is to explain how wonderful the WMF is, demonstrate why the WMF's current finances are insufficient, and solicit donations for the WMF. The WMF is then free to distribute its money as it wishes. The second option is to extol the virtues of Wikipedia, explain how little money it receives, and beg for cash for Wikipedia. However, we then expect that income to be spent on Wikipedia, not blown on other projects, hidden in opaque funds or passed on to other charities which our donors may not support. The current collection method is a confusing hybrid, with donors being convinced that they are helping Wikipedia but having most of their money syphoned off for unexpected purposes. No doubt a highly-paid team of lawyers has endorsed it as legal, but it seems far from ethical.

On a more general note, I truly want to support the WMF and work in harmony. Although the WMF's stated mission is to "advance equity", with not a single mention of Wikipedia or any other concrete aim, I still believe that we have shared goals and could pull in the same direction again, as we did so successfully a decade or two ago. But almost everything the WMF does and says just makes me want to retire, and I suspect I'm not the only contributor with those feelings. Our editors are invaluable; please stop driving them away. Certes (talk) 22:23, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

I believe it is important to state that those who sign this letter/petition want to support the WMF, & see the importance that we work as partners. Our concern is not so much that grants are made -- although Wikimedia projects should always take priority -- but having a say in the matter. (I'm planning on saying more, but I'm about to leave work & it may be a while before I can get back to this.) -- llywrch (talk) 23:29, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

 Done Edward-Woodrow :) _[talk] 23:47, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

I agree, but we can't really alter the letter after it's been signed. Before the signature section grows too large, let's repurpose it as a list of interested parties who would support delivering the letter as-is over doing nothing but see if we can do even better. Then we can collaborate on a final version which those in agreement can sign afresh and actually deliver. Certes (talk) 11:09, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

You only have three signatures so far, and one of them only "broadly supports" the letter. So I'd argue it is not too late to tweak the letter in ways that might get more to sign it. ϢereSpielChequers 11:13, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

And while we're here, I don't want to "be a part of the Wikimedia Movement Charter journey". I just want to help build an encyclopedia. Certes (talk) 11:14, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Is it possible to have the letter be broad in scope then have specific concerns in the signatures (or in a separate "comments" section)? Edward-Woodrow :) _[talk] 11:17, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Agreed. I haven't been around here for long, but appears that typical WMF behaviour is coming up with some vague idea, or some unhelpful/weird software project that no-one actually wants, and then spending all its time and effort pushing that through instead of focusing on more important matters. Edward-Woodrow :) _[talk] 22:11, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Deliver where? I was wondering about this. WP:VPWMF? User talk:WMFOffice? The talk pages of every single WMF employee on enwiki? Some obscure place on meta? Edward-Woodrow :) _[talk] 11:44, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

WP:VPWMF is the obvious place but WMF announcements seem to arrive at WP:VPM instead, so I'm not sure whether the right people read VPWMF. Wherever it goes, it wouldn't hurt to link it from a few strategic places. Certes (talk) 15:24, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

I've already linked to the page from Wikipedia:Fundraising/2023 banners, but that page has under thirty watchers and declining attention. Edward-Woodrow :) _[talk] 18:40, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Pensions

Done.  The letter has been changed from pensions to golden parachutes

The pensions comment links to an article that doesn't mention pensions. It mentions payoffs to senior WMF personnel leaving. I don't know what the WMF policy is on staff pensions - it is possible that it could be generous by US employer standards but stingy by European standards. I would suggest changing your letter to focus on the issue that almost all of us will agree on - such payoffs to former senior staff are either a sign of a falling out between the organisation and the departing exec, or a sign that the departing exec knows things that the organisation does not want disclosed, or just over generous to someone leaving the inner circle. ϢereSpielChequers 07:33, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

A large payoff to get rid of the wrong person can sometimes be a wise investment. I do not know enough about any of the individuals to opine on whether that was the case here. Certes (talk) 11:00, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Agreed if you are a commercial enterprise. I think it is more contentious if you are a not for profit, especially one that has been pleading poverty in order to solicit donations. But my point was that the cite is to golden parachutes not pensions, and I did say that almost all of us would agree that the parachutes were troubling - I didn't argue we would all have a problem with it. ϢereSpielChequers 11:10, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

I suspect I mixed up wikt:pension and wikt:severance payment – which I realize now are quite different. Edward-Woodrow :) _[talk] 11:14, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Just for reference, WereSpielChequers, pension plan accruals and contributions can be found on page 10 of the Form 990. Lines 5–10 show:

• Compensation of current officers, directors, trustees, and key employees: 4.26M
• Other salaries and wages: $64.97M
• Pension plan accruals and contributions (incl. section 401(k) and 403(b) employer contributions): $1.66M
• Other employee benefits: $13.76M
• Payroll taxes: $3.46M

It's the sum of those five lines that appears in Line 15 of page 1, "Salaries, other compensation, employee benefits", $88.11M.

(By the way, the New York Times recently had an article on Katherine Maher's wedding.) Andreas JN466 12:33, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks Jayen, (my invite doesn't seem to have arrived either) once you accept the idea of locating half the staff in one of the most expensive locations on the planet, those costs are probably inevitable. If the organisation needed to be more frugal then I expect a relocation to somewhere more cost effective would be a sensible part of a medium to longterm strategy. But in terms of this letter and community disquiet, it is those severance payments that we should baulk at. ϢereSpielChequers 16:51, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Knowledge equity

Re the grant program, I'm broadly OK with the WMF giving money to "address gaps in the Wikimedia movement's vision of free knowledge caused by racial bias and discrimination, that have prevented populations around the world from participating equally". I hope that much of the opposition to this is because of the language used, and if those same projects were being described as "Though offline sources are as valid as online ones, we know that our community finds online sources much easier to use. In countries and encyclopaedic topics where there is a dearth of reliable online sources, we will use grant money to get more reliable sources onto the internet". Then I, and I hope others, would find this as easy to defend as getting reference books into the hands of Wikipedia editors. The individual grants also seem like a lot of money, especially as initial grants for these organisations and I would have preferred a pilot projects. If each of these organisations had initially been funded for a year on the sort of scale that Wikimedians in Residence cost, then it would have been easier to justify these as experiments, as it is they are funded more at the level of a medium sized chapter. In terms of the announcements I think the community would have been more likely to see the relevance if the projects had been described more in terms of the primary and secondary sources that will become available to our editors and everyone else. Bonus points if they had set out ways for editors to make requests from these various sources. ϢereSpielChequers 17:20, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

I'm in agreement with this. What troubles me about these grants is that how they will benefit Wikimedia projects is not explicitly stated. For example, if moneys are used to record oral knowledge/traditions & release those under a CC-BY-SA license, that would be in harmony with our expectations as volunteers. Or to help a third-world academic/scholar get a book published, in return that the text later be released with a similar license. Or -- can we dare hope -- a paid Wikimedian-in-Residence position? Instead, reading the diff article, I'm not seeing this emphasis on free knowledge, let alone a result that would somehow benefit Wikimedia volunteers. It's hard not to suspect these grants were made out of liberal guilt, or (worse) as part of a quid pro quo that personally benefits a Wikimedia staffer or functionary. (And we have grounds to be suspicious: there have been numerous occasions where Foundation resources have been misused by individuals.)

The Foundation needs to be sensitive to a very important fact about the volunteer experience: we fund our efforts entirely out of our own pockets. If the Foundation has resources we volunteers can draw on, they are not publicized very successfully. As I've written elsewhere, if I need a book or article to write articles -- the content that draws people to the websites -- & if they aren't at my local library, or available for free thru InterLibrary Loan, I have to pay for these resources. (And increasingly, I find I am paying fees to use items provided thru ILL.) So if I'm on one end of the project, covering my Wikipedia-related expenses from my own pocket, & see at the other end money from donations to Wikipedia being handed out unrelated organizations, no matter how worthy their causes I am going be resentful. I am going to feel exploited. I can't help not having those feelings. -- llywrch (talk) 18:56, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

As a PS, I agree that there are topics in Wikipedia where we need help: information on those topics is scarce. Some examples would be Ancient South Arabian coinage, or Environmental activism in the Third World. And there are subjects I'm completely unaware of because I'm a middle class white guy living in the Western US, & which need to be included. I am not objecting to spending money to improve coverage of topics like those. But unless these grants directly benefit our projects in some way -- for example, help build wordlists of endangered languages that can be reused by Wiktionary -- IMHO the money is wasted. -- llywrch (talk) 19:03, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Move

Should this be moved out of my own userspace and into projectspace (so that it feels less like a bunch of people organizing to complain in someone's basement). Edward-Woodrow :) _[talk] 23:13, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

"seem to insinuate that ..."

... is overdone. "give the impression that" would be calmer. Ok, you don't feel calm about this, and I'm with you. But I assume the intention of the letter is to persuade. Maproom (talk) 08:01, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Fundraising banners

WMF basically fixed the fundraising banners after some community pushback last December. The fix arguably resulted in a 5 million dollar fundraising shortfall, so it was very painful for them to do the right thing, but they did it anyway. I think they deserve credit where credit is due for this. I would recommend rewriting any open letters or RFCs that argue that the fundraising banners are still a problem, to focus on something else, since the fundraising banners are basically fixed. Hope this helps. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:36, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

I agree. It would be nice if we didn't need fundraising banners, but 2022's were much more honest than earlier versions. Certes (talk) 14:45, 28 August 2023 (UTC)