Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF)/Archive 13

Wikipedia "cyber villains"

Moved from WP:VPWMF § Wikipedia "cyber villains"

At Friday's meeting, representatives of the Government Office and the non-profit organisation Wikimedia Estonia will map the possibilities of protecting Estonian history from the counterfeits contained in Wikipedia.

In the English Wikipedia, the cyber villain has changed the birthplaces of many well-known Estonians by writing to: Tallinn, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union.

Link

I would just like to ask if this is the sort of thing the WMF allows and endorses? And by "this thing" I mean foreign governments removing/changing what they consider "counterfeits" (machine translation) from Wikipedia. If this is allowed to happen, Wikipedia can no longer claim editorial independence, and it becomes a mouthpiece of various governments. I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 09:37, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

Please don't make everyone guess what the point is. Yes, you gave a link but also outline who/what made the quoted statement and in what context. Johnuniq (talk) 09:52, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

This seems to be linked to Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF)#The Chairman of Wikimedia Estonia commited a personal attack against me on national television above. Phil Bridger (talk) 10:14, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

There are also a couple of ongoing RfCs that followed on from the one that prompted the interview on national television, on roughly the similar topic. CMD (talk) 10:24, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

The point is that the Government Office in Estonia (presumably at the direction of Kaja Kallas) had a meeting with a WMF affiliate (Wikimedia Estonia), where they discussed ways to influence Wikipedia content (presumably circumventing the normal editorial processes). Is there a way for WMF to ask for the minutes of that meeting from their affiliate? Which "possibilites", if any, have they "mapped" at this meeting? Are there going to be further meetings?

Why is the government of Estonia trying to influnce the English Wikipedia via an intermediary (Wikimedia Estonia)? To me, these seem like reasonabke questions to ask. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 11:27, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

Why is the government of Estonia trying to influnce the English Wikipedia via an intermediary (Wikimedia Estonia)? Probably one or both of (1) they think Wikimedia Estonia is a branch of the WMF rather than an affiliate or (2) they think they can more easily coerce Wikimedia Estonia as it's in-country. You also seem to be assuming that the WMF will go along with the Estonian government's demands; if they do at all, it would likely only be in connection to pursuing the matter in relevant courts (cf. the ANI case). Anomie⚔ 14:53, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

While this may be true in some situations, it seems very high-level and doesn't grapple with potential second order effects. The government may be trying to do it because it may work. You can stir up enough people in a niche area to result in consensuses more to your liking, even if the WMF does nothing. CMD (talk) 16:06, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

At that point you're getting pretty far away from Wikipedia can no longer claim editorial independence, and it becomes a mouthpiece of various governments though. And in such a situation WP:LOCALCONSENSUS may be applied where it couldn't in response to an WP:Office action. Anomie⚔ 16:29, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

I don't disagree with that point on specific wording, but it might not be as far away as we'd like. The development of a localconsensus could reward an influence campaign as it could impede it, it is a tool within our system with its benefits and flaws. CMD (talk) 16:43, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

Don't stress over it. GoodDay (talk) 15:33, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

I'll stress over whatever the hell I want. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 15:51, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

But have you got any evidence that any of this will happen? So far we have one newspaper saying that the Estonian government and Wikimedia Estonia will "map the possibilities". It's possible that they will decide to do nothing. Phil Bridger (talk) 16:24, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

There has been some speculation in this discussion that merits clarification. Over the past few months, a number of disputed changes have been made on the English Wikipedia, and they are not limited to birthplace wording alone, and several of these changes closely mirror well-known Russian state narratives. Some relevant diffs have already been provided in this thread. In that context, it is reasonable to raise concerns about whether Wikipedia may be vulnerable to organized narrative-pushing or disinformation efforts. This would not be unprecedented (see, for example, the Croatian case). These concerns help explain why the issue has attracted attention from the media, the general public, and Wikipedians from the affected countries.

The position expressed by the local chapter has been that the matter would be resolved within Wikipedia's existing processes and that there is no reason to get involved. While Estonian Wikipedians and chapter representatives are clearly dissatisfied with the underlying issues, the situation has also prompted broader public discussion about the edit histories and the transparency they provide. Ivo (talk) 22:41, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

it is reasonable to raise concerns about whether Wikipedia may be vulnerable to organized narrative-pushing

Indeed! Now is a good time to ask. Were you, as managing director of Wikimedia Estonia, present at the meeting with the Estonian Government Office on Friday, January 9th? What was discussed at the meeting? TurboSuperA+_[talk] 22:54, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

I did not attend the meeting in person, but participated virtually. From the state side, the main question was whether there are signs of coordinated narrative-pushing, and what responses would be appropriate if such activities were to be identified. From the chapter, the focus was on explaining how Wikipedia works in practice and how it could be supported more effectively, particularly concerning the Estonian Wikipedia, where, due to the small population of Estonia, it is difficult to cover all topics needed. Some state support could go a long way to increase the quality in areas that otherwise lack editors, and allow more training for people who could make meaningful contributions in the future.

One plan is a broader review of how Estonia-related topics are covered across different language editions, as smaller Wikipedias are even more vulnerable to capacity constraints and systemic issues than the English Wikipedia. We could also try to involve some specialists who could help to review content quality on more complex topics. And there is increased interest in general Wikipedia monitoring and anti-vandalism work, as there are concerns that current capacity in Wikipedia might be stretched too thin, especially while acknowledging that development in LLMs has made it easier to generate seemingly believable text that could make it harder to notice content manipulations and easier to vandalize on scale. Ivo (talk) 23:48, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for your response. I hope you can see how it can be worrying that a State's government is taking interest in how Wikipedia's topics are covered. There is no such thing as a "neutral narrative" and every POV is subjective, which is why we have WP:NPOV. I'm sure you would raise an eyebrow if the government of Russia had meetings with Wikimedia Foundation affiliates asking how edits that they consider to be "counterfeit" can be fixed.

Re: Croatian Wikipedia, the report doesn't mention "coordinated editing", but The evaluation concluded that Hr.WP had been dominated by ideologically driven users who are misaligned with Wikipedia’s five pillars The Croatian case was what put Wikipedia on my radar beyond the common understanding of "oh that site where you can look up info quickly", as I mainly used en-wiki and never hr-wiki. The ideologically driven users were fascists who did things like writing that Ante Pavelić was merely a "statesman" (rather than a Nazi collaborator), and sanitising articles like Jasenovac, while adding negative epipthets to communist subjects of articles. One doesn't need to coordinate with others to make those kind of edits, editors who follow the same ideology and subscribe to the same narrative about Croatia in WWII will make those kinds of edits.

What you call possible coordinated editing could just be users who also subscribe to the same narrative re: Baltic SSRs. Age could also be a factor, older editors would stick to what they learned in school, while the Soviet Union still existed, while younger editors born after the dissolution of the SU would not have learned the same things. Same is true for the opposite case. I would venture a guess and say that every Estonian editor voted the same in the aforementioned RfC. That doesn't mean they are coordinated and receiving instructions from a single source, it is just a reflection of the dominant narrative in Estonia.

It is important to be aware of our own biases and not think my narrative is neutral, while their narrative is biased. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 08:09, 19 January 2026 (UTC)

Why should the Estonian government have any influence over the Estonian Wikipedia? The former governs a territory, whereas the latter is based on language. The are plenty of people living in Estonia who don't speak Estonian (mainly the dreaded Russian speakers) and plenty of Estonian speakers living outside Estonia. Phil Bridger (talk) 10:15, 19 January 2026 (UTC)

Historically, Russian state-sponsored disinformation campaigns have been rather common. And to people not familiar with Wikipedia, "someone making hundreds of edits" sounds very different than to a Wikipedian. This is also why we have tried to explain to the media that this does not mean there is some Russian state hand behind that (even while the edits themselves are clearly problematic... just that there are other explanations, as there is no lack of people holding that kind of worldview in Russia... and this also explains where this "cyber villains" comes from... even as "küberpahalane" means more like "cyber vandal" or "cyber baddy").

It would also be important to distinguish between different points of view and clear BS. Just like with this Croatian case, some kind of edits would be clearly problematic and could not be whitewashed with claims that neutrality requires those other claims to be just as prominent. When we would write about the shape of the Earth (to give a very banal example), it might be necessary to mention that there have been some people who have believed in a flat Earth, but there is no sane way to justify that this worldview needs to get the same level of attention as the dominant scientific worldview.

In here, it might also be necessary to explain that in most of Europe, people trust the state. This is not the USA or Russia, where some crazy despot is running the show. For that same reason, "cooperating with the government" has a very different meaning. Like, we are not talking about giving the Estonian government influence over the Estonian Wikipedia or sth. That would be utter nonsense. Ivo (talk) 22:59, 19 January 2026 (UTC)

I suggest treating like any other POV push whether that's from Russia, India, the US, the UK, or any other country. Be aware but otherwise ignore them. People shouting, screaming, and otherwise having a hissy fit is no way to go about changing the encyclopedia. If they want to talk part in discussion and present their views and sources there are many ways they can do so. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 19:44, 20 January 2026 (UTC)

They are, there are at least two open RfCs springing from this. CMD (talk) 02:36, 21 January 2026 (UTC)

I'm aware, my point was generic. It doesn't matter what they do, things should be handled by process not on national television. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 13:41, 21 January 2026 (UTC)

The national media is handling this because the process failed spectacularly on the Wikipedia side. Considering that even in this discussion, a lot of people have failed to notice what the POV push was actually about, it is difficult to be optimistic. Recommendation would be to avoid writing comments about what one does not know anything about. Assumptions are not a good guide, and here we can see a lot of them. Ivo (talk) 17:17, 21 January 2026 (UTC)

Failed spectacularly ≡ those nasty Wikipedia editors failed to roll over and agree with everything. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:27, 21 January 2026 (UTC)

More like "those nasty Wikipedia editors failed to check sources or even look at what the discussion was actually about, and due to that, messed up really badly". But yeah, you just proved my point by totally missing what this has actually been about and failing to check any facts. There is no point in telling how Wikipedia is all about sources and neutrality and stuff, when in reality it is just about what someone thinks who does not even bother do any basic background checks. Ivo (talk) 20:28, 21 January 2026 (UTC)

Or they did all that and just don't agree with you, you know assuming good faith. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 11:48, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

I'll ask you to be more restrained to other editors here (including me). I've seen enough bad faith assumptions and aspersions casting coming from you and it's not helping this discussion. Gigman (talk) 14:47, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

Has anyone contacted WMF to see if they've been influenced by the Estonian government? Guz13 (talk) 23:24, 20 January 2026 (UTC)

I doubt they have been influenced, either way. GoodDay (talk) 20:48, 21 January 2026 (UTC)

A locked Reddit thread is asking to contact the WMF. Ahri Boy (talk) 05:03, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

The user who created the thread is asking if they can take legal action: Is there any legal action I can take against Wikipedia for refusing to rectify this? Granted, it can be difficult for subjects of articles to understand how to get things updated that they believe can be proven to be inaccurate. --Super Goku V (talk) 06:40, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

That thread seemd to be asking a slightly different question. It was started by an Estonian whose article describes him as Russian. Phil Bridger (talk) 13:28, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

I think he was complaining that his place of birth was "Estonian SSR" instead of "Estonia", because he thinks "Estonian SSR" = "Russia". TurboSuperA+_[talk] 14:03, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

If he was then he was making even more of a mistake than some people are making in this thread. Russians had no more say over what happened in the USSR than Estonians. Phil Bridger (talk) 21:37, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

As a Latvian editor, let me explain this in a more nuanced way: this might be a reaction due to the constant stream in many languages from the Russian state-sponsored propaganda machine, which in recent years has been either breathing new life in to unsubstantiated claims that the Baltic states 'joined the USSR voluntarily' and also trying to muffle the term of the restoration (not declaration) of independence in 1990/1991, which also muffles the story of the 3 states being de-iure recognized by a large part of the international community.

The minimization of this nuance, as I'd put it, is what probably led this person and others in the Baltic states to feel like all of this is being denigrated. And, with reports that this is apparently happening in a widespread scale, doesn't help. Ivario (talk) 10:50, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

Arbitrary Section Break 01: Community-WMF relations

Getting back on track with Community-WMF relations: To condense the main issues, it suffices to highlight the salient points made by others rather than responding with the same things in my own words. The times when we could sit down with the people right at the top and get things done (like Page Curation) are long since gone. There were only 7 paid employees. Nowadays there are 700 and with the lack of transparency in the form of a genuine hierarchical organigramme, no one really knows who is in charge. Sure, there is a CEO, but their positions have become ones that are possibly more that of a roving ambassador than having an essential overview of what the different audiences require and a hands-on approach to what is needed on the factory floor.

• The WMF should really be a bunch of sysadmins running the servers, and developers improving the software, writing add-ons and apps. Anything else is literally a waste of money. I guess the thinking is that the donations and grants have to be justified with new ways of spending it. — TurboSuperA+

• They [The WMF] seem to be very good at raising and squandering money. — Cullen328

• 'really simple message to the WMF' by S Marshall in 5 no-nonsense points.

• From WereSpielChequers: [But] I have a strong suspicion that the WMF philosophy is still more "move fast and break things" and mushroom farming than Kaizen, and that the WMF is still more interested in recruiting a different less awkward editing community than in cherishing and working with the volunteers they already have. and More broadly, the WMF would do well to understand and emulate the importance of honesty and accuracy to the volunteer community and our reputation.

and ...the WMF doesn't understand the volunteer community or the real long term needs of the movement.

From another current thread on the VP 'The Wikipedia sign up page disclaimer idea': Realistically, non-trivial software development requires a budget allocation and then time to actually do the work. It's January now, so the best-case scenario would be to join the annual budget planning process (which is starting now), and to have a team assigned to begin work in July (beginning of the new fiscal year) and then maybe to have something to test next calendar year. But "years" is more likely. - WhatamIdoing and my response:

This is the fundamental problem when WMF intervention is needed for a just few lines of code on something critically important but because it was a community idea and not their own, they find any excuse not to entertain it. They also appear to have a strong opinion that because they are paid for what they do, nobody among the tens of thousands of volunteers has any technical clue even though some of us have done MediaWiki installations or built extensions ourselves. This comes down to even throwing a simple switch on one of the default prefs on a MedWiki package. AFAIK, the registration page has jealously guarded WMF access only.

These WMF efforts at Questions to the community in preparation for WMF Annual Plan inviting the volunteer community/ies to offer suggestions are possibly symbolic. The Foundation's mind is probably already made up what they will work on and how they will spend the money. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 19:26, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

I appreciate your initiative to try and summarize things, but the details of what exactly has been the source of frustration for people (and where the conversation has been heading) is exactly what I've been told is needed to make any type of difference. In one of the conversations I had behind the scenes, someone pretty much said that they could do something if I handed them a 10 year plan, but that they can't do anything with a bunch of people saying they're upset and just want things to change. It's also really good to have something to point to when someone who doesn't have that background wants to understand the reason behind people's anger (people aren't just doing it to be haters or because they don't want to help build something up instead of tear it down). I'm hoping having a really solid concrete list of examples to point to will be helpful as I continue to pursue these conversations with people within the WMF. I think you make a good point about how it's difficult to know who is even doing anything. It's a maze, and I've said as much before. I think it'd really help if we had some centralized list of this is how many departments there are, product teams, etc somewhere, along with a list of every affiliate or hub and everything in one place. It's hard to have these discussions when you don't know who to contact. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 19:43, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

On a related note, someone does need to make Wikipedia:Anti-WMF sentiment blue (btw I could’ve sworn a page that described community views on the WMF existed, after searching for a while I asked ChatGPT and it gave me a non-existent page at "Wikipedia:Wikimedia Foundation issues" which it claimed was that :/ ) Kowal2701 (talk) 20:30, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

btw I could’ve sworn a page that described community views on the WMF existed Were you possibly thinking of the open letters or the Community Response to the foundation's ban of Fram pages? -BlueEleephant (talk) 21:47, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

I think they were probably thinking of User:Novem Linguae/Essays/Community tension with the WMF instead of FRAM. The page was unfortunately deleted by its creator. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 22:26, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

Ngl I think I made it up, but thanks for the links Kowal2701 (talk) 22:40, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

It is now here: User:TurboSuperA+/What is Eating Wikipedians TurboSuperA+_[talk] 18:33, 23 January 2026 (UTC)

I just came across this essay: Wikipedia has cancer by @Guy Macon. Essay's alt title: Just because you have some money, that doesn't mean that you have to spend it. It's a good essay, worth the read. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 22:05, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

Try this: Ask the WMF to pick a Wikimania -- any Wikimania -- and tell us how much it cost with at least a vague indication on what the money was spent on. Go ahead. Try. You will receive a stonewall of silence. You won't even get a response saying that they can't or won't answer the question. --Guy Macon (talk) 00:33, 23 January 2026 (UTC)

I've had similar questions about various technology projects, like how much they spend on VE v. V22 v. Discussion Tools, etc. Not sure why being transparent about project-level funding is a problem. How do we know if they're spending enough on this or too much on that, if they don't disclose how much they're spending on this and that (just broad level categories like "infrastructure" or "personnel")? I'd like a Board that provides that project-level-spending oversight, but I don't believe the current Board does. I've heard Trustees say that it's not the Board's job to tell the WMF how to spend its money, that that's the CEO's job and the Board's job is to pick a good CEO, but I disagree with that viewpoint. Levivich (talk) 01:46, 23 January 2026 (UTC)

It's a shame Lane never had a chance to get elected and propose implementing m:Right to Information/FAQ. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 02:17, 23 January 2026 (UTC)

Every so often someone (never anyone from the WMF; along with the usual WMF silence comes an angry mob of regular editors insisting that you shouldn't question the WMF) claims that my financial transparency proposals are way too much work for the WMF. I then ask a much smaller question that should be easy to answer. Here is how that went last time: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-03-18/Op-ed#Computer equipment and office_furniture. The reader should feel free to ask the same question and see if they can get an answer. --Guy Macon (talk) 17:29, 23 January 2026 (UTC)

Letting employees sit on anything but brand new Wegner Swivel Chairs would be considered abusive.^{[just kidding]} TurboSuperA+_[talk] 18:05, 23 January 2026 (UTC)

Well, that does seem like it should have been a relatively straightforward query. It's probably difficult to get answers about that now that it's been a decade (unless records for such things are retained permanently) but that's exactly the sort of concrete example that is useful. Something I've learned is that the WMF and board seem to have a different version of transparency than we do. When I brought up a desire for more transparency regarding board elections, people kept thinking I was asking them to give confidential information. I understand there will always be some degree of confidentiality, but we're nowhere near the level of basic transparency I would expect from an organization that pats itself on the back for it. Maybe that information is accessible in some obscure way, but beyond very generalized details, there doesn't seem to be that much to go off of. And it's concerning how concerning the limited information we do tend to get is. For example, Victoria's depiction of Lane's aspirations here. I don't think trying to work within a system to change it is a problem and I'm also sad that the lesson learned from this seems to be that Victoria should have never said anything at all. If giving reasons makes things worse, the problem wasn't the transparency, and doesn't inspire faith that the other confidential reasons are any better. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:07, 23 January 2026 (UTC)

Also, I was wondering if anyone has ever literally told you not to question the WMF? There's been a few times where I think that might have been implied when it comes to my own experiences, but no one has clearly said so. I do think there were a few people who were slightly taken aback by my candor at Wikimania. But I always took that more as surprise regarding my tendency to be unconventional rather than the questions I was asking themselves. I tend to be very sincerely direct. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:14, 23 January 2026 (UTC)

This sort of nickle and diming probably costs more money than it purports to save. I used to work at WMF back in 2013. This was a long time ago, but from what I remember there was a lot of waste that boiled down to, we are going to do things the expensive way because the cheap way looks more expensive from the outside and its more important to look like we are spending money responsibly than to actually spend money responsibly. Ask yourself, why does WMF never have any meetings/offsites/etc in Los Vegas despite it being one of the cheapest places in the US to do such things? Bawolff (talk) 04:21, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

I don't think everything needs to be nickel and dimed, but it makes sense to question expenditures when they seem outside the realm of what you would expect (which the original thread about furniture actually elaborated a bit on when Guy said he'd make allowances if something was categorized where one might not initially expect it). I also don't think it's unreasonable to just have a number for how much certain initiatives/programs cost. I get the point you're trying to make here about how added bureaucracy and avoiding the appearance of impropriety can factor into things, but I don't think the foundation is as great at the latter as they hope to be or that this has to be an either/or situation. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 05:43, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

I would agree they are very opaque, and high level numbers - spent $X on mobile, spent $x on WDQS, etc would probably be welcome [For that matter, I often thought it would be interesting to try and compile guesses ourselves]. I don't think its all that helpful to get fixated though on how much they spent on furniture a decade ago. Especially without a comparison point of how much your average tech company of WMF's size, in that location, in 2013 would have spent on furniture. Naively that number doesn't actually seem that high to me, but i don't know what is normal. Furniture can be an investment, when you're paying people >100K a year, small increases in productivity due to better office equipment can add up to a very large amount of money very quickly.

I think the biggest problem with WMF is most of the criticism of WMF ends up being a little silly. Sometimes people go, look at google's budget, WMF is a pittance comparatively, clearly they can do no wrong. Or they go to the other extreme and suggest basically everyone should be fired and that no software development or server maintenance is required at all (or even the people to plug in the servers). Other times people focus on the tiny things because its something we actually have data for and can talk about, but it really doesn't matter. None of these are really good criticism in my opinion. WMF's budget should be evaluated in terms of if WMF is actually doing the things we want it to do, and what a reasonable cost is to do those things. Bawolff (talk) 06:27, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

m:Wikimania 2011/Budget, m:Wikimania 2012/Budget, m:Wikimania 2016 bids/Esino Lario/Budget. Inflation and doubling the number of scholarships between 2019 and 2024 2023 probably doesn't mean that the overall costs got lower in recent years. Best, —DerHexer (Talk) 17:26, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

Here you go. Just made it. Ahri Boy (talk) 14:00, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

Some months ago some of us tried hard to parse the staff structure of the WMF. Among us were some of the best informed but it was no easy task - the WMF is not renowned for its transparency and in the absence of a proper, up-to-date organigramme and one Foundation website with all the information, it is, to say the least, utter confusion. The volunteer community that provides all the work and hence the donations, has a right not only to be informed, but to have a very firm say in how the priorities are set. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:22, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

• Mr. Marshall has it pretty right above, but to reinterate: 1. Stop lying during fundraising. #BOYWHOCRIEDWOLF; 2. Limit fundraising to two concrete and limited periods during the year. Begging is pathetic, especially when WMF is holding a 9-figure stack of chips. 3. Stop trying to make the WMF millions into a social project to Right Great Wrongs. That's not your role; 4. Bolster legal support of good-faith Wikipedians who are subjected to legal harassment; 5. Stop with the junkets. There is no reason Wikimedia conventions need to be a vacation club for the bureaucracy and their acolytes. Use something called THE INTERNET with a view to actual inclusivity rather than tokenism through travel vouchers. I could go on. That's enough. Carrite (talk) 21:04, 23 January 2026 (UTC)

  I don't think I'd go quite so far as some of the people in this thread who want to abolish outreach/events entirely, but I do think more transparency to donors is crucial. I've pitched this idea in the past because many non-profits actually let you direct your fundraising to where you want it to go. If we had different buckets for technical support and community outreach, I have a feeling more people would prefer to prioritize the former rather than the latter when they specified a preference. There's probably a better dropdown menu of options someone could come up with that would cover all the bases yet not too specialized. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 05:50, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  From what i understand (although I don't know specifics) WMF's track record with restricted grants is pretty bad. From what I've been told, it often resulted in building software that doesn't exactly meet needs or is half finished, because the grant required them to do something that didn't fully make sense or the grant only included provisions for half the project. What you're talking about is probably a bit more high level then that, but there is risk here, for (a perhaps extreme) example if all the money has to be spent on programmers and no money spent on asking users what they want, the programmers will probably end up wasting a lot of time building something useless. Bawolff (talk) 06:02, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  The WMF historically used to ask for donations in a way that implied the servers might go down if people didn't cough up. We, and notably editors active in this discussion, successfully campaigned to make their donation banners more honest. There's still substantial room for improvement, though.

  Donation banners appear on a rendered Wikipedia page. Therefore they must present the full facts accurately and without bias.

  The WMF must be scrupulously neutral. It should not be a politically active organisation. It exists to support websites that it requires to be politically neutral, and it really ought to eat the dinner it serves. Our reputation for neutrality, such as it is, was hard won and will be easy to lose, and I don't want the WMF to lose it for us.—S Marshall T/C 10:30, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  I've seen a few people bring up politics, and I genuinely have no idea what they mean. I've never seen the WMF endorse political candidates or get involved in anything that doesn't directly impact them like Section 230. If we're talking about individual employee opinions, I feel like they should be able to express themselves like anyone else. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 13:11, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  I believe Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-08-15/News and notes is the most controversial example. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 15:16, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  I think they refer to some of the spending on social justice advocacy that significantly increased during Katherine's time as ED. Sometimes the justification was reasonable ("support this org documenting oral history of some group, which will produce reliable sources about that oral history"), sometimes tangential ("support this org that teaches kids in some minority group to code in the hope they'll grow up to contribute to MediaWiki"), and sometimes completely unrelated (IIRC something along the lines of "a free encyclopedia is inherently a radical social project" was actually used at some point to justify something). m:Knowledge Equity Fund got a lot of such criticism, as in the Signpost article Thebiguglyalien linked just above. Internal WMF culture took a similar turn around that time; really, I think the culture still hasn't recovered from Lila. Anomie⚔ 15:34, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  Not sure why we've got a CEO with such a partisan background, at the very least the optics aren't great for a self-described neutral project and risks dragging us further into the American political psychodrama Kowal2701 (talk) 15:44, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  I don't really care if someone supports human rights, free culture, etc. I'd be a hypocrite if I did have a problem with that. That said, wow I understand why people are concerned about 2023 spending. That hasn't come across my radar before. We're not a philanthropy project, spending donor money to support other projects that are not directly related to Wikimedia projects is incredibly concerning. I'd suggest anyone bringing that up in the future not phrase it a "political" matter. Whenever I hear stuff like that, I think people are skirting around how they don't like projects meant to address content disparities. I think it's perfectly fine to question how such things are done (I know that contests sprung upon us can sometimes have a lot of quality issues and involve a lot of volunteer effort to clean up and that just shouldn't be happening), but I don't think the ideas themselves are bad. They just need to properly managed and have people who know the community being involved in them. To get back to what I was saying as donation buckets, something like that could fall under the umbrella of "content". I do think there are people who genuinely want to support that and already think their money goes directly to volunteers or to keep the servers running, based off what I see across social media. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 17:21, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  And just to be clear, I think the organizations described in the Signpost article sound great on paper, and I don't have a problem with people working towards those causes. I get the general concern that it's hard to cover topics that don't have enough sourcing due to being historically underrepresented. The death or failure for local media to thrive is something that matters, too. But that's something society in general should work to change. But there's a difference between trying to address our own content gaps and directly handing a bunch of money to organizations without strings. At the very least something like that should be more direct (e.g. we're funding a Wikimedian in Residence position at Black Cultural Archives is something I'd personally be okay with). Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 17:40, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  I feel like there's a lot that can be done if someone donates to "technology". Given all the technical debt, I doubt we'd have to worry about running out of things to allocate it to anytime soon. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 13:08, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

• I watched this unfold with Framgate 6 years ago and now again with the BoT elections, but I think it's fairly consistent every time there is a WMF "controversy", you see the same recurring themes: The WMF makes a decision behind closed doors without consultation. They announce the decision late or not at all before implementation. When the community pushes back, they act like they're the ones being blindsided. They claim confidentiality and make general statements without addressing the community's core concerns. They say they are listening and request questions and feedback from the community, to which they have no intention of responding. They sometimes go as far as to issue a non-apology without accountability or any specific commitments. They claim to want to be more responsive and transparent, but it's just part of the charade. This is their strategy of crisis management: waiting it out, saying as little as possible, making empty promises, taking no direct action, and sequestering the last hardliners in some farce of a listening committee, where their complaints can be ignored more directly. That's the step we're all on now, by the way. The only thing that scared them before was irreplacable veteran wikipedians hanging it up and walking away. —Rutebega (talk) 07:21, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  This is why I think it's important for me to be persistent and not give up. But yeah, there's a pattern here, and I'm not just going to accept the status quo is the way things have to be. We deserve better than that. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 13:18, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  This is my general impression; the handling of the Simple Summaries debacle also comes to mind.

  I also am not thrilled about what seems to be a trend toward a growth-at-all-costs, optimizing-engagement strategy. Gnomingstuff (talk) 13:20, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  I have a list of recent major WMF disputes (if I'm missing one, please tell me). The pattern is clear: after outcry, the WMF either backs down or quietly proceeds and hopes no-one notices. These are both backdoor options for them, because neither involves actually engaging with us or negotiating. Cremastra (talk · contribs) 01:08, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

  @Cremastra: People were upset about the office action mentioned in this Signpost article, mostly in regards to the personal information aspect. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 01:22, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

• I am not a power user here, but I would like to chip in. I didn't know much, so I would just say simple things. First of all, Wikipedia should be run more as a tech company rather than some giant non-profit company. It is understandable that WMF is a non-profit, but the main offering of WMF is Wikipedia - essentially a technology product. We are not Samaritan's Purse, Salvation Army, or Feeding America where the "work" is tangible and seen. The main product of WMF is Wikipedia, which is not seen physically. Our way of working should be similar to Electronic Frontier Foundation or Tor Project. This means that the main effort of the board (or whoever controlled WMF right now, the structure is too confusing) should be focusing on improving the main offering of WMF, which is the Wikipedia. The energy, resources, and the thought should be focused to improve Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not the "secondary" offering of the non-profit, but the primary offering of the non-profit. For example, while Goodwill Industries have trainings, their main offering is the job at their stores. That didn't mean that Goodwill have to abandon the job training they gave, but their main effort should be about their stores and job creations there, not the job training. I think the principle applies to WMF: Wikipedia as a product should be the main thought of the WMF. As for now, I would see that WMF is focusing more on the "activism" side and projects outside Wikipedia rather than the Wikipedia itself. Secondly, Wikipedia should be run as a professional tech company. This means that WMF have to identify further competitors such as Grokipedia or ChatGPT. As for now, the only one that seems to be concerned with these two are the editors. But a CEO/CTO of a professional tech company should be the one most concerned with competitors. The rise of AI, the use of Gemini in Google search, the speed of Grokipedia, how @grok can be cited in X, etc. should be the concern of the CEO/CTO/whoever in charge right now. I am not saying activism is bad, but if Wikipedia leadership failed to plan for the future, the whole project can be doomed to failure. I didn't see Wikipedia failing in the future, but long-term identification of threats and opportunities should be the CEO/CTO's responsibility. As of now the editors are the one who care more about Wikipedia's future, this is wrong. Third, Wikipedia have tons of money. We didn't need to beg for donation. We need to cut costs. $185 million per year for a tech company is huge. The money should be spent on "technology", not projects to correct some perceived Great Wrongs. Projects such as that must be limited in scope and funding. This goes again with #1 and #2, the priority should lie on the main product - the Wikipedia itself. Money should be spent on hiring more engineers, hiring more coders, more servers, etc. Final point: Legal activism. This is the only activism WMF should care a lot about. WMF should be litigious and vehement in defending Wikipedia and its editors. I would say that WMF should be as vigorous as ACLU (which only receives $50 million annually!) to defend Wikipedia and its editors. I would say that WMF has been quite weak in defending our editors. WMF somehow prefers an editor getting outed (where they can face further problems) than losing the market. I would expect a non-profit like Wikipedia to be blocked by a country rather than letting one of the their editors to be sent into prison. That's activism and non-profit actions, where the value of "free information" given by the editors is more valuable than presence in a market. As of now WMF did provide legal assistance, but I feel like once the chips are down WMF would gladly hand out the PID. There are lots of nuances on this matter that can't be described, but this is what I feel WMF should be focusing on. If Google - a large "evil" for-profit corporation is willing to not enter China market (which will be VERY profitable for them, China is a MASSIVE market!) because of Chinese censorship laws, surely WMF should have more guts as a non-profit company? As of now, I see WMF leadership legal approach is like a giant Wall Street company - protecting the company first. WMF as a non-profit should not be afraid to sue and get sued. It's already too long, but hopefully someone can catch what I am saying. Have a good weekend, people! ✠ SunDawn ✠ Contact me! 14:14, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  I would say the rise of LLM generated text does actually seem to be a strong priority on the WMF's radar. The only time I heard anyone suggest we should be trying to "compete" with ChatGPT was Sue Gardner (who hasn't been with the foundation for awhile) in her 2023 WCNA talk, but I remember hearing both Maryana and Selena at different points talk about how more people are staying outside of the "Wikimedia ecosystem" and what that might mean for long term contributor trends (if people are asking chatgpt questions and never go to wikipedia articles directly, they're not going to edit them or make donations). If I'm being cynical, there seems to be more emphasis on the latter, but at least I have heard the former. I have to agree with you when it comes to PII. There's been two very high profile cases that left a lot of people feeling betrayed when it comes to the values the movement is supposed to espouse. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 14:51, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  I disagree strongly - Wikipedia should not be operating like a tech company, and there's a direct line from doing that to enshittifying the product. Gnomingstuff (talk) 19:50, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  Sometimes i think biggest problem with WMF is it tries to both and doesn't do a good job at being either. Bawolff (talk) 02:39, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

• I don't know that a long, diffuse airing of grievances is going to help move relations forward, and probably more likely to intensify the beliefs of those who have the grievances in the way putting a bunch of people who don't like a particular politician serves to intensify beliefs. The framing is about relations, but [almost] none of this thread looks at the other half -- our end. Here's my advice: start there, in a separate thread that focuses exclusively on what's fully under our own control. Come to a consensus about where we could've done better, list some common pitfalls that lead to counterproductive tangents and distractions or otherwise complicate these relations, and set forth some best practices for communicating with the WMF. It might be useful to structure discussions, to avoid counterproductive tangents, etc., not to mention providing some structure for the WMF to go by (which is one of the common problems with these threads). My sense is that the "we always do everything right" perspective is a minority one, and that such a thread might bear fruit if it doesn't turn into another airing of grievances. Find consensus about our end, and use that consensus and any guidelines it lays out as a good faith starting point when we ask for changes from the WMF. Give them a clearer idea of what to expect and what to look for. There's no shortage of complaints for them to navigate as-is, but we never try it the other way -- maybe it's time. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 18:26, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  I've been repeatedly asked to be more specific, by more than one person, in these conversations. So it seems pretty clear to me that this is genuinely what they want, a list of problems and possible solutions. It doesn't have to be confrontational, but it's hard to work on problems that are scattered across a million different venues. I'm not saying the community always treats staff all that well (the warnings about civility on this very page exist for a reason), but I think there does need to be stronger action when it comes to WMF side in a systemic way. I don't think most people in this thread hate individual employees or anything. I also don't think criticism means you have to be anti-WMF. This is all being done in good faith. I think it's important to be up front and direct to actually get somewhere, especially since I've been explicitly told that vagueness is not helpful. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:35, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  I'm not saying I'm going to go point towards this thread every time I have these conversations, but this thread has been tremendously helpful in trying to figure out "pain points", and I hope people keep contributing to it. When people are frustrated, that doesn't just go away because the controversy itself has sort of fizzled out. I intend to write a more concise outline of different patterns and issues over time, and things that don't seem to get addressed. I've been told repeatedly that people are willing to listen. If that's sincere, I think it makes sense to actually show why so many people don't feel like they have been listened to. I had a long conversation with a staff member at WCNA that seemed genuinely confused that large portions of the community have this pent up distrust. I do think I could write a "communicating with the community" page sometime to help people avoid obvious pitfalls (e.g. ask people what they need or what do you think we could do better instead of just saying we're listening without changing anything). Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:50, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  @Rhododendrites, @Clovermoss There is the PTAC doc on it which summarizes kinda community concerns and WMF folks concerns for the P&T department. For what it's worth, I see good progress on the general recommendations from the WMF with discord calls, VPT discussions and the recent call for comments for the annual plan (we are slightly lacking on the community side of things, but I hope to recruit more people who are able to do championing of specific features slowly). No idea about the rest of the movement (or even non-P&T entities like Wikimedia Enterprise). Sohom (talk) 19:01, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  I've noticed the increased reliance on discord. I think it's great that certain staffers can feel more approachable in that way, but I worry about all the stuff that only gets brought up in these sort of inner circles. I was really bothered by the fact that the WCNA board of trustees conversation only recorded the initial information part and not the "breakout sessions" where people asked questions and answers. It makes it difficult for people who are not physically present to engage in those conversations. It also looks bad from a transparency angle. I noticed this trend again with the recent meeting OwenBlacker and I attended. I think we were the main two community members there to my recollection. But none of the Q&A stuff was recorded. I have no idea if the concerns I brought up about how it looks from the outside looking in about getting rid of the Community Affairs Committee is in the minutes or whatever. So, so much important stuff gets relegated to mailing lists which is how I was even aware that this meeting was going on in the first place. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 19:51, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  Can't necessarily comment too much on the BoT stuff, but I think it's been a standard practice (in all orgs) to not record meetings where folks are expected to talk more freely with individual members. Recording discussions/transcripting meetings is akin to being on-the-record.

  Wrt to the Product and Technology side, from what I've seen, almost every discord discussion is followed up with a onwiki discussion where a lot of similar points get reiterated (based on the ones that I've been a part of). I don't think discord is being used as a mechanism to evade accountability in the context of P&T but to see if a more younger demographic brings up other points/blind spots. Sohom (talk) 20:18, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  Standard practice doesn't make it right. We got the "this is standard practice for other organizations" comment when a board member was asked about media checks, which side-stepped the issue. Keeping these things obscure gives the community almost no power when it comes to follow-through. Open public relations like this should not have to be treated as if it's strictly confidential information. And to be quite frank, I feel like if what Maryana had said to me had been livestreamed, there would've been a ton of community pushback and rightly so. People shouldn't have to work their own schedules around being at the right places at the right time to feel like they have a chance to have a say. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 20:35, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  I'd point out a lot of open source projects have the opposite standard practise e.g. Apache's if it didnt happen on the mailing list it didn't happen policy. While Catcham house style meetings can have some advantages - it can allow people to express ideas that aren't socially popular, it has a disadvantage that it lacks accountability. This is especially true when there is mistrust between the parties as there is between community and WMF. The community naturally wants assurance that WMF isn't misrepresenting (or misemphasizing the popularity of a view) the views expressed in the meeting. Anonoymous meetings do little to assure the community that their views are being represented and considered properly. Bawolff (talk) 10:18, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

  Our end of what? The complaints here revolve around things the WMF does unilaterally without considering the community's involvement or input. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 18:40, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

• our end of "community-wmf relations", which is a different subject from "what has the wmf done wrong over the years". Maybe people want the latter - I just wouldn't expect it to improve relations if that's the intent. If the goal is a todo list, that's worth doing, too. I've advocated for a centralized list with strong consensus in the past, but it's also a different (though obviously related) task than improving relations. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 18:50, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  I think a lot of this tends to be a sense of not really having anywhere to go factor to it, if that makes sense? People will say things on noticeboards and what not but not often get a chance to have meaningful conversations unless they have some way to get their foot in the door or have connections. Stuff like the Conversation with the Board of Trustees only happen so often and aren't well publicized. I attended the last one and someone brought up that more participation wouldn't nessecarily be a good thing because there's only so much time for questions. A lot of where someone might go for help beyond trying to figure out how to file a phab ticket can be a bit like walking through a maze, and not everyone is nessecarily technically inclined in the first place. I get the sense that the foundation feels like it's approachable and in a sense, it is, if you know where to go. But even I struggle with that and I'm more immersed than most. I've thrown the idea out of a "community advocate" before because someone really could be having these conversations full time. If people want to repair the relationship between the WMF and various communities, it's not just going to happen on its own. It's going to take time and work to repair those relationships. I'm not saying they're not trying. There has been more attempts to ask for people's feedback in recent years. But it seems somewhat half-hearted to me. There needs to be more on an active push in that direction, from my perspective. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:59, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

Arbitrary Section Break 02: Community-WMF relations

• I think this gives a lot of insight in the communication problem. From the community side, I feel like there's frustration with the WMF's reluctance to engage with discussions on-wiki: now obviously, there is engagement, in the form of various staffers with (WMF) in their usernames. But it generally feels like we're not really having a discussion, because the people sent here to talk to us don't really have decision-making power for the WMF, they're usually just messengers. Which, incidentally, is a literal definition of discussing in bad faith (at least in contract negotiation contexts). WMF staffers have a vanishingly low footprint within the actual editing community, and frankly that's baffling, both by virtue of the amount of resources they have and the ideals that this project and WMF jointly profess. I would expect a much larger contingent of WMF staffers and leaders to at least casually participate in the community, as the community, but in general, they don't. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 19:16, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

  I think this is an important matter as well. The way I see it, WMF staff only comes around when the fire is too hot to handle, and the ones that are coming usually didn't have any authority to effect any changes. I didn't feel that the CEO understand the community as well. If they never edit, never engage in community, never sees what is going on, how come they will understand what is Wikipedia? ✠ SunDawn ✠ Contact me! 05:17, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

  I maintain that the wikimedia foundation should consist solely of people with a level of edits proportional to how important they are mgjertson (talk) (contribs) 19:59, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

• I feel that way too sometimes, about the lessening overlap. I think that WMF of 15 years ago had a greater proportion of editors on staff, but also, would anyone argue the WMF was more in touch with community attitudes back then? Perhaps it was less formal, with fewer rounds of review for anything posted on-wiki, but given how much scrutiny and how little leeway staff get for their on-wiki comms, it's also hard to blame them for that. I hope that they would recruit from the community of active editors as much as possible, but for anyone who wasn't already an editor, I do get why starting to do so would be intimidating. The hard-line anti-WMF camp is a minority, I think, but a very loud and very vigilant minority. For anyone who thinks it can be intimidating to be a newbie in general here, imagine being a newbie while (a) having your volunteer edits reflect on your job, and (b) your job causing increased scrutiny of your edits. Not so appealing. It's one of those areas where we should actually figure out if there's consensus that we want WMF staffers to edit more, and then to create the conditions for them to do so safely, without holding their job against them when they make mistakes. One of those "best practices" we should figure out on our end that I was alluding to above. YMMV. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 19:53, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

I feel like there's frustration with the WMF's reluctance to engage with discussions on-wiki: I will echo what in a stronger manner what @Rhododendrites said. "We, the community" are the reason WMF employees do not engage with the community. The community has a longstanding (and currently ongoing) history of being uncivil to WMF staffers. To quote what I wrote to @Chaotic Enby at some point after Simple Summaries on discord, the problem is that onwiki, WMF feature announcements are effectively feel like a CT but none of the admins treat it as such (and often even turn a blind eye to what would otherwise be blatant aspersions) Sohom (talk) 20:01, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

(edit conflict)I strongly disagree. I have been stonewalled on multiple issues ranging from the WMF spending decades breaking the laws against discriminating against the handicapped to asking for transparency regarding the least important and easiest to document spending I could think of to asking the WMF to justify ignoring the clear wishes of the community regarding user privacy. Again and again I have been told that it's my fault. If I was only nice enough or asked the right way I would have gotten an answer. So I have repeatedly recruited editors who are incredibly nice and unfailingly polite to ask, and they got stonewalled as well. It is not even remotely plausible that every WMF employee has independently decided to completely ignore and not respond to very gentle and reasonable questions by super nice editors because someone else was mean to another WMF employee in a completely different discussion. You wouldn't like it if I stonewalled you because of the actions of someone who has nothing to do with you.

I invite you to confirm this for yourself. Pick a Wikimania and ask how much it cost, total, and for any information, no matter how vague, on what the money was spent on. Or pick something else -- anything, really -- that you think would be easy to answer. Show us how it is done. Try to get any answer on anything from anybody that works for the WMF. I predict that you too will only get silence and answers from people who are not part of the WMF. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:32, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

I'd say "I repeatedly called them cancer in many different venues and then they didn't do what I wanted them to do" is a good example of what Sohom and I are talking about in this subthread. Before we go off on a tangent, I support more transparency, and agree that should come even when not phrased nicely; what you're disagreeing with here, however, is the idea that we make it hard for them to participate by creating a hostile atmosphere (by, for example, phrasing financial criticism as "you are a cancer"). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 22:38, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

I categorically deny the above accusation. "You have cancer" is not the same thing as "You are a cancer". I say this as a cancer survivor. Also, I find it to be completely implausible that every single WMF employee that gets asked a question -- often by other editors who never mention me -- has read my essay, has never spoken up about disagreeing with it, and yet has decided that the appropriate response is to stonewall the entire Wikipedia editor community no matter how nice and polite they are. It's a theory that goes against everything we know about human nature. --Guy Macon (talk) 03:24, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

Show me how it is done. Pick anything the WMF has ever spent money on. Big or small, recent or ancient, important or trivial -- your choice. Ask them how much they spent and what they spent it on. Don't just be polite. Grovel. See if you and you alone are able to get any answer other than silence. Then any only then come back and tell me that it is my fault and that I asked the wrong question, asked it at the wrong place, or asked it the right way. --Guy Macon (talk) 03:36, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

You're on that tangent I was trying to avoid. The point being made in the comment you replied to is just that we make things needlessly hostile, so should not be surprised that the WMF is not excited to engage casually on-wiki. You disagreed strongly, but it's not clear why. As for the cancer framing, when I read More concerning is the fact that since 2005 the WMF has hired hundreds of extra employees and is now spending 1,250 times as much overall, which seems rather excessive considering that the actual amount of work they have to do is pretty much the same. WMF's spending has gone up by 85% over the past three years. Sounds a lot like cancer, doesn't it? - That wording sure sounds like the staff are the cancer. Elsewhere the chapters are [part of/symptom of] the cancer, etc. Regardless of whether it's the people or the organization that's made of people, or merely the way the organization spends money [such as money spent on people], the framing is openly hostile (which is not news - you have been dismissing those objections for the better part of a decade now). That doesn't mean it's a bad essay or that you shouldn't be allowed to write it/host it, or even that I disagree with some underlying points -- just, like, don't be shocked that the cancer doesn't love hanging out in a place where they're being called cancer, you know? — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 04:32, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

I don't know why you think as a member of a public, grovelling to random staff is going to get you answers. I would welcome more transparency, but that should go through official channels. I'm pretty sure that if a random staff member told you confidential financial data simply because you grovelled, they would at the very least be fired if not facing legal troubles.

In many ways, i think much of your criticism is not very hard hitting because it would still apply even if WMF was actually doing everything right.

To give a literal answer to your question though, I think we do know that the structured data on commons project cost WMF $5,115,000 USD over 6 years, because it was grant funded and the grants are public [I can't prove that WMF didn't chip in additional money outside the grant, but my impression is they didn't]. Sadly this does seem a waste to me as the project seems to have failed, largely due to usability issues making it not fit with the needs of commons and still only being half done by the end of the second grant. Bawolff (talk) 07:08, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

Re: "grovelling to random staff" and "going through official channels", I have asked my questions at every place and to every person anyone suggested and received silence. Give my specifics as to what you believe these "official channels" are and I will do it again and get the same result.

Re: those sloan grant documents, are you seriously claiming that $2,100,000 "To support the extension of structured data from Wikimedia Commons across all Wikimedia content, improving the search function and making it easier to read, edit, and access knowledge" and $3,015,000 "To transform Wikipedia Commons' media files from free text into machine-readable, structured data, enabling new uses for millions of media files on Wikipedia and across the web" is an example of revealing how much was spent on something and what was bought with that money? Show me the proof. How many media files were transformed from free text into machine-readable, structured data? Where can I access the free text versions and the machine-readable, structured data and spot check a few to see how well the conversion went?

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2017/01/09/sloan-foundation-structured-data/ shows the start of the three year project in 2017. Where is the page from 2020 that documents the end of the project, what got accomplished, and whether they went over or under the budget? --Guy Macon (talk) 08:07, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

I did not say you should go through offical channels, i said "that" as in the disclosures, should be done through official channels. I do not think you as a random member of the public should be able to direct what financial information WMF discloses. Disclosure should be based on policies set by the board and not done on an ad hoc basis. I think its reasonable to petition the board to set better generic policies. However it is absolutely unreasonable to demand WMF answer specific questions about whatever you feel like in the moment.

Re structured data on commons. Based on your response you seem to have no idea what that project is or what its goals are. I would suggest you read the on wiki documentation. is an example of revealing how much was spent on something and what was bought with that money? Its an example of revealing how much money was spent on a project. It is a grant document so it obviously doesn't show what the results of the project was. However the project was to create a software feature for wikimedia commons. The software feature is live on commons. You can use it and see for yourself what the money "bought" (to be clear im not neccesarily defending the project as a great project, as i personally am unhappy with the results. I'm only saying its a project we know the budget of). Show me the proof proof of what? The project was to create specific software and said software now exists. You can use it yourself if you feel like it. How many media files were transformed from free text into machine-readable, structured data? What exactly is the relavence here? The WMF was not transforming files. None of the money went towards that. It is the community's job to edit content not WMF. Arguably this as a metric speaks to how sucesful the project is, but the question was pick a project and find how much money they spent on it and what they spent it on. Questions like if the project was a good idea or if it worked out the way people hoped, are entirely separate (that said, to answer the question, nearly 100% of files have at least some metadata in the new system but adoption of the system for useful metadata is mixed). Where can I access the free text versions and the machine-readable, structured data and spot check a few to see how well the conversion went? Its not a conversion so this question doesn't make sense. However like all edits to a page you can use the history tab to get a diff. Where is the page from 2020 that documents the end of the project, what got accomplished, and whether they went over or under the budget? While I appreciate you might want project reports and whatnot, i think that goes quite a bit beyond what your original question was asking. Bawolff (talk) 08:58, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

I read the Diff post and it seems like the money the WMF used came directly from a grant elsewhere (the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation)? I've used structured data on Commons when uploading files so I know it exists, although I can't speak to the usefulness of it. It's disappointing to hear that it doesn't seem to have supported the needs of that community. I've heard that Commons has also had trouble getting official support for Upload Wizard. PTAC seems interested in taking some steps to address that, but it's a bit surprising that the main feature of a project didn't seem to have anyone from the WMF who could provide technical support for it for several years, to my understanding. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 13:28, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

@Bawolff: just an aside on structured data on commons: there are people who can say more about this than me, but my take isn't that it's a project that failed but that it's a project that was simply never completed. That's a kind of failure, I suppose. Maybe it turned into a bigger and more expensive project than they thought, but the issue wasn't that the idea was bad; the issue is that it stopped, so nobody got what they wanted. It's the sort of project that has big implications for simplifying/improving volunteer workflows, including potentially better interfaces between commons and wikipedia, better tools, and most of all better usability of media, which isn't always the easiest to find/use on Commons. It got a partial roll out, people asked ~"will this make our lives easier" and heard ~"yes, eventually, but for now it creates additional work until we're done building it". So it didn't get the warmest reception, and that might've contributed to lack of interest at the foundation. One of my biggest criticisms of the WMF over the past few years has been neglect of Commons, but that's obviously a discussion for over there. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 14:58, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

On one hand, this is kind of fair, but on the other hand, they worked on this for 6 years. I think running out on money on something you had 5 million dollars over six years to do suggests a planning failure. At the very least, I think they should have put more thought into building things in separate stages that were all minimal viable products so that what was produced would be useful even if it was cut off before being finished. A metadata system that doesn't support querying, even in the most basic form, is not a useful system (I mean that from the end user perspective, yes i know there is a half-maintained sparql endpoint, but i mean there should be something for depicts to get a list of other media depicting the same thing that is equivalent to clicking on a category link. The original pitch was to replace category links after all. If a system lets you organize media but not see the results of that organization, is it really organizing anything?). I honestly think that even with just very minor UI changes, SDC could be a much more effective product. Bawolff (talk) 15:12, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

I think it's less the engagement when it's a big "community and the WMF" discussion that I'm thinking of here though--I agree that those get contentious and can totally see why the WMF engages with them the way that they do. I wish I saw WMF staffers doing normal editing and governance things, demonstrating that they understand and care about editing--not as the monolithic WMF but as individuals. That's what I meant by "as the community". I think this sort of engagement would aid communication when it is time to do big "community and the WMF" discussions. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 20:04, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

Yes, I was talking about both. Would be nice, but we could make it less hard. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 20:08, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

As someone who was actually present for the Simple Summaries discussion: what was the "incivility" there, specifically? Be specific. Name names and quote it. Gnomingstuff (talk) 20:11, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

@Gnomingstuff When I say "after Simple Summaries", I don't mean immediately after it or necessarily causally linked to it. I mean "at some point in time after that". But sure, lets see:

• WMF staffers looking to pad their resumes with AI-related projects need to be looking for new employers - 1
• I think we should start thinking seriously about forking, and hosting the project in a more transparent and hands-off way (and possibly not in the US). The WMF has been showing hostility and disregard towards the community for many years, and it's only a matter of time before the community loses control of the project completely. - 2
• I suggest revoking all donation banner permissions until such time as everyone employed by or elected to WMF and affiliate roles with generative AI COI or positive views towards the same are terminated and prohibited from holding elected office. - 3
• Are y'all (by that, I mean WMF) trying to kill Wikipedia? - 4
• Anybody on the team who thought this was a good idea for even a second should step down. Absolutely braindead. - 5
• Now now... are y'all planning on replacing your volunteer editors with AI 🙄? - 6

This was based on a initial scan. I typically shy away from calling specific people out but I think the fact that non of these comments received any pushback illustrates my point. In literally any other situation these would be considered aspersions breaking WP:CIVIL.

For what it's worth, to expand a bit on why I said what I said, anecdotally, a lot of onwiki discussions involving WMF staff take a very adversarial tone which makes it really hard for folks on the WMF side to engage further. (To give a example of one of your comments in the recent semantic search discussion, it becomes really hard to engage with you in a back and forth when you make a remark like (But I guess these are just "Internet pundits" and the feature isn't for them.) which while not explicitly against the WP:CIVILITY policy is definitely less than ideal for starting a fruitful conversation and leads to people not wanting to engage. This is not to say you should not pushback against obvious problems (and I do appreciate you showing up to identify the Google AI-like mockups), but rather the tone and way the pushback is given matters a lot! Sohom (talk) 21:22, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

And here we just have a fundamental disagreement, I think. Behavior matters as much as words, and usually matters more. Not to relitigate the issue, but acknowledging out loud in public that the community and the press are not going to like or want a feature, and then moving forward with it anyway, is fundamentally uncivil behavior. (Like, even using the phrase "internet pundits" is dismissive from the start! How is this still unclear?) The comments quoted above are a proportionate response; some of them are rather polite given that the inciting event was essentially "we already know you won't like this, but we don't care."Gnomingstuff (talk) 23:23, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

acknowledging out loud in public that the community and the press are not going to like or want a feature, and then moving forward with it anyway, is fundamentally uncivil behavior not in itself (imo). There are situations where tough technical decisions need to be made (case to the point, Temporary Accounts (privacy over community) or Vector22 (technical UI debt/readers over community) ). As a volunteer dev, I myself had to take a few of these decisions in (including one over Christmas, prioritizing security over community "liking it", check back in mid 2026 to figure out how I did). It is something that comes up in basically every non-trivial community-facing tool. In the case of Simple Summaries, we can say with hindsight the decision made was wrong, and done in a vacuum that saw very little community feedback (and thus created a propensity to assume the community was "generally fine with it"). But that does not make it uncivil and does not excuse those comments.

Wrt to "internet pundit", keep in mind that the person who wrote the ill-worded essay was not any of the people who are interfacing with volunteers. Is it fair for the people interfacing with the community to endure remarks regarding it months afterwards? Sohom (talk) 00:03, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

While i agree there are times that tough technical decisions need to be made, I don't think most disputes resolve around them. Most (not all) security, performance or legal concerns have work arounds, although they may be expensive or not worth it. In my experience the community is relatively accepting of blockers preventing doing something provided it is clearly explained. Big disputes usually concern product direction and not implementation decisions. Bawolff (talk) 00:38, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

I would not disagree to be honest! Sohom (talk) 01:12, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

I agree with Gnomingstuff right down the line here: the quoted comments are proportionate and measured responses to an intrinsically uncivil provocation. Stepwise Continuous Dysfunction (talk) 19:38, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I'm very confused about what the problem with example #2 is. I genuinely don't see how you can even say the tone of it is off. We have a right to fork. I find it concerning that you would find that comment specifically uncivil. The internet pundit one seems like someone who is frustrated and genuinely feels like they don't matter. I can agree with you that the others are rude and are not ideal. That said, I personally give a lot more leeway when people question me about my actual actions because I see it as part of WP:ADMINACCT. We may not agree, but people should be able to voice their concerns. Compared to what a lot of admins and even non-admins deal with on an everyday basis from vandals, these comments are very mild in comparison. Admins can see , which is a side effect of being a visibly female admin.

The worst example I can think of when it comes to a community member treating a staff member absolutely horrifically was this. I can understand critiquing a lack of being willing to engage with the community, but blaming the cause of all that on the fact that she's a woman is not acceptable. I'm glad that he's no longer on the project.

If the problem is that staff members feel like they're putting themselves in the line of fire, I feel like that speaks to need for some person people feel comfortable going to to act as some in-between. I know I occasionally have had staff tell me things in private because they're afraid that saying so publically will have implications for their career, and that's concerning too. I also don't think it's fair to the individual employees in question who may be trying their best but don't really have any power when it comes to the decision making process because people might wrongly take it out on them simply because they're there. I have a lot of experience with food service jobs and I understand what it's like to stay calm in the face of that, even if it's not fair. If the WMF wanted to tell me absolutely everything that is going on that is affecting every wiki, I'd do my best to get to talk to every community involved, actively solicit feedback, and be a go-between. I don't think that the person in question has to be me, but if the foundation is willing to give me a job for that crazy amount of work, I'd be willing to do it. Regardless of who does it, I think it's something that would be a tremendous step forwards. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 00:04, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

Compared to what a lot of admins and even non-admins deal with on an everyday basis from vandals, these comments are very mild in comparison. If your comparison metric is vandals, then we are obviously better. If the comparison metric is "civil discussion on a talk page" we are in the red. Not every discussion with the WMF needs to feel like a WP:ADMINACCT tennis match. (the fact that it does is kinda the problem)

If the problem is that staff members feel like they're putting themselves in the line of fire, You've hit the nail on the head.

I feel like that speaks to need for some person people feel comfortable going to to act as some in-between. I feel like I do a lot of this at the moment (atleast on the P&T side). Sohom (talk) 00:58, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

I'm not saying it's good, but I'd say it's at least a sign people are trying to be deferential if normal talk page discussions can have a bit more edge and you take into consideration that what admins consider improper in regards to civility is typically at a higher threshold. The fact that things are so tense is a waving red flag that steps need to be taken to make people feel like something is actually being done, because that's the only "real" way to address the root of that problem. I'm glad you're trying to be an in-between for PTAC specifically, I try my best to be that kind of person myself. But I think it's something that is a lot of work and not something we should feel morally obligated to take on, especially as unpaid labour. I spent about 40 hours talking to people total in the general timeframe around writing my petition on Meta because I genuinely wanted to understand what upset people about the board. There's so much history that's reliant on word of mouth because no one is keeping track of it in a centralized place. There's more than enough existing tension regarding communication for several projects that this could easily be a full time role. I think having an identifiable person to make grievances to would help smooth some of the rough edges out. It'd also help with institutional knowledge. I know one of the first things I'd want someone like that to do is make the maze less of a maze and help create a paper trail akin to Bulletin newsletter. I also think it would be a meaningful gesture that the WMF cares about maintaining a healthy relationship with the projects by actively doing something like this. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 01:15, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

re If the WMF wanted to tell me absolutely everything that is going on that is affecting every wiki, I'd do my best to get to talk to every community involved, actively solicit feedback, and be a go-between - in defense of WMF here, it can be really difficult sometimes to know the right level of detail. If you tell people literally everything they get annoyed quickly because its too much irrelevant information. Most people do not care about most changes because most changes are really boring. If you really wanted to know about every single technical change, you can look at the the list of gerrit merged changes - https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/status:merged (This is essentially the tech land version of Special:RecentChanges), but its a lot, and it is also a lot of effort to translate the technical change into what it really means. Of course, separately from each individual technical minutia, people want to know the higher level changes in technical plans and goals, which is something I feel WMF has become more opaque with over the last few years (rip ArchCom/TechCom/TDF) Bawolff (talk) 14:29, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

TechCom would be nice! And yes, there is just too much too do (and happening) in the tech space, my approach has been to only engage the community in larger feature announcements/product direction and such. (Sometimes smaller bugs are relevant, but in most cases they signal a lack of ownership/stewardship of the underlying codebase). Sohom (talk) 14:45, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

I'd point out though that lack of ownership is in my opinion a management failure from WMF. Its everyone going hot potato. WMF is in a privileged position because volunteers fill in the gaps and do a lot of glue work. Most tech companies can't afford to just throw up their hands and say half the codebase is ownerless. WMF can because the volunteer base protects it from the consequences of that management decision. Bawolff (talk) 05:50, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

I don't get annoyed at that sort of thing, which is why I think I'd be the perfect fit for that type of role. I love knowing every boring detail possible and trying to organize it. I also think it'd be very useful to know the pain points other communities have because generally speaking I think it'd be incredibly meaningful to these other projects if someone cared because they feel like enwiki gets what limited attention there is. I think a human touch for when people want to get involved and who can actually answer their questions or know where to go to get answers would be a good idea. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 16:49, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

just a correction: the "internet pundit" comment is originally by someone at WMF, not by a member of the community. I just find it breathtakingly dismissive: pre-emptively shutting down the objections of anyone who might disapprove of the feature online (i.e., readers). Gnomingstuff (talk) 23:41, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

+1 on that. The internet pundit comment originated from WMF folks writing a very badly put-together (and dismissive) essay not from a community member. Sohom (talk) 00:39, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

While community incivility does play a part, from what I've heard there's also the fact that WMF management has increasingly been telling people that publicly disagreeing with the WMF company line, even with a clear volunteer hat on, is not compatible with continued employment. That's not a good environment for getting staff to contribute to the projects. Anomie⚔ 04:26, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

Yes, I've heard that too. It's what I was implying with I know I occasionally have had staff tell me things in private because they're afraid that saying so publically will have implications for their career, and that's concerning too. I mentioned that some people feel afraid to openly voice criticism when I had my conversation with Maryana (although mostly in an affiliate context) and she said it was hard to talk about fear and what exactly causes people to think bad things will happen. When I brought up this concern when I had my conversation with Selena, she told me that she would investigate such behaviour if people came forward to her with concerns. I'm not the type to want to break people's confidence, but I wanted to say that at least on paper there seems to be some support for that to not be what should be going on. But I admit there's a part of me that's wary of accepting that's the case no questions asked. I've dealt with work environments IRL that are totally against a bunch of stuff on paper when things that are clearly against that were happening out in the open at the same time. When I was at WCNA, Lane told me that he was asked by the WMF not to say anything about the elections. I've brought this up to a few people who seem to think that the board not disclosing things is all about confidentiality, but if that's the case, why was Lane under the impression that he wasn't supposed to talk? He clearly did so before something happened to make him change his mind and I worry about what that might mean when it comes to people's behaviour behind the scenes. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 04:41, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

Also, even if Maryana and Selena were against it, that doesn't mean other people weren't doing it despite them. WMF in my experience has had a big problem with "managers" who seem primarily concerned with managing their own career advancement. Anomie⚔ 14:00, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

Re: "I do not think you as a random member of the public should be able to direct what financial information WMF discloses", in this specific case the "random member of the public" is actually hundreds of the unpaid volunteers who make the encyclopedia possible and "what financial information WMF discloses" is actually zero disclosure except for generalities like lumping desktop computers, servers in the datacenter and office chairs into one huge "money spent on computers and furniture" entry in a required financial disclosure document.

In addition, it is not just financial disclosure I am asking for. For over a decade (others have been asking for 20 years) I have been asking the WMF for a comment -- any comment -- about a specific case where they are clearly violating federal law by discriminating against the disabled. The violation is something that that other organizations have been successfully sued over for millions of dollars for doing. The result: total silence from the WMF and the usual noise from non-WMF individuals who are in no position to answer the question or change the policy. --Guy Macon (talk) 15:56, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

Obviously I'm not really the person you're looking for here, but I'd like to at least know what you're talking about here if you'd be willing to tell me. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 16:51, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

I assume this is about the CAPTCHA system, and in that case progress has actually been made recently; we're moving toward hCapctha replacing our old text-recognition system. I personally think that's an example of a recent bad trend in which Wikimedia has lately been moving toward doing things in a more corporate way and moving away from its other values of radical open-sourceness and freedom, but it at least will solve that specific issue. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 17:23, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

And also Special:SuggestedInvestigations, which means that Wikipedia is technically not open source anymore, only open core. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 17:27, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

I mean, I think that ship sailed back in 2008 with the Anti-bot extension. Not to mention all the private abusefilter filters. Bawolff (talk) 17:53, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

For what it's worth the SuggestedInvestigations model and spam/abuse detection is one area where having some non-open things make sense on a case-by-case basis. The hCAPTCHA system was a fair bit different because besides being closed source it was a case where our data was going to third-party providers. I'm yet to see folks outside the abuse detection/PSI space use non-open-source components. Sohom (talk) 19:07, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

We can hurt their pockets by hiding the donation banners using the common.css file. After all, if they aren't here to build an encyclopedia (or a dictionary, or a free image gallery, etc.), they don't need to make money off our projects and hard work. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 17:09, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

I am surprised that Clovermoss has set this up in a way to be a discussion about Community-WMF relations rather than Community-Board relations since that's what the original petition was about. In the same way that our fate as a community is intertwined with the Foundation but we are a separate actor, so too is the Board a separate actor from the Foundation. Now the Board does of course have far more control over the Foundation than we have or the Foundation or the Foundation has over us, but for me when looking at issues and problems conlfating the two makes solving real problems harder. I would say I think the Foundation has moved from a grade of 55-65% to one in the high 80s since 2018 (when I started editing consistently). I have some things I don't like about what the Foundation does (don't get me started on what the Foundation has done to the Wishlist) and I have a dislike of how hard it can remain to stop the Foundation from harming the community at times - in another forum I should really document my experience with the Foundation around the Incident Reporting System - but unlike with the experiences Guy documents below and others have documented above I find the Foundation genuinely listens in the end now. And in places they take a firm line that something needs to happen regardless of what the community thinks they devote real resources to trying to achieve their ends in a way that harms the community the least. I see major progress from Vector 22 - as the last time the Foundation forced a huge change on us - to how they approached IP masking and even with Vector 22 I see real improvement over other similar past initiatives in terms of post implementation support. Things like Simple Sentences are maybe not stopped as early as would be ideal, but they are stopped sooner they have been in the past.

I do, however, have far greater concerns about the Board. It is not clear to me that the board believes in the democratic principles I think the volunteer community (across projects) does. Only in the rarest of circumstances do we get any sense that they vigorously disagree with each other in search of the right path or best idea. They - not the Foundation - are the ones who removed candidates and subsequently told them not to talk. I temper that grave concern with the conversations I had with a couple of board members at WCNA who were genuinely listening and who have a desire to do better. So I hope by the time the next board election rolls around in a couple of years we'll have seen progress on this front. I also hope that we will have seen that the Board has directed our new CEO to continue the positive direction the Foundation has started to take in terms of of allocating resources and being responsive to the editing community. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:11, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

I started the conversation the way I did because a lot of the time, these two groups are not easily separated from each other when people have discussions. When Rhododentrites was talking about how a to-do list would be more useful than a list of grievances, I was sitting there thinking that those two things are very intertwined for a lot of people. People are naturally more inclined to be upset when there's a lot of things they've been waiting on for ages and no one is listening to them or prioritizing that work. So this conversation is set up the way that it is because I noticed people often complain about the WMF when I talk to them about the board and vice versa. Even I'm not immune to that. I'm glad your experience has been great, but I saw a lot of talk and no action and side-stepping and "nothing can be done" at WCNA. I think Rutebega said it best in their comment. I definitely see a sense a progress in the WMF does whatever they want no matter what transition into they sometimes listen if people kick up enough fuss and sometimes solicit some feedback ahead of time, but even if the latter is better it's not something I'd grade as highly as you do. It's more of a bare minimum to me. I think part of this has to do with how if one is immersed in behind the scenes stuff, the WMF at least feels somewhat approachable in a way that the board does not. But I find most people who do not attend meetups and conferences do not have that impression. They don't know anyone they can talk to and tension just builds up in the background. Problems don't go away just because no one is talking about them. It's impossible to describe how strange it was witnessing this disconnect when I first started going to conferences in the past two years, especially at wikimania. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:22, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

I did not write that my experience has been great with either the Foundation or the Board. I certainly agree the Board and the Foundation are intertwined. But so is enwiki and the Foundation. Being intertwined does not change that all three of these groups are their own actors. By doing an airing of the grievances for both, I think it makes it harder to solve the problems identified and actually makes it more likely that things build up in the background because any talk that is had is unproductive. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 19:00, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

I was assuming that a high 80s grade meant that you had great experiences, but I guess those two concepts aren't directly related for you given your comment above. I got the impression that you felt like your concerns were at least addressed in some capacity at WCNA, I definitely did not feel like mine were at all. I suppose we'll have to disagree about how productive it is to have conversations about multiple overlapping subjects at the same time. I think it's hard if one doesn't have a holistic view, especially since one directly affects the other, in a way that is much more intertwined than the communication between the WMF and the community can be. At least to my understanding. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 19:59, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

The conversations I had gave me hope that maybe the board does believe in democratic principles and will act differently in the next two years. They do nothing to alleviate the concerns I have around past actions. At least not until that talk turns into new actions.Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 02:27, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

You're definitely right that editors (myself included) don't often draw a clear distinction between the WMF and the board, but I'm glad Barkeep brought it up. In reading through a lot of historical discussions recently, I would tend to agree that the stonewalling and delay tactics I lamented above predominantly come from the board, and interactions with rank-and-file WMF staff are at least on an upward trajectory. I suspect the board are constitutionally more circumspect when it comes to their public statements, and go to extreme lengths to avoid saying anything they could later have to walk back (the same applies to the legal department, for obvious reasons). It's also relevant that a substantial share of the trustees come from a corporate nonprofit milieu where our standards of openness and mutual good faith are not the norm. As a result, they can be oblivious to the extent to which obfuscation and subversion of the volunteer community—even when nominally to defend the foundation's interests—actually hurts the movement and contravenes their fiduciary duty as trustees.

Theoretically, the existence of community/affiliate board seats should ensure continued observance of the movement's values, as enshrined in WMF:Principles, but evidently this system has broken down. Based on the board's usual strategy of (non)engagement, we can't expect this to resolve itself without the continuing involvement and investment of the editing community. How to proceed with that is probably the most productive direction for this discussion. —Rutebega (talk) 23:20, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

I'm joining Barkeep49's experiences here: There are teams at the Wikimedia Foundation, that listen to you, take your feedback seriously, change workflows, and know where and how to communicate on eye level. So we in our groups do the same (I'm pretty sure that enwiki's ArbCom has much better experiences with the Foundation than average users who don't regularly speak with Foundation staff). — I have summarized the WMF—stewards relationship in the annual stewards report. Certainly, I too could list countless of things that went wrong in the past, coming from the Board or staff, but that wouldn't help my future activities here. Instead, I want these good cooperations to be a role model for other interactions between Foundation and community. We can only improve our relationship when we improve it together. Certainly, we have to talk about the mistakes that were made in the past, but I hope that we will find a point in the future were we acknowledge that they happened years ago and realize that most of them were made by former employees and that Wikipedia is still running, but we shouldn't lose focus on what we could and should achieve in the future. And I am convinced that we can reach that more easily together than if we would primarily complain about the past, wouldn't treat new ideas coming from the changing world around us fair and respectful, while we still have to communicate our red lines and why we cannot change them. If we listen to each other, we will find more similarities, especially in how we want to make Wikipedia and/or the world better. Certainly, each side has to make a step towards the other and build up trust. That's easier said than done, but from my experiences in a particular area with a particular team I can ensure you that it is possible (and certainly also happens elsewhere). And if it is possible, it can likely also be reproduced somewhere else. Best, —DerHexer (Talk) 18:16, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

• I feel like part of the problem is communication style. Putting aside the issue of community hostility for the moment:— when dealing with a WMF announcement, I often feel like I'm talking to a brick wall. A staffer will post some kind of bombshell announcement filled with PR jargon, then retreat in shock when it turns out to be controversial. We Wikipedians spend about 2 days shouting at each other about it before another staffer steps out, gives a bland, glossy corporate statement on the issue and then disappears again.
  This is not a good way to engage with people. Some staffers I feel are quite good with engaging with the community casually and honestly, but others I feel are sitting behind their desks looking down at the rabble. This perception is, I feel, a factor in the ongoing civility issues: we feel ignored and can tend to lash out, especially when the WMF continues to trot out meaningless corporate-speak. Cremastra (talk · contribs) 01:01, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

  Wouldn't it be great, if in those situations where an announcement goes tits up, we could send a trusted community member in to have some backroom chats rather than leaving the poor announcee with whiplash and an angry mob they don't understand or know how to deal with Kowal2701 (talk) 01:21, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

  Again, I don't think this is a problem in the style of communication but the thing being communicated. The community is not made up of dogs that only know how to respond to the tone of someone's voice. At least based on the decisions I've seen, when a decision or feature is "controversial," it's because people have identified major problems with it. The solution isn't to be more casual, it's to fix those problems. Gnomingstuff (talk) 14:54, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

  Putting aside the issue of community hostility for the moment:— when dealing with a WMF announcement, I often feel like I'm talking to a brick wall. I suspect those two things are directly related. Levivich (talk) 15:02, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

  In addition to the way community hostility makes communication harder, I think one limitation we have is that the "community" is amorphous. So if in a preliminary discussion 8 people show up and give mixed but encouraging feedback, the foundation may invest further resources and proceed to a new phase. At which point maybe 40 people show up and the mixed feedback turns negative. This is why ArbCom has become defacto spokespeople to the WMF even for things for outside the T&S realm, simply because it's a trusted group that has some continuity. But ArbCom can't really act or speak for the community on many of the topics that have been discussed here and at least when I was on ArbCom the committee made that clear. The m:Product and Technology Advisory Council addresses the continuity piece, but doesn't address the "can't really speak for the community piece" both in terms of mandate and in terms of the fact that the community gets no input on who is appointed to that group. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 19:04, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

  And I think it's really demoralizing for the people who give feedback over and over again when they see something that to them is an obviously bad idea. It feels like a million close calls, even if they're listening and change gears. Sometimes the "mixed" feedback is from people who are trying really hard to be polite and it's misinterpreted as if we change a few things it's fine, they just personally dislike it. I know I've met people who said they changed their tactics to be much more direct and clear (which can be more easily perceived as hostile, although some of it is less a matter of a perception... was going through the archives and sometimes people directly respond to these things with comments like "yuck"). I don't think WMF staff are intentionally trying to anger people (there's a reason they chose this job over others), but it's hard not for people not to feel angry when different people keep doing the same things and there isn't a positive pre-existing relationship to begin with. It's not a recipe for success when the only time you hear from someone is when they're proposing something you're worried is going to be the next disaster. ArbCom and people who attend conferences have direct interactions with the WMF in the way the average person does not. They may notice different staff members etc involved but they don't really see much of a difference over time the way people who are more immersed and "in the know" do. For example, I know Selena cares and asks for feedback, but I never met her before WCNA 2023. She has a handful of edits on enwiki. To people who've never met her personally, she's probably as mystifying as any other CTO. And if we want people to not be upset about patterns they notice, there needs to be a place for those feelings to go outside of the occasional product feedback request. I've summarized some of these thoughts on my new subpage: User:Clovermoss/WMF. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 19:47, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

  She joined in August 2022, the next WCNA took place only three month later and was fully virtual because of COVID (likely a reason for fewer attendances of meetups as well), she attended multiple events afterwards, and we don't know about volunteer accounts. Maybe we should start with assuming good faith first, and maybe reach out to new WMF employees ourselves first in order to get them to know. I will do so with Bernadette at the Wikimedia Futures Lab, in the same way I said hello to all CEOs and shared my main pain points and how their teams could help us.
  In general, I prefer to have a close(r) connection to WMF staff that actually improves my work instead of the management that hopefully makes sure that these people have good working conditions (personally but also time, skills and colleagues to reach out to stakeholders like us). Best, —DerHexer (Talk) 22:33, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

  @DerHexer: I am assuming good faith. I'm not sure how you could think I'm not? And my whole point here is that I have met Selena at conferences and she's wonderful, but there's a lot of editors who do not attend conferences and do not have the chance to know her because she does not have an active presence here. I had been an editor for five years when I attended my first ever meet-up, and the difference with how approachable people were in that context is night and day. It's very hard for most people to actually have connections with WMF staff or even have any idea what departments there are or how to reach out to them beyond occasional feedback requests. So they're only interacting with them when they're incredibly likely to be upset already. There's no pre-existing relationship and it's hard to communicate all the things that have upset them before and so it goes where people will complain it is not relevant. But from that perspective, it doesn't nessecarily matter if different people are in charge. They're not seeing any of those changes ripple down in their direction. So it's hard to tell people to not care about what someone's predecessors did if it seems like the WMF is making the same types of mistakes over and over again. They don't get to see any changes that happen behind the scenes when it comes to leadership changes, attitude toward community feedback, just knowing people in a general sense, etc. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 00:58, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

  I certainly feel - as I noted in my initial comments - And I think it's really demoralizing for the people who give feedback over and over again when they see something that to them is an obviously bad idea. ONe thing I dind't make clear in this comment is that the community didn't do anyting wrong in the "a few people weigh in, work proceeds, and then a larger segement of the community weighs in negatively". One point your comment here also brings up is the asymmetry between the volunteers and WMF staffers. It's impossible for any volunteer to really truly stay abreast of everything the foundation is doing. I get the Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin delivered to my talk page and I regularly find it overwhelming; they regularly run more than 10kb. But a given WMF staffer or team has a much smaller subset of things they need to focus on while volunteers really should be focused more on maintaining and improving our content rather than what the WMF is up to. So we end up having to make our voice heard through sheer numbers of people which I know to be demoralizing for the people getting the feedback. I genuinely don't know how to fix the communication woes because at some level better communication becomes Bulletin level overwhelm. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 23:59, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

  I agree and have previously written about how the community doesn't have just one viewpoint. This is a challenge for the leadership team of any community: it's impossible to satisfy everyone in the community, scalability problems means it's impossible to engage with everyone in the community, and in most cases it's infeasible to get a representative sample of the community. (Typically there's a large silent majority that's very difficult to reach.) For issues where there are diverse opinions, this inevitably means no matter what decision is taken, there will be a sizeable vocal group unhappy with the result. Somehow, leadership needs to reassure everyone that their viewpoints are being considered, even if in the end, the chosen approach doesn't align with many of them. Unfortunately, I don't have any new ideas on how to achieve this, beyond more understanding from both the leadership and the community of the inherent imperfections and limitations of the decision-making process. isaacl (talk) 23:27, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

  The silent majority isn't always in agreement with those changes, though. I've met quite a lot of people who are upset along with the rest of people saying something, but don't feel like there's any point in even trying to communicate that. They're too jaded and they tune it all out. Obviously different segments of the community disagree with each other on various subjects, but there are some things that have widespread agreement that people that don't have that background regularly miss. Even if it's not out of malice. For example, the repeated debacles with AI experimentation. Different people were involved every time and didn't seem to have any idea how controversial community reception to that would be. I'm sure they thought these were good ideas and were not acting out of malice. If there was a dedicated person to go to to ask "hey, how do you think reception to this feature would go?", it doesn't have to be a hard no or yes all the time, but they could spot what to them would be obvious red flags and save a lot of community drama from happening in the first place. As for impossible to engage with everyone in the community, it doesn't have to be. I'm trying not to shill my idea too hard here, but having that be someone's job would give those feelings a place to go. Time only heals old wounds if they're not being ripped open. But if someone feels heard and like whatever is bothering them is being taken seriously in some capacity, they're more likely to actually be able to move on. Otherwise, the more time goes on, the worse it feels. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 01:31, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

  having that be someone's job would give those feelings a place to go Isn't that what answers@ is for? As I understand it editors who email there get substantive replies even if it's a "We don't know how much X costs because we don't do accounting that way" type of answer. If there was a dedicated person to go to to ask "hey, how do you think reception to this feature would go?" have you really never talked to the various tech "Movement Communications Specialists" (how's that for a mouthful)? Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 02:09, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

  I've never heard of answers@. What is that? An email address? I've met some of the movements communications people in various contexts, but the fact that they exist isn't exactly well-known. To my recollection, they've never posted here to say hey I have an open door policy, if anyone wants to reach out to talk about anything, I'm here. And I'm quite immersed in the wikimedia sphere. The WMF is approachable in certain contexts if you know where to look but they do not make it easy to find this stuff out. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 02:26, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

  You can read more about it at m:Answers and m:Answers/Process. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 02:29, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

  I also think m:Answers/Wikimedia Foundation, where the annual plan hasn't been updated since 2023, is a decent encapsulation of the problems with meta as a communication platform. —Rutebega (talk) 04:58, 30 January 2026 (UTC)

  Sure, the challenge of the silent majority is that we don't know its viewpoints, and thus their displeasure is only going to show up after a decision is implemented. It's hard to know what has "widespread agreement" when there are so many people whose opinions we don't know. As Barkeep49 alludes to, there are people whose jobs are to engage with the community. And yet there are still hard feelings. From the unrepresentative sampling of people who complain on pages such as this one, there are many people strongly convinced their preferred approach is the correct one, and thus the only reason for making a different choice is that they aren't being listened to. I understand that feeling on a personal level, but I try to combat it by considering that I could be wrong. Often I don't have the same information that others have, and I may be misunderstanding some aspects of the problem. As we've discussed previously, I agree that more communication and interaction is good. I'm just saying that there are inherent limitations. Government agencies and other organizations hold extensive public consultations, for example, and it helps with some people feeling heard, but it doesn't help with everyone. isaacl (talk) 02:34, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

  They don't really do a good job of engaging with the community when you very rarely hear anything at all from them and it's more reactionary than initiative. I had no idea these people even existed until I had been editing for something like 6 years? I'm not saying they don't do good work, but it's hardly visible, and most people's interaction with them is going to be in the sense of 'I occasionally see them post a meta page asking for feedback'. That doesn't exactly accomplish much in terms of WMF-community relations. We have a serious gap there. I'm not saying I can't be wrong but I think it's impossible to determine that when we've never tried to fix it in a determined and involved way. I really don't think it's surprising there's still hard feelings (look at what everyone is saying about communication from the WMF above, that doesn't seem to me like people feel like they have a chance to be heard). There's a huge difference between committees and public consultations and who knows how many layers of bureaucracy and someone you know and trust to hear you out if you ever need it and who knows where to look for answers or to reassure you that yes people have considered that. It's sort of like the difference between a union representative and a user survey, in my mind. One is a lot more involved than the other. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 02:46, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

  Yes, I've understood your viewpoint, and I've already agreed with improvement being desirable. isaacl (talk) 03:04, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

  Glad we're on the same page, then. :) Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 03:07, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

  On that specific point, yes. isaacl (talk) 03:28, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

• The WMF seems to be good at raising and spending money. Few if any of its actions are a net benefit to Wikipedia. I endorse and adopt User:S Marshall's points made further up verbatim. Stifle (talk) 15:47, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

Wikimedia referrer policy

See User:Guy Macon/Wikimedia referrer policy, where the WMF rejected the clear consensus of the community. --Guy Macon (talk) 04:58, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

Personally, I think the part that bothers me the most about this, is not that WMF rejected it, but that the justification is extremely misleading. It bothers me a lot when WMF misconstrues technical issues to justify a policy decision. For background - there are two potential privacy risks with referrers. (a) [The main one] that external sites can see which website you are coming from, and maybe link together that information with other information it knows about you. (b) [The one nobody really cares about] An on-path attacker might be able to determine what website you were visiting over https by looking at the referrer in requests to non-https websites. In the RFC WMF says that (b) is basically not a practical attack as there are much easier ways to do it. Which is literally true, but the concern is about attack (a) not attack (b), and the way the response was phrased makes it sound like the analysis also applies to attack (a) even though it doesn't. The average Wikipedian is not a technical person, so I think its really important to be honest about the pros and cons of decisions so that folks can be properly informed. I know its years ago at this point, but it is disappointing to see how WMF justfied its response to this RFC [To be clear, it might not be the person who wrote the comment's fault. It may very well be due to a game of telephone between different people in WMF]. Bawolff (talk) 05:44, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

That's not what I get from the response linked. What I see there is them suggesting that people concerned about your (a) should really be looking into disabling referrer sending in their browser so as to protect themselves on every site, not just Wikipedia. The mention of your (b) wasn't to dismiss (b) itself (they don't actually dismiss it as far as I can tell), it was to point out that concerns about your (a) related to "safety" (versus "privacy") relate to powerful actors who would likely be capable of your (b) as well, so the requested change would provide little protection in that respect. Anomie⚔ 16:19, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

In other words, "the clear consensus was wrong, and we at the WMF choose to ignore it." --Guy Macon (talk) 20:35, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

I think this is a reasonable example of progress by the foundation. Rather than imperioualy rejecting community consensus as they did here 9 years ago, with things like simple sentences they take on board the feedback both for the immediate issue and in changing process in an attempt to avoid similar situations in the future. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 09:48, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

It isn't too late to listen to the community and stop sending referrer information. I'm just saying.

Perhaps I should post another non-binding RfC for them to ignore. It will be amusing to see the comments saying that asking again nine years later is too soon... :) --Guy Macon (talk) 18:33, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

Does anyone know what the Global Resource Distribution Committee is? Recently received an email about it on a mailing list. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 16:58, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

It looks to me to be one more example of what has been done dozens and dozens of times before: Form a committee consisting mainly of hand-picked representatives of entities that receive piles of money from the WMF (no actual Wikipedia editors allowed), ask them to advise the WMF about how to distribute the next pile of money, thank them for their hard work, and then do whatever you were going to do before you asked for the advice.

In this particular case, the particular pile of money is this one: [ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start#Wikimedia_Community_Fund ].

Nothing to see here, please disperse. --Guy Macon (talk) 17:45, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

The Board specifically

Having a subsection should hopefully be a satisfactory compromise? That way everyone who wants to discuss the board as a separate issue can but comparisons about broader trends can easily be made if one wishes. The board elections are obviously one of the more recent issues, as is the lack of transparency in a general sense. I've noticed that the board brings up their bylaws a lot, so here's a convenience link for anyone not familiar with that: . Here's a link to the Candidate Review Process and the fiduciary duties slideshow. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 01:10, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

To try and get this part of the conversation going, I'm concerned about how vague the new "reputational risk" part is. What exactly causes the board to think someone would be a reputational risk if elected? This could mean anything from someone has controversial political opinions to we think they'd want to change too much so we won't even give the chance to try. I'm also concerned about a lot of the themes expressed at m:Talk:Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard/October 2025 update. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 01:22, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

An example of reputational risk: . Levivich (talk) 19:45, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

I'm aware of the general concept. My point is that without guardrails, anything could theoretically count as a reputational risk. I don't entirely trust the board to be sensible about this the way things stand. It might be a different matter if the board doesn't have the issues that it does. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 20:04, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

That's true, but it's also kind of like saying "but rain could fall at any time!" I mean, it's true, it's impossible to predict what may or may not end up as a reputational risk. Nevertheless, all companies (for-profit and non-profit) must take steps to reduce that risk, just like we take steps to prepare for the rain even if we can't predict it perfectly. Both the examples you gave: controversial political opinions, and openly calling for "too much" reform, could be signs of a reputational risk that is too high. It depends on the details, of course, and the ultimate decision is very subjective (how high is too high?), and one of the things Trustees are trusted with is properly weighing reputational risks when vetting new candidates. The "answer" is to elect Trustees whose judgment in these matters we trust. Levivich (talk) 20:11, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

Which you don't get much of a chance to when vetting narrows your choices down to a handful of candidates to a handful of seats and the board can just remove candidates from the ballot whenever they want. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 20:14, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

Also true :-) And even moreso when half of the Board are appointed by other Board members rather than elected by editors. It's not surprising that appointed Trustees would be both far more conservative in their risk assessments, and far less in touch with the consensus of the editing community, than elected Trustees.

However, it should be noted that the Trustee who was the most vocal about reputational risk in the most-recent round of vetting was an elected Trustee not an appointed Trustee. In my humble opinion, in the election in which this Trustee originally ran, there were better candidates who I believe would have made a different choice, but they were not elected. So we, the community, get the candidates we voted for.

I'm not sure whether, in any election, anybody asked any of the candidates any questions about how they would vet future candidates, and, specifically, how they would judge reputational risk. If we want Trustees to evaluate reputational risk in a certain way, we'll need to vet the candidates ourselves for that--meaning, in the next election, we should ask candidates about how they would evaluate reputational risk in future Board candidates. Levivich (talk) 20:21, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

If the election process itself was actually an election, I'd be able to agree with that. But the community seats get narrowed down by affiliates, so anyone without a strong affiliate background is unlikely to even be an option. The very process seems designed to offer an illusion of choice to preserve the status quo. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 20:41, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

Yeah I agree with that analysis. And that's for the 8 seats that are even elected; there are 8 more appointed seats (including the founder seat). The current Board gets to appoint 7 and, along with affiliates, pre-select candidates for the other 8. The whole system is designed to ensure a "safe"/non-controversial outcome (from the Board's perspective): we get to choose only from among pre-selected choices. Not the system I would want.

Changing that would require a change to the bylaws, which can only be done by the Trustees. I'd like to see candidates pledge, "if elected, I would vote to change the bylaws to X," and then if I supported the change to "X", I would vote for that candidate. ("X" could mean, for example, more elected seats, ending candidate screening by affiliates, or any number of reforms.) As I said elsewhere on this page, I'd like to see an entire slate of candidates all pledging to support a particular platform of reforms, so I could go vote for all of them. If you get 8 of them on Board (which would take multiple cycles), then amending the bylaws could become a reality. Levivich (talk) 20:47, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

I'd be repeating myself if I just talked broadly about the institutional problems with the BoT. Instead, it might be worthwhile to laser focus on the Board elections as both a huge source of conflict recently and, ideally, an avenue for reform in the future.

Looking back, there are three elements to what happened with the most recent election that were unacceptable from my POV:

First, the decision to eliminate 2 candidates after shortlisting gave us only 4 candidates for 2 seats, severely limiting the amount of choice we were really given. Doing interviews and background checks before shortlisting (which, to be fair, would cost time and money) would have reduced the number of candidates from 12 to at most 10, meaning there would have been no shortlisting step at all (explained here on meta). That means we would have up to 10 candidates in the final round, depending on how many others besides Lane and Ravan were eliminated. As the Board tried to emphasize, eliminating candidates after they were elected would have looked even worse, but that's not a good excuse to do it the way they did, for reasons I will come to.

Second, they announced the change in procedure during the campaign. This generated confusion, and disrupted candidates' and communities' ability to plan and strategize around the amended selection process. Clearly this subverts both the actual democratic function of the election and general confidence in its fairness and integrity. It is obvious, or should have been obvious, that this decision would be disruptive and unpopular, so I would infer that a competent Board would not have made the change unless it could not wait until the next election and its necessity was not foreseen prior to the campaign. This contributes to my next point.

Third and finally is something the Board will never confirm and I cannot prove, but based on the circumstances appears very likely: the Board had decided already in August that one or more candidates standing for election was unacceptable, and were forced (by their own reckoning) to intervene as early as possible to prevent that person or persons from being in a position to win a Board seat. The decision was made before any background checks or interviews, meaning these were a perfunctory fig leaf for the Board putting their thumb on the scale. The values and commitments these candidates held were what condemned them in the eyes of the Board.

What they found objectionable I can only speculate, but I will highlight two statements I think are revealing: in the first mention of this change on 21 August, Abhishek Suryawanshi of the elections committee cited "increased scrutiny the board faces", which gives the impression of political pressure and a cowed Board. Then, in her announcement of the final ballot on 03 October, Nataliia Tymkiv (Board chair at the time) said "Now more than ever, the Foundation needs a strongly unified board", implying candidates need to demonstrate loyalty to the Board (not the movement) and a willingness to get in line. It's not a complete picture, but I bring it up because the Board has adamantly refused to transparently share its reasoning for this and practically every other decision it makes, and because understanding the Board's motivations is nonetheless strategically necessary for any activism to be effective.

To that end, what can we do about any of this? Here are two simple, modest reforms that we might be able to convince the Board to agree to:

1. More candidates on the ballot. Allowing that some fraction of eligible candidates may be disqualified before voting, the shortlist should be expanded accordingly. The exact number could be discussed, but for 2 seats I think 8–10 candidates would be manageable and appropriate, and the same proportion (16–20) for the 4 seats up in 2027. This would require a modest increase in administrative burden for the foundation over what is now apparently the status quo, but I think it's quite reasonable. On our end, we should do whatever possible to recruit more candidates.
2. A commitment from the elections committee and (if possible) the Board, not to make any alterations to any part of the selection process while it is ongoing. Obviously the Board has nearly unchecked authority to make its own rules at any time, and there is no mechanism for them to cede that authority to us even if they wanted to. That said, I don't think this should be a big ask, especially if allowances are made for genuine emergencies. The elections committee is independent and made up of volunteers, so we can at least assert an expectation that they not cooperate with election interference from higher up.

I don't have any illusion either of these would address the core problems, but it would be a start. Let me know if you love or hate these ideas, or have other reactions. —Rutebega (talk) 04:45, 30 January 2026 (UTC)

@Rutebega: I think these are reasonable ideas. Would you be willing to say the same thing over at m:Talk:Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard? That seems to be the place where one would most easily get the board's attention. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 14:37, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

@Clovermoss I think it would help to have a bit more buy-in from the community first, but if this discussion fizzles out I don't mind leaving a note just in case they're receptive. I'm busier than normal with life for the next few months so it may be a little while. —Rutebega (talk) 00:41, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

An example: Abstract Wikipedia / Wikifunctions

As an example, do we have any insight on how much money and developer time has been spent on Abstract Wikipedia, and whether this really is a priority for the community at large?

" In Abstract Wikipedia, people can create and maintain Wikipedia articles in a language-independent way. A particular language Wikipedia can translate this language-independent article into its language. Code does the translation."

Basically, the WMF is since 2020 creating a manually written rule-based LLM to automatically create or translate Wikipedia articles into any language, based on Wikidata. Apparently they learned nothing from the Scots and Greenlandic fiasco's and really believe thay can create an all-language article creator this way, and that this is wanted by the community at large instead of many other improvements which could be made with this money and manpower. After 5 years of development, the example functions they have on the Wikifunctions main page is "is this is a substring of that" and "is this a palindrome"... Fram (talk) 11:38, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

This is a great opportunity for everyone who argues "The only reason you never get an answer is because you [insert random personal attack here], Guy. If only someone asked nicely/went through proper channels/asked the right question/was properly deferential, someone at the WMF would have been glad to show you some financial transparency."

I have heard this from at least twenty different people over the years. Let's see if it is true. You, the reader, can ask the WMF "how much money has been spent on the Abstract Wikipedia project so far? What was it spent on? What has been the end result of that spending?"

Surely SOMEONE is worthy enough to ask the above question and get a straight answer, even if the answer is "No. You are not allowed to know how much we spent." Show us how it is done! --Guy Macon (talk) 15:20, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

$1 million USD? Sohom (talk) 15:27, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

And $3 million from Google.org before that Sohom (talk) 15:38, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

These appear to be grants from other organizations. Do we know if the Wikimedia Foundation is using any of its own money towards it? Bawolff mentioned earlier that when we do have program-specific data it's because grants are involved. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 15:41, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

Part of the reason why i thought SDC was entirely grant funded is that the project was abruptly shut down when they failed to secure a third grant. Admittedly this is guess work, but i suspect if WMF was footing part of the bill, the shutdown of the project would have been more gradual. We don't have that signal for abstract Wikipedia. Bawolff (talk) 18:56, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

And $1 million from the WMF endowment], let's not leave that one out of the narrative... Fram (talk) 15:51, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

That's not "how much was spent". It answers a different, related question. See my comment on fungibility below. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:40, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

Abstract wikipedia also got 1 million dollars from macauthor foundation for being a runner up in their 100&change competition. Bawolff (talk) 18:43, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

The alert reader may have noticed that I always ask "how much money was spent?" and never "where did the money come from?" That's because money is Fungible. When they first tried to sell the idea of a California Lottery to the voters, they made a big deal about an ironclad promise that every dollar of profit would go to the schools. And indeed it does. The catch is that the schools get the same amount of money. The lottery funds are roughly 1% of the total that California spends on education, and the legislature simply spends 1% less on education than they would have spend without the lottery. So the money actually goes to the general fund while technically going to the schools.

The fungibility calculation breaks down if the sources of revenue exceed the amount spent. At that point someone has to explain where the rest of the money went. Or they can simply keep how much was spent a secret with tricks like reporting as a line item "money spent of furniture, computers, legal fees, and lawn maintenance" -- useful if you don't want the peons to know how much you are paying your brother in law to keep the lawn mowed.

Sometimes grants have strings attached. The donor may require that it only be used in certain ways. But guess what? Those conditions, if any, are also a closely held secret! --Guy Macon (talk) 18:36, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

I'm not sure what money being fungible has to do with any of this. Just because money is fungible doesn't mean you can't follow it. Identifying known sources that have to be spent on some project at the very least tells us the minimum that was spent on that project. You can also crosscheck it with headcount assigned to the project (usually sort of public) and see if the number is roughly consistent. Bawolff (talk) 19:06, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

Anyway, restricted donations, like the Endowments' funding of Abstract Wikipedia, are not fungible. Also, restricted donations aren't a closely-held secret, they're reported on the WMF's financials. Levivich (talk) 20:53, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

You're telling me they've been essentially trying to create an llvm for wiki articles? and I haven't heard of it? mgjertson (talk) (contribs) 20:14, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

I'm also concerned about this, something that I only know is even in early ideas stages because of discord. Let's not blame individual employees please, but the fact that stuff like this is a recurring issue, especially with mobile, is a problem. More information at mw:Readers/Information Retrieval/Phase 0 and mw:Readers/Information Retrieval/Phase 1. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 22:01, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

The documentation pages you linked seem LLM-generated as well. Didn't we already have a whole fiasco in June of last year about the WMF introducing LLM features that the community very clearly doesn't want? SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 22:47, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

My understanding is this is a new product manager that has only been with the WMF for three months. Again, I want to focus on the systemic problems here (am currently having a conversation with someone who is worried this is going to turn into targeting that employee and that I shouldn't have said anything because people are trying to convince them this is a bad idea behind the scenes), but I do think it's important to have discussions about patterns like this. For example, how a lot of community consultation on most things takes place "off the record" and thus leaves communities vulnerable to not feeling like their opinions have been accurately represented or considered.

The board is a seperate entity but has the same problem. I had someone remind me when I questioned the action of a new trustee that she's new to the movement as well. But if we're having problems like that, it suggests that maybe there's some breakdown in communication. I don't know what's normal for most organizations, but I wouldn't expect to be proposing new features as a new employee in my current career (which is very blue collar, so maybe not a good direct comparison, would appreciate people who are not sailors to opine). I also notice the general trend of how there seems to be a lot of focus in building features for readers and for engagement. I don't like that trend either because it makes us feel like a company trying to get people to pay for the service we provide them. Once again, I don't blame individual employees here, but I feel like to some extent people are systemically set up to fail. People with decision-making authority should understand the community they're working for well. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 22:59, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

If anyone reading this ever identifies any Wikipedia editor who targets or abuses any WMF employee instead of focusing on the system they are in, please email me or bring it up on my talk page. I am not an admin but I know how to report things to admins and how to follow up so that such behavior does not happen. If any WMF employee is reading this, please remember that disagreeing with you is not the same thing as attacking you. --Guy Macon (talk) 23:13, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

That's another good example - that feature was technically linked to on the Technical village pump a while back, but presented as "introducing semantic search"; they left the AI widget part out. (I realize it isn't part of phase 1 now.) This, to me, seemed a little deceptive; whether intentional or not, it seemed likely to skew feedback in a more positive direction than if they mentioned the AI part, which seems to be a pattern with WMF stuff (see also the Simple Summaries survey, which several people reported didn't contain an option for people to say "no, don't do this") And I'm all for improving the search functionality, too, and I do usually search off-wiki using question format. If the feature was strictly what they told us it was, that would be great.

I don't think this is an issue of one employee. Unless you work at, like, a 4-person startup, major product decisions have the sign-off of many people including the higher-ups. Gnomingstuff (talk) 15:36, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

Even product managers need sign-offs? Because the new employee is a product manager. I'm not sure what the "higher ups" beyond that would be for the WMF, unless one needs executive sign off for every decision. I suppose it's possible that's normal and I just have no idea because of my blue collar background. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 16:04, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

The general direction "do something to improve reader growth" has executive knowledge, I think the overall direction gets known by folks who are the mid-level managers "improving semantic search", I don't know that the specific products being ideated (that are in Phase 0) necessarily are already being approved by the people at the top. For what it's worth how peeps present things when talking to the community is a Movement Communications team problem and not something the executive team micromanages. Sohom (talk) 16:22, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

My understanding is that Abstract Wikipedia does not automatically create articles, and the comparison to large language models is inapt. Humans have to create the articles using a language designed to be easily translated to other languages. Instead of using an existing language as a lingua franca, or inventing a language that looks like traditional human languages, the project is inventing a lingua franca patterned after programming syntax. isaacl (talk) 23:39, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

I think that what people are concerned about is that there will be the same issues that happen when trying to attempt machine translation in a general sense, even if this is technically different. There's a big AN discussion about OKA-funded articles and llm-generated text for a reason, not to mention the scandals that Fram led with in their comment. Language has proven time and time again that it's not as simple as trying to find the right tech and that these efforts can cause actual harm. My understanding is that abstract Wikipedia is also trying to create global versions of templates (so things don't break when one is translating from one project to another) and this is usually the context I've heard about it in. This project wasn't really on my radar until recently because I assumed its other goals had to do with organizing wikidata content in a more longform and structured way. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 23:55, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

I have my doubts that there is a sufficiently large community interested in using programming syntax to write articles, as well as there being problems with developing wikifunctions appropriate for all target languages. Since humans are designing each specific wikifunction implementation, though, I don't have the same concerns about it as I do for program-generated translations. It's more like humans are designing a complicated phrasebook that can be mechanically followed to produce a translation. (As mentioned, I'm skeptical about the feasibility of that approach, but I think it's worthwhile for someone to do research in this area, leaving aside the question of who should fund it.) isaacl (talk) 00:15, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

If by templates you mean the pages stored in the Template namespace that can be transcluded, I haven't heard of Abstract Wikipedia being involved with global templates. I thought that was a separate initiative? isaacl (talk) 00:17, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

Don't want to misrepresent anything, but Sohom Datta could probably give more detail about the template side of things. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 01:07, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

@Isaacl: See This page about embedding function calls in wikitext. To my understanding WMF is looking at/moving closer to/backdooring it's way into a global template-like solution where you can have functions that can be embedded into wikitext that output other wikitext. (Which is a template if you look at it hard enough) Sohom (talk) 01:24, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

Yes, I'm familiar with Wikifunctions calls. My understanding was that a separate initiative had been looking at storing traditional templates globally so they could be used across wikis, with localization for parameter names. isaacl (talk) 01:55, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

(On a side note, wikifunctions:Wikifunctions:Embedded function calls § Wikitext output says it won't output other wikitext.) isaacl (talk) 01:59, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

That link goes to a page with "There is currently no text in this page." and no page history. Searching for "wikitext output" gives no results at all. Fram (talk) 09:47, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

That's because you were searching the main namespace, the page is located in the project namespace, that's where you would search for such pages on Wikipedia as well. I fixed the link above. --Johannnes89 (talk) 11:14, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

Thanks. So their grand plan is to automatically create Wikipedia articles, but the system can't output wikitext? And they don't see any rather basic problems with this? Like I said below, that's $5 million plus down the drain. Fram (talk) 11:19, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

"Code does the translation." is what their own page says. Not "a human does the translation based on or helped by Wikifunctions". The intention really is that humans create some pattern, some code, to extract the data, and then the code translates this into fully-formed natural language articles in any language you like. Completely utopical in the way they are going about it, and completely superfluous in this time of LLMs who do it badly but still better than this coding experiment will ever achieve. $5 million plus down the drain. Fram (talk) 09:44, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

"A key hoped-for outcome of the long-term vision for Abstract Wikipedia is to provide short articles and snippets made up entirely of Wikifunctions calls using Wikidata inputs, shown alongside local articles. " So yes, the vision is to have fully automated "articles" by Abstract, not human-created ones aided by Abstract. Fram (talk) 09:53, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

I think the idea was that statistical AI works best for languages with a huge corpus of work to train on, but is less effective on small languages (not to mention the hallucination & unpredictability issues). So instead they want to take a more logical rules type approach. Will it work and be better than LLMs? Does that idea still make sense now that LLMs have advanced so much recently? I have no idea, seems incredibly speculative to me and i can't help but feel like it seems like the easy parts are being over engineered to avoid working on the hard parts. But i can still understand the appeal of this approach despite the success of LLMs. Bawolff (talk) 12:13, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

Humans have to write the article using Wikifunction calls, the lingua franca. The Wikifunctions are executed to produce text in different languages. The Wikifunctions are written by humans. So it's much like a giant lookup table, rather than a large-language model that has no explicit rules encoded within it. I agree it is possible to write brief overviews using a generic skeleton of Wikifunction calls that is applied across multiple subjects in the same area (for example, countries). That would not be a replacement for in-depth articles about subjects, as a generic skeleton would be unable to cover their individual aspects.

In essense, the desire is to capture the ideas being expressed by the author in a format that is easily amenable to translation to human languages. I'm also skeptical of the value of the WMF funding this research. I'm only saying that calling it a large-language model is inapt. isaacl (talk) 17:05, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

But words and their corresponding concepts in one language don't have perfect matches in another, that's going to create all kinds of WP:V failures Kowal2701 (talk) 17:18, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

Sure; I've already expressed my skepticism at the viability of this approach. isaacl (talk) 02:17, 28 January 2026 (UTC)