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RfC to issue a non-binding resolution to the Wikimedia Foundation

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Consensus for Wikipedia: Village pump to issue non-binding resolution for all three sections, especially #3: Increased support for internal needs. Onetwothreeip (talk) 04:00, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

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Should the English Wikipedia issue the following non-binding resolutions to the Wikimedia Foundation?

Each of the resolutions has its own section for !votes and discussion:

1. Grants to organizations intending to be active on the English Wikipedia
2. Grants to organizations unrelated to supporting Wikimedia Projects
3. Increased support for internal needs

01:02, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Proposed resolutions

Grants to organizations intending to be active on the English Wikipedia

Discussion

The English Wikipedia community is concerned about the distribution of grants related to activity on the English Wikipedia that will either not contribute to our goals of building an encyclopedia or will actively hinder those goals. We request that the Wikimedia Foundation informs the English Wikipedia of all non-trivial grants that will result in activity on the English Wikipedia through the opening of a discussion at the Village Pump (WMF) prior to the grant being issued.

Grants to organizations unrelated to supporting Wikimedia Projects

Discussion

The English Wikipedia community is concerned that the Wikimedia Foundation has found itself engaged in mission creep, and that this has resulted in funds that donors provided in the belief that they would support Wikimedia Projects being allocated to unrelated external organizations, despite urgent need for those funds to address internal deficiencies.
We request that the Wikimedia Foundation reappropriates all money remaining in the Knowledge Equity Fund, and we request that prior to making non-trivial grants that a reasonable individual could consider unrelated to supporting Wikimedia Projects that the Foundation seeks approval from the community.

Increased support for internal needs

Discussion

The English Wikipedia community is concerned that the Wikimedia Foundation has neglected critical areas of the project, and that continued neglect of these areas may endanger the project.
To improve the resilience of the project, we request that money be reallocated to hiring more technical staff, whose role will be to fulfill requests from the community such as those expressed on the Community Wishlist, as well as restoring access to tools such as grapher extension.
To improve knowledge equity we also request that that the Foundation provides funding to assist established editors in accessing the resources they need to improve the encyclopedia, such as by increasing the number of libraries accessible through the Wikipedia Library and by giving micro-grants for the purchase of backlogged items at Resource Request.

Related discussions

There are three related discussions that editors involved in this may be interested in; they are listed here.

Community Response

Grants to organizations intending to be active on the English Wikipedia (Community Response)

The English Wikipedia community is concerned about the distribution of grants related to activity on the English Wikipedia that will either not contribute to our goals of building an encyclopedia or will actively hinder those goals. We request that the Wikimedia Foundation informs the English Wikipedia of all non-trivial grants that will result in activity on the English Wikipedia through the opening of a discussion at the Village Pump (WMF) prior to the grant being issued.

Grants to organizations intending to be active on the English Wikipedia (Survey)

Support (Grants to organizations intending to be active on the English Wikipedia)

1. There have been many issues over the years where groups have been funded by the WMF to engage in activities on the English Wikipedia, only for the activity to be actively harmful to our project by providing no benefit and resulting in our volunteers having to spend time cleaning up the resulting mess. Often, this result can be reasonably predicted, as it could have been with the Deforestation in Nigeria project, if only the WMF had actively sought our input; hopefully this resolution will convince them to do so. BilledMammal (talk) 01:01, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

   As someone unfamiliar, what happened with the Deforestation in Nigeria project?—Ineffablebookkeeper (talk) ({{ping}} me!) 12:09, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

   (ec x 2) User:Ineffablebookkeeper, see Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1137#Another Nigerian project dropping poor articles here, Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-09-16/News and notes#WMF reconsiders Africa approach, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/How can AI be applied to Deforestation and Climate Change: Nigeria's Contribution to Global Warming, as a not exhaustive list. The short version is that a USD $20,000 grant was approved in part because of the false claim that Wikipedia lacked coverage on Deforestation in Nigeria, a claim apparently made after an inadequate search and never double checked before the grant was approved. The articles created by the group receiving the grant were of poor quality, some entirely unsuitable.

   This question refers to the original wording of this proposal. Folly Mox (talk) 14:48, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

2. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:21, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
3. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 03:03, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
4. AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:08, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
5. Sandizer (talk) 05:11, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
6. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:47, 3 October 2023 (UTC) per my comments in previous discussions, wasting money on KEF (support for non-Wikimedia-related initiatives) needs to be stopped now. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:47, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
7. JML1148 ^{(talk | contribs)} 06:23, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
8. Supporting the amended proposal.—S Marshall T/C 09:10, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
9. Edward-Woodrow • talk 12:24, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
10. The Wikimedia Community, and not the Wikimedia Foundation, governs the Wikimedia Movement. When donors give money to Wikipedia, they give it to the Wikimedia Community and not the Wikimedia Foundation. It is essential that money go to support the Wikimedia Community, its culture, and its values. With increasing regularity and forcefulness, the values and ethics of the Wikimedia Foundation are contrary to those of the Wikimedia Community. Bluerasberry (talk) 14:25, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
11. Support as amended. Some initiatives seem to be about experimenting with editing privileges as a classroom tool rather than improving Wikipedia, and that's not where these grants should go. Certes (talk) 14:32, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
12. Support as amended. Notifying us ahead of time when a grant recipient's activities are expected to affect this project will allow people to help them course correct in the early stages if lack of competence appears to be an issue, rather than waiting for it to be discovered organically once it has already become a problem. The tighter feedback loop should result in better articles, less discouragement from the grant recipients, more competent new editors, and decreased frustration from en.wp editors. The increased transparency may reduce ill will between this project and the Foundation. Folly Mox (talk) 14:58, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
13. Support with the amendment made. The community should be emphasizing *what* the community wants to happen. Exactly how to make that happen is a separate issue and I think statements like this should be distilled to the key element(s). CoffeeCrumbs (talk) 15:08, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
14. Support. The language requires the WMF to inform the community, it doesn't say the community has to approve the grant. "Non-trivial" should be defined later as some dollar threshold, so there will be large grants and small grants, and the WMF should be required to inform enwiki whenever it is considering a large grant that will affect enwiki. I for one would like to know about large grants being considered without having to read through every grant application on meta. I've been surprised at how many grants are in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars. This would be very easy for the WMF to comply with, and I don't see any downside. Levivich (talk) 16:59, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
15. Support. The fairly recent case of Nigerian deforestation articles springs to mind and asks serious questions about the ability of the WMF to allocate grants. More attention is needed here. Willbb234 20:34, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
16. Aasim - Herrscher of Wikis ❄️ 20:36, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
17. Support as amended. Would be good to define "non-trivial" for clarity. Espresso Addict (talk) 21:03, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
18. Support, but I don't think that the notification necessarily has to be a discussion (alternatively it could simply be a post), and I'd be fine with any discussion ocurring on metawiki. It'd create less work for the folks that review grants and less places to monitor. As for the merits of notification, enwiki might often know more about the state of the wiki than grant approvers when a grant largely concerns enwiki (in my opinion should be determined at reviewer discretion), so I think that it makes sense to notify enwiki as a courtesy. —Danre98^{(talk^contribs)} 02:59, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
19. Support. This isn't even asking for veto power, just "Hey, if a grant you're giving is likely to have a substantial impact on the English Wikipedia, please give us a heads up beforehand." I do not think that is an unreasonable request. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 03:06, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
20. This seems like a good step toward transparency and harm reduction. —siroχo 03:45, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
21. Support anything which hamstrings W?F. Chris Troutman (talk) 20:08, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
22. Reviewing grant applications and judging a project's likely impact on content are two tasks that require different skill sets. Perhaps it would help if grant applicants without an established track record as Wikipedians submit some samples of work to the editor community before being awarded tens of thousands of dollars. Andreas JN466 11:43, 5 October 2023 (UTC)
23. Support, now that the problematic lines in the statement have been removed. – SD0001 (talk) 16:30, 5 October 2023 (UTC)
24. Support: there are far too many situations where unpaid volunteers are cleaning up the mess left by paid agents. It is one thing for this to be for-profit COI editing but entirely another for it to be grant money coming from reader donations. We are the best placed to judge whether an idea fits en.wiki. Creating new articles will rarely be an appropriate task for newcomers. Some absolutely shocking grant approvals show the process has no oversight by anyone with a clue. — Bilorv (talk) 20:59, 6 October 2023 (UTC)
25. Support I think it is actually totally reasonable to say "please let us know if you are going to give money to an organization that is going to edit on Wikipedia so that we can have oversight and guidance". Introducing grant money has the power to overwhelm the abilities of even a project as large English Wikipedia to clean up errors and problems. We should at least be able to know when a project is going to start. Steven Walling • talk 02:16, 7 October 2023 (UTC)
26. Support. I don't even mainly edit in enwp but I am looking forward of this kind of initiatives from the community and whether we can apply it outside of enwp. RXerself (talk) 16:15, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
27. Support per above. Crossroads ^-talk- 21:58, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
28. Support as a way to increase transparency and community involvement. DFlhb (talk) 12:25, 12 October 2023 (UTC)
29. Support many of these grants are poorly designed and allocated, resulting in waste of money and damage to the project --Ita140188 (talk) 18:58, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
30. Support No-brainer. A mild version to just inform. North8000 (talk) 19:26, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
31. Support. Dont see why more transparency would be bad. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 20:55, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
32. Support. The WMF is not a generic "make things better-er" charity. Mebigrouxboy (talk) 23:45, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
33. Support I'm amazed this isn't being done already; giving money to something that creates un-helpful articles here that we have to deal with seems counter-intuitive. Oaktree b (talk) 15:42, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
34. Support. If money is given in the promise of activity in English Wikipedia a notification should be a common sense approach. The community would gladly assist the organizations receiving the grant, but the community also should have the right to scrutinize "paid" activities going on in their wiki. ✠ SunDawn ✠ (contact) 03:05, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
35. Support Killarnee (talk) 13:07, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
36. Support tompagenet (talk) 13:17, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
37. Support--Wehwalt (talk) 02:58, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
38. Support Grants should go to organizations aiming to actually help the project, or at least not add more work for volunteers to repair it behind them. In any case, transparency over the goals and intended actions of such organizations receiving grants is more than welcome. ChaotıċEnby(t · c) 02:41, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Oppose (Grants to organizations intending to be active on the English Wikipedia)

1. Too vague to be useful and doesn't respect the autonomy of other projects. What does "non-trivial" mean? What does "active on the English Wikipedia" mean? While I can imagine what they might reasonably mean, if we're going to support a resolution that we hope will be implemented, we need to provide actual metrics against which we can evaluate compliance. Presumably the resolution intends that non-rapid fund grants made for activities that will result in edits directly on EnWiki seek feedback from the EnWiki community. It could also mean something else (allocations over a particular dollar amount, for example, or organizations doing specific kinds of activities). The risk is we pass this because we all imagine some shared understanding when no shared meaning exists, and then when the WMF does what it thinks we mean the false consensus is laid bare as more backlash ensues. Further, the proposal could amount to an EnWiki veto over what occurs on other projects should a grant cover multiple projects (like Commons or Wiktionary). We could say that the WMF should do the same for those projects too, but if every project impacted by a grant gets its own on-project discussion and potential veto, we now have potentially hundreds of consultations to be managed being tracked across multiple projects and threads. That's why these kinds of discussions on grants already take place on Meta, the wiki for cross-project coordination. Of course, communication as to what's happening on meta could be improved such as when I and others added a dedicated "Meta" section to CENT to raise awareness of important discussion on that wiki, but the "here to build an encyclopedia" argument cuts both ways: EnWiki is for building an encyclopedia, not grant administration. I agree with (what I imagine to be) the sentiment, but as a resolution I think it is too loose. — Wug·a·po·des 02:23, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

   I appreciate the amendment as it addressed a main concern. I'll take some time to consider how I feel about the remaining vagueness but for the moment consider me somewhere between neutral and weak opposition. — Wug·a·po·des 23:49, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

2. Editor attention is already spread thin among so many (too many) Foundation initatives. Spreading thinner the attention of foundation minded editors further concerns me. The foundation needs to be competent in making grants and to the exten that it's not, that high level problem at the macro level is what needs solving, not micro level feedback. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 03:42, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

   Regarding Editor attention is already spread thin among so many (too many) Foundation initatives. Spreading thinner the attention of foundation minded editors further concerns me.: My hope, by having them inform us rather than expecting us to watch metawiki and inform ourselves, is that we will make it easier for editors to engage with these sorts of issues and thus increase the number of editors willing to do so. BilledMammal (talk) 07:38, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

   I understand. My preference would be that volunteers help the Foundation setup productive systems that do not require constant wide spread volunteer oversight. Grantmaking is a time consuming activity and I'd be happy to let paid people spend the lions share of the time on it. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 12:52, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

3. Oh dear. Please take a good look at all the formal groups that exist in the movement today - roughly 180 of them, at least half of which will directly or indirectly contribute to English Wikipedia. (Don't forget, almost all of these groups do or can participate formally in discussing global policies and processes that will affect our project; and those supporting international events, as well as MediaWiki, Commons and Wikidata, certainly have a trickle-down effect.) And that doesn't count informal groups, "recognized" groups that aren't affiliates, and individual volunteers. Oh, and hubs - which are deliberately intended to involve multiple groups focused on particular topics. If people want to get stuck into reviewing grant applications, they should go over to Meta, volunteer their time and energy, and do it. They're always looking for volunteers. Oh, and incidentally, deforestation in Nigeria is a real thing.[1] Risker (talk) 04:09, 3 October 2023 (UTC) (Adding parenthetically that there are multiple Wikipedias edited by Nigerian Wikipedians; just because there's an article in English - one that has lots of tags on it - doesn't mean there is a parallel article in other local languages. This isn't just an English Wikipedia issue. Risker (talk) 04:44, 3 October 2023 (UTC) )

   @Risker: Regarding your parenthetical comment about Nigerian Wikipedians working in many languages, note that the Task List for the $20,000 Deforestation in Nigeria project only mentions English Wikipedia articles. The first draft of the grant application did mention Igbo articles in addition to English, but the references to Igbo article work were first reduced in scale and then deleted altogether: [2], [3]. Andreas JN466 11:28, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

   Also, I think reviewing grant applications and judging a project's likely impact (positive or negative) on Wikipedia content quality require different skill sets. (Of course, the latter is always difficult without a work sample supplied beforehand, or an established track record of article work.) Andreas JN466 11:36, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

4. Per Wugapodes and Risker, with more comments to follow. KevinL (aka L235 · t · c) 04:15, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
5. We can and should tell the Foundation that they need to rethink the broad direction they're taking on grants. But in no way should EnWiki, or for that matter any community, become the grant overlords. We are hardly qualified to give individual level feedback on grants. There is a reason we have the board and a foundation. Wikipedia's community governance works great at creating an encyclopedia, but it does not do great at managing money. We can effect grant reform without having to become grant reviewers. CaptainEek ^{Edits Ho Cap'n!}⚓ 05:07, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
6. Per Wugapodes, Risker and CaptainEek. Thryduulf (talk) 08:07, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

   The amended version is considerably less bad than the previous version, but I'm still not convinced this is a direction we should be going in. Thryduulf (talk) 16:52, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

7. This sounds vague and appears to ask for an enwiki veto of what happens on other projects. I'm not convinced there isn't a problem here, as the deforestation issue highlights, and the WMF should have some introspection of that happened. But I don't believe the current suggest is the right way to go. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 21:18, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

   I won't repeat the points made so well by others but I want to note that if we deleted the second paragraph and the last sentence of the first paragraph, then I'd certainly "support", and I think others might too. This having been done, I'll move to support.—S Marshall T/C 08:34, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

8. Oppose per Risker. You want to review grants, nobody is stopping you. Also the non-neutral wording declares matters of opinion as matters of fact, enough to oppose on this basis alone. Gamaliel (talk) 23:08, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
9. Per the very good comments above, with special mention to Barkeep49 and CaptainEek regarding the competencies (and lack of) of our community-governance system here. There have been many expressed concerns with the grant system, but I am unsure how this proposal would move assist much with them. CMD (talk) 03:21, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
10. Oppose. Review of grants should be done through meta. However, it may be good to compile a rolling list of grants that may generate content for enwiki for editors here for ease of tracking related updates. Through this list, we can potentially see if there is an overall benefit or negative outcomes from the grants and then see how such grants can be processed or advised in the future. How it is to be done can be explored further if there's support for this consideration instead. – robertsky (talk) 08:34, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
11. No, per Risker and CaptainEek. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:26, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
12. If one like to review grants head over to meta and do it --In actu (Guerillero) ^{Parlez Moi} 11:14, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
13. Per most of the above. Badly worded and likely impossible to implement. Not a solution to the issues given as examples. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:39, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
14. The revised proposal moved me from a clear oppose to being on the fence. This is one where other opinions have influenced my perspective, so I weakly oppose mainly per Risker, but also Barkeep, Eek, and Wugapodes. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 18:59, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
15. Grants can already be reviewed. Meta is the place for it, not here. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:27, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
16. Mine is a weak support, given the "non-binding resolution" nature of the proposal and the fact that I don't think it hurts to remind the WMF that grants which could impact the on-project conduct of parties, be they regular editors or not, are worth special consideration and have a special level of interest to this community. That said, I'm pushed to a formal oppose based on 1) the fact that the specific proposal here still strays a little into miscasting the community's position to oversight the foundation's financial and administrative decisions in such areas and, 2) the fact that despite this relationships, the Foundation already has more than abundant transparency on such matters through Meta. A better outcome here would be a push to make more editors conversant in broader Wikimedia movement processes and procedures. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 21:32, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
17. Weakly mostly on two items: 1) Wugapodes' objection over imprecision, and 2) that I think any discussion should continue where it has been, which is Meta, rather than here (i.e. that it should be a notification only here). I think this is otherwise supportable and to be fair is something that could/should be done for every wiki which might be affected by grants work. Izno (talk) 22:45, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
18. While it may not literally be written to enable that, the "opening of a discussion" over a new grant would become an avenue to propose revoking that grant, and I don't think it's our place to do that, both in principle and from an official standpoint. RunningTiger123 (talk) 02:54, 8 October 2023 (UTC)
19. Per Barkeep, Risker, and Captain Eek, at least. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:20, 23 November 2023 (UTC)
20. There is already a process for this. Curbon7 (talk) 02:26, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

Grants to organizations intending to be active on the English Wikipedia (Discussion)

• Comment. Not opposed to this, but it feels like a bit of a sledgehammer–nut response targeted at the single (awful) grant. Would prefer a longer list of grants falling under the education programme, and elsewhere, that have resulted in clear harm to the encyclopedia. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:56, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  I don't have a list on hand, but the most common time for it to occur is when the WMF gives a group funds that they use as monetary prizes for editing; for example, Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos in past years, although it is no longer an issue as it no longer offers monetary prizes. BilledMammal (talk) 02:19, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

• Would love for this to be more general and not exclusive to enwiki. See comments at m:Requests for comment/Democratizing the Wikimedia Foundation, in particular "RFCs where the WMF acknowledges they must abide by the results". Frostly (talk) 02:06, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  While I would love it if the WMF did apply this to other projects I didn't feel it would be appropriate for us to ask the WMF to do so without the consent of those Wiki's. BilledMammal (talk) 02:16, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

• Question what does it mean by non-trivial sum? Fresh from organising Wikimania 2023, of which I had a direct hand in operationalising Wiki Loves Living Heritage Singapore 2023, would the sponsored prizes there (offhandedly, not more than 10,000 USD) be counted if it was funded by the Foundation? Of it, it generated 1,180 new images, many are of certain quality that can be used on the articles here. How low do we consider as trivia? This also raises the question of grants that are given that on surface seemingly does not affect enwiki directly, but in reality is. Do we want to or should we be policing those as well? – robertsky (talk) 03:21, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  @Robertsky Side note. As far as I can tell, WMF does not even support any community requests for funding under 500 USD (rapid grant minimum). If I am wrong, I'd appreciate a link. IMHO 500 USD plus is non-trivial, considering global scale of our project (it is more tham mimimum monthly income in some poor places). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:52, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  Defining "non-trivial" seems in the cards. I do not know how many grants would usefully be reviewed though if that number is any higher than the floor, since I suspect it is the smaller grants that have an outsized influence on the volunteers here. Pizza for a badly-planned editathon seems more likely to disrupt than most other kinds of grants. Izno (talk) 19:56, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

• Comment. I'd support something closer to For any WMF-funded activity that is determined to have had a net negative effect on the English Wikipedia, the WMF will pay an equivalent amount for contract labour to slay backlogs of the community's choosing. I know, I know: who defines and decides "net negative"? It's just a dream. Folly Mox (talk) 03:31, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
• Comment I think there's a resolution to be made here, but needs to be more specific in light of the oppose comments. I would leave out the part which says "and does not proceed with the grant if the English Wikipedia is not convinced of its utility." The foundation should certainly evaluate our comments, but the final decisions should be up to it. Also, this needs to be more narrowly focused on projects which seek to directly affect the content on English Wikipedia. – SD0001 (talk) 08:15, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
• @AndyTheGrump, CaptainEek, Espresso Addict, Folly Mox, Frostly, JML1148, L235, Piotrus, Pppery, Risker, Robertsky, S Marshall, SD0001, Sandizer, Thebiguglyalien, Thryduulf, and Wugapodes: As the proposal has only been open for a few hours I've updated it to remove the second paragraph and last sentence of the first; if anyone objects I will revert, given that it has been open for a few hours and seen a number of votes, but I believe it is better to get a proposal that we can agree and it seems these changes are necessary for that to happen. BilledMammal (talk) 08:55, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  Perhaps a diff might help? Sandizer (talk) 09:01, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  Change BilledMammal (talk) 09:02, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  What is the reason for the update? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 10:29, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  Because the original wording didn't appear to have the broad community backing we need for the WMF to take these resolutions onboard; I'm hoping this wording will be more palatable. BilledMammal (talk) 10:38, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  You haven't changed anything that would change my opinion. If people want to get involved in grants, they need to get directly involved. It is incredibly disrespectful to the volunteers who work so hard to analyse grant requests to suggest that *one* community gets veto rights on their carefully considered and nuanced decisions, many of which affect multiple projects. I would suggest that authors of these proposals (I know it wasn't just you, BilledMammal, you're just taking the brunt of the responses) actually spend the time to talk to people involved in grant review and analysis, and perhaps actually try to assist in grant review and analysis, before saying that (a dozen or so people from) a project should be able to essentially veto a grant. Please walk a mile in those shoes. This is WP:IDONTLIKEIT on a global scale. Risker (talk) 19:12, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  I don't see a veto here now post-change, I see a required notification so that users who might be interested in specific proposals can indeed actually try to assist in grant review and analysis. If the grants at that point are vetoed by review of interested users from here, that would seem to say more about the utility of the grant than not. The clearly detrimental Deforestation project (and others before it!) should not have been approved and review by en.wp users would likely have identified issues with that grant immediately.

  I have a remaining concern that this could be used to detrimental effect for grants which do not per se target en.wp. For example, the "Deforestation" project was clearly (or perhaps not clearly) intended to be done as work targeting en.wp, and it is this kind of grant I think a notification would be good for. It feels like a miss to notify about a general grant to improve software affecting multiple wikis or multi-wiki coverage of material but not intending to focus on en.wp or even substantially contribute here. Can this framing be tightened? Izno (talk) 19:54, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  Sorry Izno, I missed this. That was a fair request, but I think it is a little too late now - however, my personal perspective is that a software project wouldn't result in activity on enwiki, even if it would affect enwiki, and thus notification wouldn't be required. BilledMammal (talk) 01:12, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

  Where does this proposal "suggest that *one* community gets veto rights"? Please, let's not spread misinformation. Levivich (talk) 19:54, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  It suggests that in the past. Folly Mox (talk) 20:18, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

• Comment. Hi everyone, Yael here, VP of Community Growth at WMF, which is a sub-team within Advancement that includes the Community Resources team, responsible for grants distribution.
  I’m seeing two (and-a-half) interconnected issues in this RfC, and I’m happy to speak to each of them: 1) Funding activity on EnWP that is not intended to contribute to our goals of building an encyclopedia; 1a) A specific comment about a grant on deforestation in Nigeria, which is used as an example of either non-encyclopedic content or an active hindering of that goal. And 2) How WMF communicates with EnWP about grants that will result in activity on EnWP.
  Regarding #1: The grants we make through our Community Resources team are intended to support the Wikimedia community to contribute to our collective goal of increasing encyclopedic content. I am in complete alignment with the spirit of this RfC - that grants should contribute to this goal, and that they should be of a high enough quality that they don’t make work of en-Wiki editors more difficult. Sometimes people disagree with what is encyclopedic content, but we trust that the Wiki projects make those decisions themselves; thankfully, it’s rare that content directly supported by grants is added to any of the Wikis that is counter to this objective.
  Sometimes, we make funding mistakes or the grants don’t go as we had hoped. That’s what happened with the specific grant referenced re: deforestation in Nigeria. As others have mentioned, this is a topic that many believe should be on Wikipedia. Unfortunately, the quality of the article didn’t live up to en-Wiki standards and as a result caused EnWP admins more work. I genuinely apologize for that.
  There’s a lot we’ve learned from this grant portfolio (you can see the full proposals, both those funded and not, on Meta here). I won’t go into detail here, as I’m trying to respond to the main point of the RfC. In short, this grant came from a pool of funding that did not go through our Regional Funds Committee community review process, and we’ve since sunsetted that pool of funding. We are now sending all applicants from The Organizer Lab to the Rapid Grants program, which has both a lower cap in funding and is reviewed by the Regional Funds Committees.
  Regarding #2: Current practice is that all proposals are publicly available on Meta for community input. We rarely see much engagement there, but community members are welcome to engage and their comments will be considered and reviewed by the Regional Fund Committees, which are made up of community volunteers. We also ask all grantees to describe to what extent they’ve engaged with their relevant Wiki communities in drafting the proposal; I acknowledge that some do this more than others and we’re reliant on their self-attestation to this.
  Given that Meta can be hard to navigate, and that many EnWP members are more active on the Village Pump, the request to share information there is a fair one. Community Resources can commit to sending out an announcement on all Village Pumps (not just EnWP), when the funding round is open and proposals are open for Community input. This announcement will link to Meta, where the proposals are posted for comment. Ultimately, Regional Fund Committees make the final recommendations on funding, but they take community input, which can be done directly on the Meta pages associated with the proposals.
  Finally, I’m open to learning what other communication channels would be helpful (e.g., a Wikimedia-l announcement?) when each funding round is open. On a personal note, I welcome requests and feedback particularly on relatively solvable asks like this. I respect that RfCs are important to EnWP for community alignment, but you are welcome to also just send concerns like this directly to the Community Resources team or to me. We genuinely love solving solvable problems. RWeissburg (WMF) (talk) 17:40, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

RWeissburg (WMF), that doesn't solve the core problem. Have a look at WP:THEYCANTHEARYOU. That should have been treated as an emergency blocker-level bug. Yet, years after reporting, it still is not addressed. We need editors to be notified consistently if we leave a message on their talk page, and for that to be dead obvious in the interface. If the "mobile app" does not or cannot support that, get rid of it, and ask people to use a browser to access the website, which they should be doing anyway (no website should have an "app" to access it; the "app" to access a website is a browser). But if you must have an "app", make sure it functions completely correctly, including letting the user know, in no uncertain terms, when someone has left them a talk page message. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 04:48, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Seraphimblade - I think maybe your comment is intended for the third topic: "Increased Support for Internal Needs"? @JTanner (WMF) has responded on that topic below. 75.104.108.53 (talk) 16:04, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

My apologies - that comment above is from me; I had accidentally been logged out. - Yael RWeissburg (WMF) (talk) 16:05, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

• I don't understand what this proposal actually entails. m:Grants shows there are many different processes. Occasionally there can be dozens of grant requests for projects which may produce edits on the English Wikipedia. Does this proposal ask for more granular links pointing out each individual proposal in its own section on the village pump, or what? Nemo 14:01, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

Grants to organizations unrelated to supporting Wikimedia Projects (Community Response)

The English Wikipedia community is concerned that the Wikimedia Foundation has found itself engaged in mission creep, and that this has resulted in funds that donors provided in the belief that they would support Wikimedia Projects being allocated to unrelated external organizations, despite urgent need for those funds to address internal deficiencies.
We request that the Wikimedia Foundation reappropriates all money remaining in the Knowledge Equity Fund, and we request that prior to making non-trivial grants that a reasonable individual could consider unrelated to supporting Wikimedia Projects that the Foundation seeks approval from the community.

Grants to organizations unrelated to supporting Wikimedia Projects (Survey)

Support (Grants to organizations unrelated to supporting Wikimedia Projects)

1. In most cases it will not be appropriate for the WMF to provide funds to organizations unrelated to supporting Wikimedia Projects; our donors gave money to support the projects and we should respect that. Rare exceptions may occur, but in such circumstances broad oversight from the community should be sought, to ensure that the grant is appropriate and that it will not damage our image by causing the public to believe that we are becoming a partisan entity. BilledMammal (talk) 01:01, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
2. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:21, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
3. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:32, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
4. As I've said in the past, soliciting donations for one cause and then handing them off to a different cause is in effect the same thing as a scam. 100% of funding collected by the WMF should go into supporting the various editions of Wikipedia and its sister projects or to keeping the WMF operating as an organization that facilitates these projects. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 03:07, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
5. Frankly, I'd find it astonishing that this needed to be said, if it wasn't for the evidence that it clearly does. AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:11, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
6. —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 03:46, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
7. Pecopteris (talk) 04:15, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
8. Sandizer (talk) 05:11, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
9. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:47, 3 October 2023 (UTC) per my comments in previous discussions, wasting money on KEF (support for non-Wikimedia-related initiatives) needs to be stopped now. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:47, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
10. WMF solicited donations using disingenuous messaging like "Wikipedia is not for sale" and is transferring not-insignificant amounts of such funds to goals that have nothing to do with Wikipedia or with any of its sister projects. That is morally dubious at best and fraud at worst. It needs to stop. Ciridae (talk) 05:57, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
11. JML1148 ^{(talk | contribs)} 06:23, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
12. The money needs to be used for the purposes the donors expected it to be used for. If donors were told they were paying to keep the lights on and the servers running, and they were, then it's unethical and duplicitous to spend it on advocacy think-tanks. Also, Wikipedia has a reputation for neutrality that was very hard-won and will be very easily-lost. Don't squander it please. Spending donors' money on advocacy groups is reckless and risks our core mission. I can envisage headlines about "Wikipedia applies political pressure" on a slow news day and I think that would be a catastrophic outcome.—S Marshall T/C 08:42, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
13. Money raised for Wikipedia should stay for Wikipedia. As I said elsewhere, $200K USD for a non-profit organization based in Indonesia that works on human rights and advocacy issues for indigenous people is a nice plan, but not related to the project in any way. Edward-Woodrow • talk 12:21, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
14. If I may, While I understand the concerns regarding the allocation of funds by the Wikimedia Foundation, it's important to remember the wisdom in the quote, 'It's not right to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.' In this context, the children represent Wikimedia Projects, and the dogs represent unrelated external organizations. It's crucial that funds donated for supporting Wikimedia Projects are prioritized for their intended purpose. Therefore, I wholeheartedly support the request for the Wikimedia Foundation to reappropriate any remaining money in the Knowledge Equity Fund and seek community approval before making grants that may appear unrelated to supporting Wikimedia Projects. This approach aligns with the principle of responsible fund allocation. Icem4k (talk) 14:25, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
15. Support, in the interests of honesty and transparency. Certes (talk) 14:26, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
16. The Wikimedia Community, and not the Wikimedia Foundation, governs the Wikimedia Movement. When donors give money to Wikipedia, they give it to the Wikimedia Community and not the Wikimedia Foundation. It is essential that money go to support the Wikimedia Community, its culture, and its values. With increasing regularity and forcefulness, the values and ethics of the Wikimedia Foundation are contrary to those of the Wikimedia Community. Bluerasberry (talk) 14:25, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
17. Support, per S Marshall's points. The bait-and-switch of WMF fundraising has gone on far enough. Even if used for other good things, it's important to be honest about what money donated will be used for. People who provide financial support deserve that honesty, yet we have this yearly débâcle in which we have banners that suggest that donated money will be used for something that's only a small portion of the budget. CoffeeCrumbs (talk) 15:06, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
18. For many years, the WMF has been spending way too much money on non-editing improvements (like trying to solve the root causes of systemic bias or knowledge inequity) and too little money on editing improvements (like upgrading Visual Editor, or the graphs extension). This needs to stop. They need to spend the donations primarily on hardware and software development and maintenance; only when those needs are met should they even consider spending the donations on anything else, and those needs are not met and never have been. Levivich (talk) 17:03, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
19. Aasim - Herrscher of Wikis ❄️ 20:36, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
20. Strong support. I believe donors are misguided on where their money will end up. Giving money to other organisations is a big no and I can't believe this has been going on for so long. Willbb234 20:41, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
21. Donors expect the WMF to spend money on WMF projects and goals, not to be a general-purpose grant making group --In actu (Guerillero) ^{Parlez Moi} 11:11, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
22. If anything, this statement isn't pointed enough. Chris Troutman (talk) 20:09, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
23. Support. Our donation money should be spent at home, not on third party causes that have minimal or no inter-relation with Wikimedia. Reminding the WMF of this is appropriate. I am a bit surprised at the quantity of opposes. Perhaps this RFC should have been simplified to "The English Wikipedia opposes spending donor money on causes not closely related to Wikimedia, and is deeply concerned about the Knowledge Equity Fund." –Novem Linguae (talk) 07:54, 5 October 2023 (UTC)
24. Support. I think the idea of rephrasing this per User:Novem Linguae's suggestion (or by simply cutting the second sentence) has merit. We do not really want to micromanage these grants, nor are we properly equipped for it. We want the WMF to get the message – a message that a good number of opposers appear to agree with. --Andreas JN466 18:17, 5 October 2023 (UTC)
25. Support Novem Linguae's suggestion, with tentative support for the other wording. It's rather dishonest to advertise for donations on Wikipedia and then have that money go to something that's at best very remotely related to Wikipedia. 173.244.10.85 (talk) 15:03, 6 October 2023 (UTC)
26. Support: readers who donate are largely unaware of what their donations are used for and external organisations is a big part of it. WMF mission creep exceeded ludicrous levels several years ago. Of course good things come from working with other organisations like Internet Archive, but the statement is that the WMF need to consult the community over such collaborations. — Bilorv (talk) 21:05, 6 October 2023 (UTC)
27. I would prefer if "and we request that prior to making non-trivial grants that a reasonable individual could consider unrelated to supporting Wikimedia Projects that the Foundation seeks approval from the community." was removed but support the general principal. Jenks24 (talk) 17:24, 7 October 2023 (UTC)
28. Support - funds raised by Wikimedia are understood (and advertised as such) to be used (and necessary) to run Wikipedia and associated projects, not third party organizations. --Ita140188 (talk) 13:56, 9 October 2023 (UTC)
29. Support. While doing projects on knowledge equity itself is not inherently opposed to what we are doing in Wikipedia, the fund that was gathered by benefiting from the work of the community must be used to help the people inequity inside the community first. I would rather see a legal fund for editors in oppressive countries, or expand the coverage of The Wikipedia Library. RXerself (talk) 20:52, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
30. Support. WMF funds should be for WMF projects, of which many are needed. Crossroads ^-talk- 21:55, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
31. Support. The WMF has gone from the stewards of Wikipedia to a 'movement' in it's own right, and it is impeding Wikipedia's ability to be a reliable, high-quality encyclopedia. INeedOGVector (talk) 22:12, 12 October 2023 (UTC)
32. Support A much needed reform. And ending deception of donors who largely are asked to donate to support Wikipedia and then transferring money to people and organizations unrelated to that. North8000 (talk) 19:30, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
33. Support. The second part of the sentence could be just removed, since it is too prescriptive on implementation details. For example, simply removing the KEF would also be a good course of action. Anyway, I agree with the overall idea. MarioGom (talk) 07:51, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
34. Strong Support - Money given to WMF is given out of an understanding that it is to uphold WP - Any deviation from this merits a discussion prior. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 20:57, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
35. I think the specific wording could use a bit more workshopping, potentially after the RfC, but agree with the overall sentiment. (I prefer Novem Linguae's version.) Tol (talk | contribs) @ 15:38, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
36. Sandstein 13:29, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
37. Strong Support Money given to WMF should be used for WMF. My time to edit Wikipedia (that strongly benefited WMF) should be used for WMF/Wikipedia, not for projects that are too far unrelated from the goals of Wikipedia. There are many good causes in this world - people should donate directly to those causes instead. WMF should be totally unbiased, and allowing money to flow out for "causes" can cause biases. ✠ SunDawn ✠ (contact) 03:07, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
38. Support Killarnee (talk) 13:08, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
39. Support Johnbod (talk) 19:08, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
40. Support - The mission creep has been harmful and means ever more requests for funding not actually required for the sites people think they are donating to tompagenet (talk) 13:17, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
41. Support Fund the community's work, not things that aren't our mission. It's also not being straight with the donors.--Wehwalt (talk) 01:33, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
42. Support The grants made should be related to Wikimedia projects. Strobilomyces (talk) 21:16, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
43. Support as per the above. - AquilaFasciata (talk | contribs) 20:49, 17 November 2023 (UTC)
44. Support. Knowledge equity can mean a lot of things, and the inequity continues in many non-English Wikipedias and most sister projects. These funds should be directed to WMF projects first as that was the donor's expectation. Yet when I see Knowledge Equity fund recipients don't contribute towards WMF projects at all despite having strong synergies (e.g. "Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism" wrote 0 Wikinews article despite being an investigative journalism organization in their name and "Borealis Racial Equity in Journalism Fund" admitted in their report to WMF that they improved/wrote 0 articles and added 0 images.) Even a Wiki Edu classroom project has a bigger and meaningful impact towards an WMF project and at a far cheaper cost. As the Knowledge Equity fund currently stands, it needs to be reined in when projects are funded with so few strings attached. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 06:10, 23 November 2023 (UTC)
45. Support Grants made with the expectation of reaching Wikimedia projects should go to Wikimedia projects. ChaotıċEnby(t · c) 02:39, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Oppose (Grants to organizations unrelated to supporting Wikimedia Projects)

1. Knowledge equity and related issues, while not directly related to the projects, are crucial issues that are within the WMF's scope. Frostly (talk) 02:01, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
2. This seems like an over-reaction to a poorly-communicated initiative; the WMF has conceded that it should have provided more information and explanation as to how funding these groups had the potential to expand available free knowledge that can be used in Wikimedia projects. Noting also that this is English Wikipedia, and should only include proposals that are specific to English Wikipedia. Those grants are at the global/meta level. Risker (talk) 04:19, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
3. The first sentence is fine. The second sentence is way outside outside the English Wikipedia's area of competence. Thryduulf (talk) 08:09, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
4. I'm especially opposed to demanding the money already allocated for the fund be returned, it seems unnecessary to me and risks stuff being killed off prematurely every time there's a change in leadership in ways we may not like. There seems to be agreement that the KEF is not going to be repeated, so while there are still going to be changes a gradual winding down based on existing decisions is far better than a sudden change. Do we really want when we finally get something we want funded only a year or two later it will be killed immediately just because new leadership no longer agrees? To be clear, I understand the money hasn't been allocated to any particular purpose yet, but it's still been allocated for the fund. I'm also deeply concerned that there is already a serious imbalance between the English Wikipedia and pretty much every other project (some a lot more than others) and while I don't think many or maybe even any other projects agree with the KEF, effectively we're demanding that the English wikipedia alone is able to dictate where money is not spent which is a major WTF. I'd also note that while the general idea may be laudable, it's actually a lot more complicated than that. I've looked at some of the projects and while they may not directly ensure project improvements, they may in the long term do so. It's well known that there is extensive systemic bias in the English Wikipedia and all projects are affected by this in varying ways. Improving access to education etc in places where it is limited increases the chances we will one day have editors from these areas able to contribute. It's clearly a very long term goal and the actual effect from some minor project is likely to be miniscule, so I don't actually think it's an effective way for the WMF to spend their money and would not encourage it but it also illustrates why a vague statement cannot really limit the WMF. I also consider the issue of insufficient funding for important projects separate issue. The WMF is not short on funds and it's clear that the reason why some important areas aren't getting sufficient attention isn't because they're spending all their money on stuff like KEF. This doesn't mean they should be spending the money on such things but it does mean it is unlikely doing this will achieve anything other than prematurely killing the KEF. Nil Einne (talk) 11:05, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
5. meta:Knowledge Equity Fund clearly explains its relevance to the WMF's core mission: the fund is used to (emphasis added) support knowledge equity by addressing the racial inequities preventing access and participation in free knowledge. The English Wikipedia has struggled to address systemic bias from the beginning. It's a major problem and I'm glad the WMF is using some of its considerable financial resources to try tackling the root causes. You can't fix everything with editathons. – Joe (talk) 14:16, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
6. It is very interesting and unfortunate that the wording of this part of the rfc equates "knowledge equity" with "non-trivial" activities. The self righteousness is not lost on me. I can only reiterate the sentiments on this oppose section. The zero-sum mindset herein is simply unhelpful. I am yet to hear real facts leveled against "the knowledge equity fund" that are worth talking about, other than "we need money to do stuff and we dont like this projetc, therefore stop it and give us the money". --Thuvack | ^talk 17:52, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
7. Izno (talk) 19:58, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
8. I agree with Thryduulf here, although the first sentence is fine the second oversteps. Editors dissatisfaction with current spending shouldn't control specific details.-- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 21:25, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
9. Per Nil Einne. Gamaliel (talk) 23:11, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
10. I don't think having the English Wikipedia community approve all such grants individually is an effective use of either the WMF's or the community's time. The community should help set the objectives of these grants, so they can be filtered appropriately as part of the grant process. isaacl (talk) 23:32, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

    @Isaacl: Here "community" doesn't refer to enwiki, but the broader community - I was thinking through a securepoll vote (not, in my opinion, an unreasonable overhead when we are talking hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars), but other methods as determined by the WMF would also be appropriate. BilledMammal (talk) 03:41, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

    I have the same view regarding the effective use of the Wikimedia community's time. isaacl (talk) 04:00, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

    Ideally we shouldn't need to spend time on things like this, but unfortunately the WMF has demonstrated that they can't be trusted to act without oversight, through things like KEF and through other grants like POSTCARD which I discuss below (supporting Youtube and Instagram influencers). Personally I think the overhead can be kept to a minimal, such as by broad requests for approval (for example, rather than having voted on every grant proposed under the KEF, the community votes on the KEF itself), but reasonable minds may differ. BilledMammal (talk) 04:09, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

    It would be more effective to influence the setting of objectives and engage with the review process as necessary. isaacl (talk) 04:15, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

    It would be, and my hope is that we will eventually be able to do so such as through initiatives like putting individuals who share the communities views on these grants on the Board, but that is a long term project and this is an issue that I believe needs to be addressed in the here and now. BilledMammal (talk) 04:34, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

11. While I suspect this will find some support, after some thought I find myself in the oppose column -- and for reasons not directly connected to the KEF.
    First, some background: This proposal began as a proposal to hold fundraising hostage unless the English Wikipedia got line-item veto power over all of the WMF's finances. That's been toned down quite a lot, but I can't get over the pervasive sense of English Wikipedia supremacy/exceptionalism running through all of the discussions up to this point. We are already the largest and most powerful of the projects. We already numerically dwarf everyone else. We already have most of our users in the richest countries on the planet. The idea that we deserve total financial power over the entire rest of the Wikimedia universe is shocking, and while that's not being proposed here, knowing that was the goal means I can't help but carry forward some skepticism here.
    I can fully appreciate that the idea of funding projects "unrelated" to Wikimedia projects is going to unite many people with a range of valid criticisms about how the WMF spends its money (i.e. "X feature or Y bug has been missing/broken for ages, but you're funding this?"). But the target of criticism here is something where the feedback has already led to a decision not to fund it again. What we're doing is deciding whether to adopt a general principle about "unrelated" projects using the KEF as an example, but never actually defining "unrelated". Others above have tried to explain the extent to which calling this "unrelated" is misleading. Wugapodes gives some good examples of other "unrelated" (but not actually unrelated) potential grantees. I'd add research into wikis in general, work on OpenStreetMap, research into linked data practices, funding for archives to digitize sources, and other kinds of projects that help us indirectly. And it's in that context that the KEF is indeed related. It's just not an edit-a-thon or Wikipedian-in-Residence. TL;DR - This might look like a referendum on the KEF, but it's actually a broadly worded principle with unclear implications. Given the background of these proposals, I have no reason not to think "unrelated" won't be treated as broadly as possible. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 00:49, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
12. Per Thryduulf; that bit ought to originate from meta (if it's a good idea in the first place) and seems entitled coming from one wiki. In addition, Wugapodes brings up good concerns about wording. —Danre98^{(talk^contribs)} 03:08, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
13. Agree with the concerns raised above. Furthermore, even if the proposed method wasn't worded as vaguely as it is, handling individual grants through community vote seems an inherently poor idea, an inherent mismatch with our slow and fuzzy consensus system. CMD (talk) 03:17, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
14. Per others. While I agree with the first sentence, the second feels like we're overstepping a bit. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 06:32, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
15. Per Rhododendrites above, and per Folly Mox and Wugapodes in the discussion section below. While the proposal's goals are understandable, the vague wording makes it impractical to actually enforce, the proposal would give enwp a disproportionate amount of power over other wikis, and I'm not convinced that a single-wiki RfC has the scope to enforce this change regardless. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 15:59, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
16. Not a good idea at all. And if this was a good idea, a "non-binding resolution" is not the way to go about it. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:44, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
17. This is far beyond our purview. I can envisage a speculative (if highly unlikely) scenario in which this project were so underfunded with regard to basic needs, relative to the amount of funds raised in relation to en.Wikipedia and donor intent that the en.Wikipedia community might need to make some noise to see more commitment to en.Wikipedia in the WMFs budget. But bluntly, we don't live in that reality or anything remotely like it. This project's needs are more than substantially enough met to justify our attempting to beackseat drive for the fiduciaries and professionals at the WMF on decisions that are well withing their legal and institutional discretion. A more generally worded appeal for a higher level of consultation/seeking feedback from the community might be something I can get behind, but this proposal (especially considering how it arose) is just presumptuous and way beyond the division of labour and authority as relates to WMF and movement finances. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 21:45, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
18. we request that prior to making non-trivial grants that a reasonable individual could consider unrelated to supporting Wikimedia Projects that the Foundation seeks approval from the community. This is too vague to support. What is non-trivial? What counts as "approval" and how would it be solicited? Which community do you mean, as there are many of them beyond English Wikipedia? The WMF already tries to get community approval, but globally from all Wikimedians via Meta. The disconnect is that most editors don't show up to Meta and participate in grant reviews, but that work does in fact happen. I agree the WMF should work on encouraging more on-wiki connection between the grant review (which is actually conducted by volunteer committees in many cases, btw) and the editing communities, but this is not a clear enough proposed solution to take action on. Steven Walling • talk 15:31, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

    @Steven Walling: You said "too vague to support." What specific definitions of the terms "non-trivial," "approval," and "community" would cause you to support the proposal? Levivich (talk) 16:02, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

    This isn't my proposal so not really incumbent on me to fix it. It seems implied that the proposal actually means "The WMF should run a straw poll !vote on the Village Pump every time before they want to make a grant over [insert whatever arbitrary $ amount qualifies as non-trivial]". Really unclear if that's specifically what is meant though. In definition this vague, technically speaking the WMF already fulfills the requirements, because the entire grantmaking process on Meta is done transparently and mostly via volunteer committees. Steven Walling • talk 02:06, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

19. If this proposal was only the first sentence – a reminder to spend money more wisely and prioritize the Wikimedia Community, in tandem with proposal 3 which I supported – I would certainly get behind that, but a targeted shot across the bow against the Knowledge Equity Fund, which I broadly agree with and would argue is quite valuable and important, is not something I can get behind. Curbon7 (talk) 19:20, 7 October 2023 (UTC)
20. Rhododendrites brings up good points about how this seems to value too much authority over all Wikimedia projects with the English Wikipedia. As noted elsewhere, if there is a place for that authority, it's at meta with the global community. I also think WMF's support for groups outside the project is important – we need places to get our information from in the first place – and I can't shake the feeling this is a step towards stopping that. RunningTiger123 (talk) 03:03, 8 October 2023 (UTC)
21. Rhododendrites and RT put it well. The proposal is poorly worded, misrepresents a particular community-overseen grant pool, asks to cancel that grant pool and for an impossibly vague en:wp veto over future grants, and misuses the trope of donor intent. It also implausibly suggests that grants earmarked during a year of surplus and amounting to under 1% of the WMF's program budget, are somehow preventing it from addressing unspecified "internal deficiencies". There are valid + uncontroversial points to be made for the Foundation to better align its prioritize with community needs... but this does not make any of those points, instead proposing to make a dubious statement on behalf of the whole community. No, thank you. – SJ + 04:21, 8 October 2023 (UTC)
22. The original proposal is waaay to broad for me to support in any sensible fashion. The community has absolutely no remit in deciding to veto funding based on what is relevant to the movement (with enough wikilawyering, we would probably have consider recent funding for projects like Wikidata and WikiLamda (or allocation of money for Wikimania 2023) to have not directly support the movement and could have labelled them as mission creep). That being said, I would Support @Novem Linguae's rewording since it is short and succint and gets the point across without resorting to insinuations/effectively codifying a veto power for the en.wikipedia community and assumption of bad faith on the part of the Foundation. -- Sohom (talk) 12:51, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

    @Sohom Datta Judging by the content of your comment and your reference to Novem Linguae's rewording, I suspect you meant to oppose the proposal below this one, i.e. "Grants to organizations unrelated to supporting Wikimedia Projects (Community Response)". (Feel free to delete this comment either way.) Regards, Andreas JN466 16:24, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

    @Jayen466 Thanks moved :) Sohom (talk) 01:54, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

23. Per Rhododendrites and Joe. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:21, 16 October 2023 (UTC)
24. The purpose of WMF, as mandated by the founding documents, is the support of free knowledge. Maintaining Wikipedia is just one method to do so. Giving to other organizations working in the field of free knowledge is supported by this purpose. --h-stt !? 15:18, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
25. As others have said, the second sentence goes too far. I also agree with others that the Knowledge Equity Fund is not obviously unrelated to Wikipedia's mission; we should instead push for greater transparency around the KEF. Suriname0 (talk) 22:24, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
26. Largely per Rhododendrites. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:11, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

Grants to organizations unrelated to supporting Wikimedia Projects (Discussion)

So I guess my issue with this text is that the WMF does consult with the community about disbursement of Knowledge Equity Grants. See meta:Knowledge Equity Fund#The Knowledge Equity Fund Committee, which lists five volunteers alongside the six staffers.

It's widely known that the Knowledge Equity Fund is pretty unpopular, and no one seems to have indicated it will recur after the third year of disbursements, which I guess we'll hear about on Friday. Someone on wikimedia-l or some other email thread compared these grants to basic research, like laying the groundwork for a more successful "free knowledge movement", which was a minority view but makes sense.

The thing I suppose rubs me wrongest is that the goal here seems to be to stop giving these planned grants to marginalised groups, and spend it instead on English Wikipedia, the rich white dude of the Wikimedia Party Palace. Yes, that's not stated explicitly, but Resolution 3: Here's How to Spend Money on Us immediately follows. We don't not need Foundation money for staff to maintain technical debt, fix bugs, talk to us, etc., but it just feels... kinda gross? Please note this is a comment, not an oppose. Folly Mox (talk) 03:22, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Folly Mox, I think you hit the nail on the head with this comment. This proposal feels....entitled. Risker (talk) 07:29, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

It is reasonable that many in the community feel entitled to see WMF budget used to support Wikimedia projects (not us, which sounds like anyone here is expecting to see a penny). Especially since that is what all fundraising messaging strongly implies. On seeing Wikimedia projects as the rich white dude... I couldn't disagree more. Some of us still see Wikimedia projects as a humanist mission that deserves full focus from the Foundation that was established to guarantee its continuity. MarioGom (talk) 17:48, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

The WMF should be spending its money on improving WMF projects for readers, and on helping editors to make such improvements. No one suggests limiting the spending to wikipedias, or to English-language projects. (Spending on Chinese Wiktionary is fine, and probably doesn't benefit many rich white dudes.) Giving money to some external body to spend should require evidence that it will benefit WMF projects more than spending that money directly. Certes (talk) 18:47, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

I think that's an important distinction. The WMF is certainly not "The English Wikipedia Foundation", and we of course must remember that. If WMF spends funds on, for example, helping a project in a less common language recruit editors and get off the ground, that is a totally valid use of those funds, because it is spent in direct support of the Wikimedia mission. But WMF is the Wikimedia Foundation, not the Fix-Everything-Everywhere Foundation. So it is reasonable to expect that when WMF spends its funds, it will be able to directly answer the question "What direct benefit is this expenditure expected to have toward the Wikimedia projects?". That doesn't have to be spent directly on the projects—if, for example, the WMF were to help start up a journal willing to do peer review and publication for articles in areas that are traditionally underrepresented in academic publications, that is of direct value to the Wikimedia projects by expanding the range of things we have enough high quality source material to write about, where before that we wouldn't. But it is then possible to say "Well, here's how this benefits Wikimedia." On the other hand, it seems that many of the things WMF is currently doing are in the realm of "That's a nice thing to do—but it seems out of scope for us to be doing it." Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 19:50, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

There seems to be a dichotomy between Wikimedia Projects and external orgs that I think misunderstands the relationship between our projects and the wider free knowledge movement. Creative Commons and the Internet Archive are external organizations which are mission aligned, and their success is directly relevant to the success of our projects. If they asked us for a grant would we tell them to kick bricks because it doesn't benefit our projects? A more specific example, I spent some time last year working with Cornell's copyright information center on a grant proposal to increase their staffing so that they could resume and increase their outreach work which our CCI group had found valuable but which had been cut due to university budgetary restrictions (it fell through in the planning stage, unfortunately). Would this resolution have prevented that kind of support for mission-aligned organizations? It wouldn't have been spent "on the projects", but the benefit of being a "good neighbor" and supporting groups who share our values and support our goals has knock-on effects that shouldn't be summarily dismissed. — Wug·a·po·des 00:19, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

@Wugapodes: This purpose of this proposal isn't to stop grants going to entities that a reasonable individual could consider unrelated to supporting Wikimedia Projects; it's to give the broader community oversight of the process, because things like the KEF and other grants like POSTCARD, which are intended to support (I am not making this up) Instragram and Youtube influencers have shown that we cannot trust the judgement of the WMF in this matter.

If the WMF wanted to give $500,000 to Internet Archive or a similar project then I have no doubt that the community would approve it, because there is no possible reputational damage from such a grant and because IA is critical to our mission - it is essential to allow us to comply with WP:V. Indeed, I would argue that it is related to supporting Wikimedia projects, but perhaps a reasonable argument can be made as to why it is not. BilledMammal (talk) 03:54, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

After your response I'm less clear on what's being proposed. You keep using really vague words like "broader community" and "oversight" which on the surface sound agreeable but are being used to mask what seem to be more controversial positions. The "broader community" is Meta, it's the global community comprising participants of all projects. Do you mean everyone or do you mean EnWiki? This community (i.e., the global community) already has broad oversight of these processes including multiple volunteer led, region specific committees and an open comment period on Meta (one of which you linked to). Wanting more participation is reasonable, but I don't think that framing this as if there's no community involvement or participation is fair; not liking a process and a process not existing are different things.

The premise of the resolution isn't even well motivated: the resolution hinges on what individual donors think they're supporting, but neglects the other $30 million dollars in major gifts,enterprise funds, endowment returns, and investment returns which don't come from the small individual donors relied on by the rhetoric. It uses vague language games of "non-trivial" and "reasonable individual" to hide that fact that even among supporters there's no clear understanding of what those mean---some supporters suggest that "non-trivial" would cover every single rapid grant over the $500 minimum. Even your comment here can't firmly reject that this proposal would implicate partnerships with major mission aligned organizations like the Internet Archive I would argue that it is related to supporting Wikimedia projects, but perhaps a reasonable argument can be made as to why it is not. I'm not going to sign my name to something so vague that it can be twisted in whatever way someone wants. — Wug·a·po·des 06:22, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

Do you mean everyone or do you mean EnWiki? Everyone, and I would argue that they don't have broader oversight of the processes; if they did, KEF would not have happened.

vague language games of "non-trivial" and "reasonable individual" For broad statements like this specificity is difficult, and results in situations where the WMF could use technicalities to get around seeking community approval. However, I don't see that as an issue; the very worst that can happen here is the WMF unnecessarily asks for community approval for some grants.

Even your comment here can't firmly reject that this proposal would implicate partnerships with major mission aligned organizations like the Internet Archive I don't discount the possibility that a reasonable argument could be made, but I can't envisage one. BilledMammal (talk) 06:34, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

Everyone so then why is this on EnWiki? Why are the first words of the proposal "The English Wikipedia community"? Has this been translated in to any other languages? Have opinions of any other community been considered? The KEF was half volunteers hailing from English, French, Spanish, Indonesian, and Arabic projects; the current grants structure was was redesigned over nearly a year on the basis of multiple consultations with stakeholders including various project volunteers from across the globe. Why should anyone believe that an RfC held on EnWiki and talking solely about EnWiki accurately reflects global consensus on how communities would like to oversee grants? On what basis are you speaking for the global community?

For broad statements like this specificity is difficult You want greater control and oversight of a $20 million grants budget, but defining the scope of what you want greater control over is too hard of a problem? Indeed, revolution is easy; governing is hard. Are you prepared to accept the increased staff overhead (read: the administrative costs being criticized elsewhere) that comes with managing all those "unnecessar[y]" postings? Too many posting will make it harder to find the important proposals (compare banner blindness); how will you ensure that this glut of "funding for edit-a-thon pizza" requests won't paradoxically lead to less oversight as people tune out? We could say these (and other questions) are for the WMF to figure out, but if you don't trust them to even implement specific requests, why would you trust them to implement vague requests? Plus, that would mean yet more admin overhead spent on interpreting our vague resolutions.

I don't see vagueness as a problem in its own right; I see it as a problem because it belies a lack of strategic direction. The allocation of a $20 million annual grants budget, let alone the $170 million annual budget, shouldn't be decided on the basis of vague value statements. I find it ironic that misappropriation of funds is seen as a problem when the WMF does it, but we're allowed to hand-wave away the specifics of allocating millions of dollars because it's too difficult to figure out. — Wug·a·po·des 22:50, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

Regarding "everyone", I suspect you would find it more objectionable, not less, if the proposal was that grants to organizations unrelated to supporting Wikimedia Projects needed approval from the enwiki community, rather than from the broader community.

defining the scope of what you want greater control over is too hard of a problem It's a difficult problem, but it is one that we could work around, if it was beneficial to do so. It is not; with this being a non-binding resolution we are better served by defining a principle that we can then work with the WMF to implement - and as I said, the worst that can happen is the WMF unnecessarily asks for community approval for some grants.

how will you ensure that this glut of "funding for edit-a-thon pizza" requests won't paradoxically lead to less oversight as people tune out edit-a-thon's are indisputably related to supporting Wikimedia Projects; this proposal isn't asking for the WMF to get our approval on such grants.

I find it ironic that misappropriation of funds is seen as a problem when the WMF does it, but we're allowed to hand-wave away the specifics of allocating millions of dollars because it's too difficult to figure out. We're not going to be allocating them; this resolution doesn't ask for us to decide where they will go. All it asks is that the WMF ensures that the community is onboard with their decisions. BilledMammal (talk) 08:45, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

You didn't answer my question: on what basis are you speaking for the global community? You claim to be speaking for everyone, but when asked for justification on how you represent global opinions you deflect. When the EnWiki centrism of your position is pointed out, you start speaking about the global community again. You see how we keep playing this language game, right? Do you understand why this inability to speak plainly gives me no confidence in the resolution?

And again, you didn't answer my question: are you prepared to accept the increased administrative costs necessary to handle the superfluous postings and consultation work required to manage your vague resolution? If you balk at doing threshold levels of strategic planning, I do not trust that you are prepared for the far more difficult work ahead.

You're right, I got this confused with the other resolution where edit-a-thons would potentially be covered as a "non-trivial grant[] that will result in activity on the English Wikipedia".

We're not going to be allocating them [funds] This is outright false. The resolution explicitly says "We request that the Wikimedia Foundation reappropriates all money remaining in the Knowledge Equity Fund". You're seeking to direct millions right here and right now, and later on ask that they "seek[] approval" for ill-defined categories of future grants. — Wug·a·po·des 18:18, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

I think there has been a miscommunication here. This resolution speaks for the English Wikipedia; if passed the English Wikipedia would be asking that the broader community is consulted on grants to organizations unrelated to supporting Wikimedia Projects. I don't believe there is any enwiki centrism here; we are saying that we are concerned about these grants but we recognize that it isn't our place to decide alone whether they go forward or not; instead, we are asking that the WMF seeks approval for them from the broader community.

This is outright false. Perhaps we are using a different definition of the word allocate; the definition I am using is the act of deciding officially which person, company, area of business, etc. something should be given to. This resolution doesn't ask that we are allowed to decide who will receive funding; instead, it asks that we are allowed to reject funding within a narrow area, to act as gatekeepers. If that isn't the definition you are using can you clarify?

are you prepared to accept the increased administrative costs necessary to handle the superfluous postings and consultation work required to manage your vague resolution I'm not convinced there will be an increased administrative overhead. Some of the grants issued in the past are ones that should be obvious to the WMF would be rejected by the community; even absent this requirement those grants consume administrative capacity. Ideally, the WMF will recognize this and rather than wasting their time, and the communities time, on the grants will instead redirect the administrative capacity to handle the community consultation work. However, even if they don't and administrative costs are increased I believe the net result will be less money spent on the program as a whole due to grants being rejected. So yes, I am prepared to accept it.

If you balk at doing threshold levels of strategic planning, I do not trust that you are prepared for the far more difficult work ahead. I feel I have already replied to your statements about the lack of specificity in the proposal; It's a difficult problem, but it is one that we could work around, if it was beneficial to do so. It is not; with this being a non-binding resolution we are better served by defining a principle that we can then work with the WMF to implement - and as I said, the worst that can happen is the WMF unnecessarily asks for community approval for some grants. BilledMammal (talk) 18:48, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

I can't really support this as currently worded (I do not think that the English Wikipedia in and of itself has the authority to demand that the WMF do a particular thing with already allocated funds), but I will give a "moral support" here. The WMF certainly has been spending too much money on things which do not have a clear connection to the core mission of Wikimedia, and has not generally been willing to give further detailed explanations for "How does this further Wikimedia's goals, and how is this expenditure the best way to achieve that?" beyond platitudes. So, I agree in the spirit of the thing, but this proposal is not the right way to ask for that. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 03:19, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

@Seraphimblade: It's not a demand, but a request - and personally, I would have no issue if the WMF did proceed with the third round, so long as they first secured the broader communities approval through a securepoll vote. BilledMammal (talk) 03:54, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

@Seraphimblade: seconding your point, a proposal to focus on the core mission, with specific examples of what needs clearer focus, would feel constructive. That does not feel like the spirit of this proposal to me, which second-guesses and mischaracterizes a specific effort to counter systemic bias that already involves community input, and at least tried to explain its origins and how it furthers Wikimedia's goals. – SJ + 04:50, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

Small note that the Oppose/Support section titles are potentially a tad confusing. When read at face value, they might suggest you support/oppose the opposite of what you intend. Support for instance, when read as a sentence means: support, giving grants to external organisations, while in reality it means I support the proposal that that we are against giving external organisations grants. This is also a common issue with Survey polls in politics. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:38, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

Many of the topics and concerns raised here were discussed at the open community call hosted by the Knowledge Equity Fund Committee last Friday, October 6. You can find the notes from that call on Meta. These topics include how we can more clearly communicate opportunities for communities to participate in nominating grantees and getting involved, how the Knowledge Equity Fund grantees are connected to the movement and how we can better connect the dots, and how we are measuring the impact of knowledge equity. The Committee will be meeting this week to discuss the suggestions and feedback from the call and will post an update about next steps in the next two weeks.NGunasena (WMF) (talk) 19:42, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

I just posted some next steps and changes that the Knowledge Equity Fund Committee will be taking based on the feedback we heard in the community call, in three distinct areas: Improving communication, Clarifying impact, and Connecting the dots with the movement. This is not a comprehensive list as we're still in discussion, but we wanted to share the changes as we go. NGunasena (WMF) (talk) 20:56, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

• The most important way to address Knowledge Equity also involves "sticking to our knitting": improving our mobile editing interface and mobile apps. Many potential editors only have access to smart phones, not computers. If we really want to boost editing from areas like the Global South, we need to make it easier.

--A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 02:08, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

I think the first thing to address there is WP:THEYCANTHEARYOU. That should have been treated as an emergency level bug from the beginning, and it's well past time to get that fixed. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 04:41, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Seraphimblade, my name is Jazmin (Jaz) and I am the Product Manager for the Mobile Apps team. I very much agree that maintaining on-wiki communication functionality is important and necessary. This is why, over the last two years, we’ve prioritized improvements to make the WP:THEYCANTHEARYOU table more and more green. (e.g., 1, 2, 3), though for some added context, depending on the platform (Android app, iOS app, or Mobile Web) the implementation, or lack thereof, of alerts differs, but steps are being taken to change that.

Specifically on the  issue of IP editors not seeing notifications, we are currently working on it. I can understand that specific mobile communications issues feel a bit slow or quirky (depending on the platform) as compared to others; this is due to several teams working systematically to address anonymous edits through temporary accounts.

In the future, the shift to “temporary accounts” (formerly known as IP Masking) will hide IP addresses from the general public while also allowing people to continue editing without creating actual accounts. Particularly in the apps, users that do not login to a permanent account when attempting to make an edit, will automatically be assigned a temporary account that is based on cookies, not location. On the apps, users with temporary accounts will have the same editing and notifications experience as people that create permanent accounts. This will eliminate the quirks and inconsistencies across platforms, addressing many of the outstanding gaps in mobile notifications. @NKohli (WMF) and @SGrabarczuk (WMF) can share more about this project overall should you have any questions.

Additionally, next week we will make some updates to the cross team on-wiki communication MediaWiki page, which was created to be more inclusive of other language wikis; the refresh will include incorporating updates currently represented on team specific project pages. The app's Community Relations Specialist, @ARamadan-WMF will ping you there once the updates are live so that we can continue the conversation and get your input on whether or not we are going in the right direction.

JTanner (WMF) (talk) 21:07, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Hi @A. B., I am happy to see your passion for improving editing on mobile. My name is Jazmin (Jaz), and I am the Product Manager for the Mobile Apps team. While I collaborate with the team responsible for Mobile Web, I do want to make that distinction, so you can understand the context of my response.

My manager, @MMiller (WMF), shared just a few improvements we are working on for the mobile app experience. What isn’t mentioned there is that we are completely rewriting the editor on iOS to improve the performance.

We have an open meeting coming up Friday if you’d like to have a closer look at our roadmap and share additional ideas to improve the editing experience on the app. If you can’t make the time, no worries, we will record it and provide notes. We also make updates for the Android and iOS app on a monthly basis, which includes sharing early designs and ideas and we welcome your partnership. If ever you have feature ideas or bugs you notice feel free to reach out to @ARamadan-WMF so that we can triage it in our weekly team meeting.

For any Mobile Web ideas that are editing specific feel free to reach out to @PPelberg (WMF) and for more reading features @OVasileva (WMF) is a good person to talk to. JTanner (WMF) (talk) 20:55, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Increased support for internal needs (Community Response)

The English Wikipedia community is concerned that the Wikimedia Foundation has neglected critical areas of the project, and that continued neglect of these areas may endanger the project.
To improve the resilience of the project, we request that money be reallocated to hiring more technical staff, whose role will be to fulfill requests from the community such as those expressed on the Community Wishlist, as well as restoring access to tools such as grapher extension.
To improve knowledge equity we also request that that the Foundation provides funding to assist established editors in accessing the resources they need to improve the encyclopedia, such as by increasing the number of libraries accessible through the Wikipedia Library and by giving micro-grants for the purchase of backlogged items at Resource Request.

Increased support for internal needs (Survey)

Support (Increased support for internal needs)

1. What we need from the WMF most of all is tech support; for them to maintain the website and develop the tools that we need to build the encyclopedia. Unfortunately, this support is often lacking; despite the criticality of New Page Patrol it took a massive lobbying effort to get the WMF to dedicate any resources to it, and it has been six months since we were notified that the graph extension had to be disabled due to security risks, but there has been little progress on restoring it despite its utility. Hopefully the WMF will be willing to take this resolution on board and in its next budget direct a greater proportion of resources towards providing this support. BilledMammal (talk) 01:01, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
2. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:21, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
3. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:27, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
4. Easy support, though I'd encourage removing "established" from "established editors". While accepting this non-binding resolution is several steps removed from actually seeing a change in TWL resources, what would help knowledge equity is actually to lower the requirements to access TWL. Help people get off on the right foot when they're editing rather than assume they'll slog through 500 edits without access to good sourcing. Certainly not enough to cause me to oppose, but I'd like to see that word removed (apologies for not catching it before the proposal went live -- perhaps it's not too late, BilledMammal?). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 01:36, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

   While I understand your concern, I'd prefer to leave "established" in there. Realistically publishers offering resources are going to want to have some idea of the hit rate they are signing up for. I can't see Elsevier, for example, wanting to open ScienceDirect much more widely than they already have. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:47, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

   Then what is the funding going towards? Last I checked, everything in TWL isn't because the WMF paid for it but because someone simply asked the publisher for it. WMF could help close the gap. I cannot imagine the WMF paying to add these resources, as that would lead to all the other publishers saying "wait, we don't have to give it away?" — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 02:01, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

   @Rhododendrites and Espresso Addict: Just jumping in with a quick note that Rhododendrites is correct - we don't pay subscriptions for any of The Wikipedia Library's resources. It would be obscenely expensive given that we serve tens of thousands of users (approaching the entire WMF budget), and as you suggest, paying one publisher would risk resulting in a chain of events where other publishers also demand payment. I'm sympathetic to the idea of lowering access requirements, I'd love for more editors to be able to use the library. Unfortunately this would require renegotiating all our agreements, which is a lot of work. Input is welcome on this topic at T314357. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 10:06, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

   Thanks for the response, Samwalton9 (WMF). I read the interesting Phab link but it won't let me comment. I think it would be more realistic for the Foundation to pay for access for a small group of highly active named editors, perhaps for a specific type of task, which would make it fall more under the Wikipedian-in-Residence type of relationship. On the access requirements, fwiw, I have chatted to several non-editors about the library resources as a recruitment ploy and non-editors are generally interested until I mention the access requirements, which seem unapproachably steep to them. Espresso Addict (talk) 21:44, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

5. If they say they're raising money to support and improve the encyclopedia, they should do so. Intothatdarkness 01:52, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
6. Frostly (talk) 02:02, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
7. I've said as much before and I think leveraging existing resources like the legal fees assistance program and Rapid Grants would be an efficient way to make progress on this in parallel with increasing Wikipedia Library holdings. — Wug·a·po·des 02:30, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
8. Community Wishlist items that consistently receive high support are continually being overlooked due to currently insufficient funding for technical staff. Reallocating funds from such editing grants would arguably enable editors to more efficiently pursue these grants' aim of increased article coverage BluePenguin18 🐧 ( 💬 ) 02:48, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
9. "Hire more devs" is a no-brainer. The microgrants sound like an interesting idea as well, and the Wikipedia Library is already amazing. But yeah, hire more devs. Help us align with our shared goals. Folly Mox (talk) 03:02, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
10. This is what people are donating for. AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:12, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
11. The WMF has more than enough money to do these things, but it has inexplicably decided to spend a large sum of this money on things that do not help Wikipedia and its sister projects. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 03:14, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
12. Mainly due to the graph extension being disabled and the lack of work going towards fixing it. It's like a ghost haunting the talk pages of most Wikipedia articles. I've noticed a concerning amount of decay when it comes to tech support, and if additional funding will help then I'm all for it. Deauthorized. ^(talk) 03:23, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
13. While I'm a little worried about monkey paw effects here, that doesn't diminish my support per BilledMammal. Barkeep49 (talk) 03:39, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

    Had to look up The Monkey's Paw... hope that's the reference :) ~ ToBeFree (talk) 21:16, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

14. —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 03:46, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
15. In agreement with Barkeep49, with more comments to follow. Best, KevinL (aka L235 · t · c) 04:16, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
16. Common sense. There have been several technical issues at NPP that we have had to beg and grovel for the WMF to fix. More resources towards technical development is self-evident. Curbon7 (talk) 04:17, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
17. Pecopteris (talk) 04:17, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
18. While I understand that the Foundation has had some growing pains in the tech department, that is no excuse to not continue to put effort into our software. If that requires some radical changes, so be it, but we need more effort going into our backend. That means more money. There are far too many tech issues that have lingered for years. CaptainEek ^{Edits Ho Cap'n!}⚓ 05:03, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
19. 100%. Don't know if this is going to move the needle but it couldn't hurt. Nardog (talk) 05:08, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
20. Sandizer (talk) 05:12, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
21. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:48, 3 October 2023 (UTC) per my comments in previous discussions, wasting money on KEF (support for non-Wikimedia-related initiatives) needs to be stopped now. Instead, we have our own needs (software, database suscriptions, outreach) that should be supported. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:48, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
22. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 05:51, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
23. Tech support and maintenance, and development of features requested by editors is the minimum that is expected from the WMF. Ciridae (talk) 06:00, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
24. JML1148 ^{(talk | contribs)} 06:23, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
25. The implementation of wishlist proposals every year leave out a lot to be desired. – SD0001 (talk) 08:20, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
26. Absolutely. Stifle (talk) 10:14, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
27. I'm not generally as critical of the WMF as many but this is the one areas I agree with the critics. The WMF has been slack in supporting the communities needs. I appreciate that it doesn't always go well since some features have been implemented on request then disliked and abandoned, and that there are a lot of communities with differing needs to support, but they can and should do better. Nil Einne (talk) 11:23, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
28. Clearly. Edward-Woodrow • talk 12:22, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
29. Micro-grants for old Resource Requests seems like a pretty good idea. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 13:07, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
30. This is what the WMF was created for. Certes (talk) 14:27, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
31. The Wikimedia Community, and not the Wikimedia Foundation, governs the Wikimedia Movement. When donors give money to Wikipedia, they give it to the Wikimedia Community and not the Wikimedia Foundation. It is essential that money go to support the Wikimedia Community, its culture, and its values. With increasing regularity and forcefulness, the values and ethics of the Wikimedia Foundation are contrary to those of the Wikimedia Community. Bluerasberry (talk) 14:25, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
32. It's the primary mission of the movement, after all. The execution should match the sales pitch. Many of the other things they do are, I feel, for laudable goals, but fundraising shouldn't be pretextual in this way. There are many projects related to the core mission that receive anemic funding. The core mission is the reason the WMF exists. CoffeeCrumbs (talk) 15:14, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
33. The Night Watch (talk) 15:22, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
34. WMF has consistently shown that it is willing to spend any amount of money needed for fundraising, and the fun parties that are involved with that, and very little on actual needed functions. The leadership has been a disgrace for years, and is part of the reason I don't spend more time here. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 16:46, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
35. WMF has been neglecting its core function for too long. Levivich (talk) 17:05, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
36. Aasim - Herrscher of Wikis ❄️ 20:37, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
37. Support. I particularly like the idea of widening the scope of the Wikipedia Library. I think this is a resource which so many editors use and could do with additional investment. Willbb234 20:43, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
38. There shouldn't be long outstanding issues while the WMF remains well funded. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 21:34, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
39. Yes, the foundation should always have its primary mission in mind. However, I support with the nuance that the foundation has hired support staff, of which some are necessary, and that whilst micro grants for resource requests are a good idea, the linked page (at least) is only on enwiki which is a negative. —Danre98^{(talk^contribs)} 03:23, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
40. Yes. —siroχo 03:37, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
41. One of the WMF's primary founding purposes was to provide technical services and software development for the Wikimedia projects. If not its top priority, that should be very close to it. We have far too often seen highly desired community requests go either entirely unanswered or get a "We don't have the resources right now" for years on end, while we see tons of resources flowing out in dozens of other directions. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 04:43, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
42. Support, if for no other reason than this is what donors expect their money to be spent on. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 07:50, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
43. I think this is where we're on firmest ground, because we're asking for something that we need rather than trying to dictate to the WMF. It really is astonishing how little of the WMF's enormous budget goes to software. We haven't been able to use mw:Extension:Graph for six months, apparently because it was unmaintained for years before that. NPP had to beg for fixes to Page Curation, also unmaintained for years, and after three months of work all the team assigned to it could manage to do is switch to a more modern backend with no significant changes to the functionality (to be clear I'm not criticising the team; they're clearly under-resourced). We can't reliably talk to editors on mobile. And that's with volunteer developers doing a great deal of the heavy lifting. – Joe (talk) 08:24, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
44. Support This is the core reason for the WMF to exist --In actu (Guerillero) ^{Parlez Moi} 11:10, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
45. Technical maintenance is important and is outside the ability of the community to perform. I think conveying to the WMF that we'd like to see more investment in that area could be productive. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 16:05, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
46. We have some of the most-obsessive volunteers and they give the world their labor for free. Least we could do is ensure truth in advertising by supporting those editors. Chris Troutman (talk) 20:11, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
47. Now this one I can get behind. My support is a little on the weaker side, because I recognize the complexities involved in the financing of the Wikimedia movement and institutional ecosystem, with it's many stakeholders and I broadly respect the discretion of the WMF as pertains to addressing and balancing the competing needs. That said, the specific areas highlighted by this proposal are known current weaknesses in our technical infrastructure (even if vaguely defined here). And while I have often felt the scrutiny the WMF faces from some of it's more consistent critics as regards it's management of movement resources has strayed into the presumptuous (to say nothing of those that are sometimes histrionic, speculative, unrealistic, or simply wildly outside the purview of those without the relevant fiduciary or professional duties), I do think that these would-be muckrakers have succeeded in at least one respect: highlighting just how sizeable a largess the WMF has managed to accrue for the movement through effective fundraising. While I do not believe it is this community's role to set terms on how those funds are distributed (outside of a speculative existential crises from underfunding), I do not see the harm in pointing out to the WMF that we have a few areas where funding of technical solutions would be especially helpful at this moment in time, and that there is an argument to be made, based on donor intent, that the large role that en.Wikipedia plays in generating funds for the movement as a whole arguably militates for plugging these needs sooner, rather than later, at least when the reserve financing is as flush as apparently they currently are. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 22:01, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
48. Support. I am not so concerned with the Wikipedia Library and WP:RX part as this is the first I'm hearing of problems in those areas. I am very supportive of the Community Wishlist and community software part of this RFC though. Community software seems like an area that has historically been neglected, with some small progress made recently, but still with much work to do. –Novem Linguae (talk) 08:00, 5 October 2023 (UTC)
49. Support. Andreas JN466 18:19, 5 October 2023 (UTC)
50. Support: with the amount of money the WMF have, the technology we have should be cutting edge. The graph extension is a prime example of something that should have been fixed overnight. The Wishlist simply doesn't work. The problem is not just the broken things and the missing functionality. I don't think many experienced volunteers understand just how unusable this website is to newcomers. For one thing, website design has advanced since 2001 when writing in lightweight markup language was expected. For another, experienced volunteers accrue all sorts of gadgets and js code to make simple tasks that are otherwise very complicated or make readable what is completely unreadable on the base site. — Bilorv (talk) 21:16, 6 October 2023 (UTC)
51. Support This year the Foundation did the annual planning in public with community input for the first time in years. That was a step in the right direction, and many of the things they committed to are explicitly with the editing community in mind. There is still more that could be done to put sufficient staff attention on community needs however, and be responsive/agile when it comes to planning and resourcing. Steven Walling • talk 02:10, 7 October 2023 (UTC)
52. Jenks24 (talk) 17:25, 7 October 2023 (UTC)
53. Support it's ridiculous that the foundation has apparently enough money to donate to other organizations, while not enough to perform basic software maintenance to support its core mission --Ita140188 (talk) 14:00, 9 October 2023 (UTC)
54. Support – Most people who donate I've talked to IRL have the impression that "it's to keep the servers running". I think using a larger portion of funds towards tech support is necessary or should at least be an option to allocate your donation to. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 20:33, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
55. Support, very much needed. Crossroads ^-talk- 21:59, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
56. Support DFlhb (talk) 05:04, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
57. Support Janhrach (talk) 17:00, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
58. Support This will also stop deceiving donors who do so to support Wikipedia. It would have been better to include / implicitly includes "shift funds from other less related areas, not increase total expenditures." North8000 (talk) 19:34, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
59. Support The WMFs number one job - really the only reason it needs to exist - is technical and it seems to always forget that in favor of "flashier" initiatives. The impact of more technical work dwarfs any other uses of donor money. Galobtter (talk) 22:51, 13 October 2023 (UTC)
60. Support We could do so much more. (comment from involved editor) — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 11:48, 14 October 2023 (UTC)
61. Support The WMF needs to provide far more support to the community, and there are almost zero blockers preventing it, or at least a request for it from us. Justarandomamerican (talk) Have a good day! 21:11, 14 October 2023 (UTC)
62. Support. This should be the top priority of the WMF. I would suggest finding ways to align C-level executives with this core mission, rather than aligning Wikimedia projects with whatever makes good high profile resumes in the US NGO scene. MarioGom (talk) 08:00, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
63. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 20:58, 15 October 2023 (UTC)
64. Tol (talk | contribs) @ 14:02, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
65. Support. In particular, improve the mobile interface and apps so less affluent editors can more easily add content. Many have mobile devices but no desktop computer. Also see my 23 October TWL suggestion in the discussion section below. --A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 02:37, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
66. Support. Obviously. Stop wasting $$$ on "flashy" projects in lieu of increased support for the community, that's what people give their money for. --Randykitty (talk) 13:26, 24 October 2023 (UTC)
67. Support Organization failure when everything is for the "flash" and "bangs" instead of taking care of the core values. We didn't need too much work. WMF is already bloated with millions of dollars they have received - we didn't need to bloat it even more. Any IT startup tech having money/resources WMF got today can easily fix any tech issues around here - but WMF can't. ✠ SunDawn ✠ (contact) 03:10, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
68. Support Killarnee (talk) 13:08, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
69. Support Johnbod (talk) 19:09, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
70. Support I know of at least one privacy-impacting security flaw which is still not fixed because we have to balance what we are physically able to contribute our time to, and what is within the scope of the project we commit to. What else needs to be said? Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 23:55, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
71. Conditional Support. I agree with Rhododendrites that the word "established" should be removed from "established editors". I also think mention of the Graph extension should be removed, as there were good reasons it was disabled and it distracts from our overall point to bring it up here. Nosferattus (talk) 01:52, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
72. WP:TCHY creates a tremendous workload for volunteer editors and has frustrated me for a long time. — SamX [talk · contribs] 08:15, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
73. Support - we need the resources of the Wikimedia foundation to go directly into wikimedia websites. The ever growing funding requirement that is essentially unconnected from the actual task of running the websites is unacceptable tompagenet (talk) 13:19, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
74. Sandstein 12:45, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
75. J947 † ^edits 01:08, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
76. No editor should be out of pocket because they improve Wikipedia.--Wehwalt (talk) 13:49, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
77. Support That literally should be the primary goal of the WMF. ChaotıċEnby(t · c) 02:43, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
78. jp×g🗯️ 10:32, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Oppose (Increased support for internal needs)

1. Oppose Until the foundation manages to get its overall spending levels under control this is a bad idea.©Geni (talk) 20:28, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
2. Oppose Should the WMF devote more effort to community requests? Sure! But I've been here nearly two decades and I've never used grapher extension. And tools I use every day you've probably never used. We're not all going to agree on what is a critical request, so this is pretty pointless. Gamaliel (talk) 23:15, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
3. Oppose including Graph extension Solely on the grounds of including/dragging the the Graph extension into this topic. The Graph extension was disabled due to issues wrt to vulnerabilities with upstream libraries. This is not something that the WMF can do something about. While the WMF could theoretically somehow commit to maintaining our entire upstream software stack, this is prohibitively expensive to the point that even Google and Microsoft do not tend to do this. The approach that the Wikimedia Foundation is currently taking is that of sandboxing libraries is notoriously hard to do correctly, as evidenced by the gazillions of bugs in Microsoft and Google products that use client-side sandboxing (such as research.google.com and Visual Studio Code) which are still being found and exploited. I think the tardiness in this case, is warranted. Support otherwise. -- Sohom (talk) 14:05, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

   This is because the extension was not updated for several years. All we need is to transition to the newest software versions as all established organizations do regularly Ita140188 (talk) 14:01, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

   @Ita140188 All we need is to transition to the newest software versions it is significantly harder to do that than you think, especially in the context of the aging technical debt surrounding the usage of MediaWiki. Porting the Graph extension over to Vega 3,4 or 5 (which I agree would also solve the problem) is a non-trivial task that includes more than just updating version numbers but also making sure that wikitext written for the graph tag using the previous version of the library still works on the newer version even though the abstractions used by the libraries might have radically changed, not to mention that in-case this compatibility is not possible, editors will have to manually check and update each and every instance of the usage of graph tags. Sohom (talk) 05:49, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

   I agree, and that's the point. The lack of investment over many years created this technical debt, which reinforces the case for having more resources allocated to this. We cannot and we should not assume that old versions of software will work forever and no bugs will be ever found. The only way to have functioning software today is to constantly update it, and that takes resources. Ita140188 (talk) 07:38, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

4. Mild oppose as worded. While I agree with the overall sentiment, "To improve knowledge equity [...] assist established editors" sounds like a contradiction in terms. Reinforcing the existing community might just consolidate the status quo.

   I tend to agree with the three premises I see in this statement, namely that:

   • the most direct way for Wikimedia to improve knowledge equity is to grow and improve our freely licensed projects (more diverse works for a more diverse audience);
   • our contributor base, while insufficiently diverse, is more diverse than the average media landscape, therefore making the existing contributor base more effective will be a net positive for the world;
   • the most direct way to make contributors more effective is to look at the existing community and provide them more of the tools they need.

   However, those premises are not universally accepted or verifiable. Sure, if you try to improve a specific article like Deforestation in Nigeria you're going to conclude that it's far more effective to message its contributors and give them a few hundred dollars in resources to make further work easier, compared to giving 20 k$ to someone seemingly unaware of the existence of the article. Once you try to do the same across a broader topic like Nigeria or deforestation globally, if you just help the existing contributors it's likely they'll keep doing more of the same. So we need to at least keep an eye on some of our broader goals, such as verifiability, which involve all of our users, including unregistered users.

   Which brings me to the specific suggestion included in the proposal. The Wikipedia Library might as well increase inequality, in that it reinforces a relatively narrow base of contributors and contributions based on established/exclusive sources (such as USA-centric publishers or prestige-based research), further amplifying structural bias. The alternative is to invest in more inclusive sources and source providers, which would help all our users get in touch with more diverse sources. An unregistered user who wants to verify a claim from a reference has a much easier job when a link to open access version is provided, or when a preview or digital loan from the Internet Archive is linked. Moreover, such open or semi-open resources help the production of secondary sources by helping library users, translators, researchers, authors, educators. It's relatively easy and low-risk for us to help, as it takes relatively low effort new initiatives or existing initiatives like Invest in Open Infrastructure.

   Nemo 11:01, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

   This argument is incompatible with WP:PAYWALL Mach61 (talk) 17:54, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

   No it's not. Nemo 17:45, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Increased support for internal needs (Discussion)

• I'm not going to read any of these long-worded points, I started to but am guessing that they (Edit: now have read many of them) ...all comes down to WMF has control of the money gained from touting Wikipedia so of course they owe us anything we want and they should also include the community in almost everything they do. Why not? And more power to WMF in everything. I hope some wonderful billionaires will be giving them (and, in turn, some trickle down to Wikipedia please) $100 million at a pop. Bill Gates, donate a 100 million, or 200, give them a lot, and kindly stipulate that 1/3 of that should go to the projects conceived of and organized by Wikipedia editors. Every year someone else should step up and do this. Taylor Swift, a million would go a long way, and Elon, how about funding Commons to the hilt, create the creation. By the way, VivaWikiVegas could use a few million in cash/and or MGM housing donations to throw the bash of the century for Wikipedia's 25th birthday. As for Editor Expeditions...

For just one of a thousand examples, this is something I literally thought of yesterday. WMF Wikipedia coffers (which should be overflowing with kindness) can send teams of Editor Expeditions out in the field. An individual or a group, say an art editor, a technology editor, a city-specific subject-expert, a few fill-in-the-blank editors, sent or a week or two as individuals or as a team to a city, a nation, to the citadels of a scientific field, to work on article sources, photographs for Commons, meeting with local officials to promote Wikipedia etc. Participation of the local community with the Wikipedia community to give options for growth. A team would have a back-up crew working with them daily, maybe the people who will be leading the next on-site expedition.

Things like that. Randy Kryn (talk) 03:03, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

• Randy, I admire your unselfconsciousness. In your first sentence you call others' contributions "long-worded points" and decline to read them, and then you've written all this.—S Marshall T/C 08:49, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, I learned at my father's knee. In my above comment I was referring to the many varied questions and proposals on this page and the others put up yesterday. Brevity might do all of us a favor, but in this case I've added my comments concerning all of them in one place. Randy Kryn (talk) 14:05, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

• @Deauthorized: On graph extension. The extension is disabled, but there is no lack of attention from the developers. From phab:T334940, the amount of work to be done to fix the extension is... non-trivial, with no direct path to upgrade the underlying engine to the latest version. Just that the conversation isn't happening here, it doesn't mean there is a lack of work. – robertsky (talk) 03:36, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  Also an active discussion at mw:Extension talk:Graph/Plans. – robertsky (talk) 03:40, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Fixed link; the page is on MediaWiki-wiki. Remagoxer (talk) 04:31, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

thanks for the catch! – robertsky (talk) 06:03, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Does anyone understand what the plan actually is? If so, what can editors do to help fix broken graphs which presumably need to be edited somehow, e.g., to make them compatible with Vega 5? This is a good example of something that fell apart when a vulnerability was discovered, because there were no staff resources devoted to fixing emergent faults. That does indeed seem like a money allocation deficiency to me. Sandizer (talk) 09:53, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Realistically a fix will involve a bot any anyone who can code that can work out what the shift from Vega 2 to 5 involves. Not likely to be something general editors can help with much.©Geni (talk) 22:37, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

I guess so, but it's hard to confirm. After this and that, I still really don't have a handle on what needs to be done at all. Sandizer (talk) 16:22, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

Does anyone understand what the plan actually is? If so, what can editors do to help fix broken graphs which presumably need to be edited somehow, e.g., to make them compatible with Vega 5?

Hi @Sandizer, great question. The plan is to re-enable the Graph Extension in a sandboxed iFrame with a restrictive content security policy. Additionally, we will make the Graph Extension compatible with Vega 5 so that, going forward, all new graphs will benefit from Vega 5's security, accessibility, and syntax improvements. We will also equip volunteers with code and processes that will ease the transition from Vega 2 to Vega 5 when the time for this transition comes.

This is a plan we've converged on through months of conversations with a network of volunteers. Within the next week, you can expect to see a roadmap that details the specific steps we – volunteers and staff – will need to take to make the above happen.

In the meantime, we appreciate how proactive you are, and have been, about asking what you [and other volunteers] can do to help fix the broken graphs.

I recognize that it is likely frustrating to be willing and ready to lend help and for it to not be clear how to do so. I’m naming this potential frustration because it’s important to me that you know it’s something we’re thinking about as we try to strike a balance between re-enabling the extension as quickly as possible while doing so in a way that keeps Wikipedias as a whole safe and secure.

And hi, I'm Peter Pelberg 👋🏼  I work as the product manager on the Editing Team. I'm also responsible for safely and securely restoring access to the information and capabilities disabling the Graph Extension has left people without.

cc @Levivich, @Deauthorized, @Joe, @Bilorv, @Sohom, and @Robertsky. Y'all mentioned the Graph Extension which led me to think you might value knowing when you can expect to see a detailed roadmap from us for how we're proposing to restore it. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 18:30, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

@PPelberg (WMF) Thanks for clarifying :) -- Sohom (talk) 18:41, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

@Sohom. You bet. If any new questions/ideas/concerns emerge as you're thinking about the Graph Extension, please ping me! PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 18:43, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

It is beyond ridiculous that this problem was allowed to occur and with each passing day it damages Wikipedia's reputation to editors and readers. This is not to criticise the employees working on the issue, but the misallocation of WMF funds that led functionality like the Graph Extension to be neglected for years. The WMF is rolling in money but not spending enough of it on maintaining tech, modernising interfaces, community wishes and so forth. — Bilorv (talk) 19:30, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for the response. I hope that this issue is corrected soon. Deauthorized. ^(talk) 00:39, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

Update: we've published the roadmap for re-enabling the Graph Extension and would value anyone with knowledge of/experience with the extension sharing what you think about it on the project talk page. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 23:29, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

@PPelberg (WMF): the roadmap seems ok. 2 points in mind, 1. I think it is also best to involve those who hold the templateeditor user rights and/or actively working on WP:TFD/H queue here on enwiki, if you have not done so, to accelerate the transition over to Vega 5. 2. is there an end date to Vega 2 backport? Will Vega 2 be eventually be decommissioned totally and when? Asking because it will give the community a sense of urgency to move to Vega 5 for the supported graphs in Vega 5, while solutions or workarounds for the unsupported graphs/features either in form of somehow grafting the unsupported graphs or decoupling them to another template, etc. can be worked on. – robertsky (talk) 13:42, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

@PPelberg (WMF): the roadmap seems ok. 2 points in mind, 1. I think it is also best to involve those who hold the templateeditor user rights and/or actively working on WP:TFD/H queue here on enwiki, if you have not done so, to accelerate the transition over to Vega 5.

Great call, @robertsky. We have not yet contacted the two groups you named above. Although, I've filed T346291 to hold us accountable to doing so.

A clarifying question: were you thinking the communication you described above would happen once the technical components for porting existing graphs to Vega 5 are in place? Were you thinking that communication would happen now? Both? Something else?

…I want to be sure I'm accurately understanding you.

is there an end date to Vega 2 backport? Will Vega 2 be eventually be decommissioned totally and when?

Great questions. I'm going to respond to the second question first…

Yes, we are planning to fully remove support for Vega 2 and in doing so, create categories and/or linter tags to mark any remaining Vega 2 graphs as being in need of updating. This is currently scheduled to happen in Phase 5 of the roadmap.

Regarding the first question you asked – "Is there an end date to Vega 2 backport?" – can you please say a bit more about what you mean by this question? E.g. might you be asking:

1) "When the Graphs Extension is re-enabled, will it support Vega 2-based graphs?"

2) "If the answer to "1)" is "yes," how long after the Graph Extension is re-enabled with support for Vega 2 will Vega 2 support be removed?"

Asking because it will give the community a sense of urgency to move to Vega 5 for the supported graphs in Vega 5, while solutions or workarounds for the unsupported graphs/features either in form of somehow grafting the unsupported graphs or decoupling them to another template, etc. can be worked on.

Understood! I appreciate you sharing the thinking that prompted you to ask the above. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 23:52, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

@PPelberg (WMF):

were you thinking the communication you described above would happen once the technical components for porting existing graphs to Vega 5 are in place? Were you thinking that communication would happen now? Both? Something else?

For a wider participation, the communication can happen when the components are in place for the migration, hopefully with clear instructions on how to use the tools, which I assume to be at the end of Phase 2? My thoughts are that with clear instructions, at least of the simple charts, any editors can change the charts without much assistance, and for the more complex ones, the experienced template editors, with respect to Charts extension, can quickly work on doing up a suitable replacement based on these instructions, other prior experiences, and/or creativity.

With respect to the end date question, it is was asked under the assumption that Vega 2 will be enabled in a safe manner in the meantime. So yes, your clarifying 2-part questions is correct. – robertsky (talk) 03:21, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

And presumably if the WMF allocated more resources to it, that work would get done faster? That's how work usually works, anyway. More importantly, with more resources, we can hope that there won't be more extensions in the future that just get forgotten about for six years, causing blow-ups like this. – Joe (talk) 13:21, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

Exactly. This is the result of underinvestment and neglect for many years, and something that was entirely predictable Ita140188 (talk) 19:11, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Hard to say if throwing more developers at this stage for the Graph extension is going to make the work get done faster. But definitely will be helpful to have more developers/eyes to look into other extensions, being used on all projected hosted on the Foundation's servers, neglected or not. At the very least sort out a priority list based on criteria such as security or feature gap, etc. for future development. – robertsky (talk) 10:29, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

• What Robertsky said. There are thousands of us who remember the early WMF having the total staffing of what is today the staffing of the smallest team in the Product & Technology sphere. There are thousands of us who remember hours-long and even occasionally days-long downtime. I can still remember the time there was nobody officially "on call" for keeping the site up, and one of the few capable individuals actually had to deplane just before take-off in order to get Wikipedia back up. (And never did get reimbursed for their missed vacation.) We cannot be complaining about the WMF spending too much money on staffing and benefits while at the same time complaining that there aren't enough staff to do everything. The technological debt is significant (although being worked down). Part of that debt comes from extensions built by volunteers years ago that managed to get into MediaWiki core, only to have the maintainers leave. We may have to give up some extensions that are difficult or impractical to maintain, or consider other ways of doing certain things. But that would mean change, and we all know how Wikimedia communities respond to changes.... Risker (talk) 04:32, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  "We cannot be complaining about the WMF spending too much money on staffing and benefits while at the same time complaining that there aren't enough staff to do everything." True, but it's almost inevitable that growing organizations will eventually lose focus on some if not most of their core needs, resulting in too many people and not enough vital work being accomplished. Sandizer (talk) 10:06, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

I object to Wikimedia Foundation staff hired to do things best done by the non-technical community, including convening conversations on ethics and values, doing outreach, and community organizing. I support Wikimedia Foundation hiring technical staff for code development. The coders are not the ones who find themselves in conflict with the community. The staff who speak on behalf of the Wikimedia community and for the Wikimedia community frequently do. Bluerasberry (talk) 14:36, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps you should ask the technology staff this. When I sit with developers, they point to the differing expectations between communities, and the disproportionate entitlement of English Wikipedia, as major issues. They aren't here to build English Wikipedia, they're here to support 800 projects, all with different needs and demands. Those staff you're worried about were brought in to act as buffers between the very demanding individuals in many communities, and the developers who (as a group) are quite conflict-averse. When it used to be the developers talking to communities, they were pilloried, too. Risker (talk) 18:10, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

"buffers" has historically been part of the problem. With the foundation tending towards treating them as ablative meatshields rather than conduits of communication.©Geni (talk) 20:37, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

That's a really insightful point, which is in some ways at the crux of this: what amount of entitlement is appropriately proportionate for the English Wikipedia? About half of the 820 Wikimedia projects appear to have fewer than 20 active editors. I'll not touch on revenue or mindshare / reputation. That acrimony is best handled elsewhere. I will say that Community Wishlist items are often unfulfilled, which affects all projects, and the priority of the survey results is already determined by devs, so they're free to rebalance to help serve smaller communities disproportionately to their sizes.

Do the dev teams not want more crew? I understand there's a point in software engineering where throwing more people at a problem loses effectiveness, but we're hardly close to that point. Folly Mox (talk) 21:11, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

They want the supporting arms. Lawyers to make sure they don't get sued, the talking to the press people to try and prevent media fires from getting to bad, the talking to government people, the talking to community people so people mostly aren't pissed at them. The HR and accounts people so they get paid.©Geni (talk) 22:31, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

I guess I'm not seeing anywhere in the proposed resolution where it recommends cutting staff positions that are ancillary to development and maintenance in order to pay for the proposed new technical positions.

In any case though, I think I misunderstood Risker's Perhaps you should ask the technology staff this as something more general than a reply to the sentence directly above it. Folly Mox (talk) 01:16, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

[Developers] aren't here to build English Wikipedia, they're here to support 800 projects, all with different needs and demands. Then it'd be great if the WMF would hire some devs to work specifically on the English (and other large) Wikipedias, given that we're its flagship project and bring in the lion's share of the money used to support the rest of those 800 projects. – Joe (talk) 13:18, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

Hi all - I’m Sam Walton, the Product Manager for The Wikipedia Library (and now Moderator Tools). I saw increased support for The Wikipedia Library was mentioned in this RfC so I wanted to jump in to share some information about how we grow the library and what we’ve been doing recently. First, some good news - The Wikipedia Library continues to grow, with 12 new partnerships in the last year and numerous collections renewed or moved to more seamless methods of access. We also recently hired Vipin SJ as a dedicated partnerships manager, so for the first time we have someone solely focusing on growing the amount of content available through the library. This has really helped us be more comprehensive and committed in our approach - I’ve worked on the library for something like 8 years now and I think the program is currently in the best place it’s ever been.

Acquiring new partnerships to expand the available content in the library can be a slow and frustrating process, but usually not because of a lack of capacity on our side. We’re building the library through no-cost partnerships, and this isn’t a proposal publishers are accustomed to evaluating. Unlike with sales, they don’t have teams ready to field these requests and simply action them. Getting a new partnership is a process that starts with getting through to someone at the organisation who is in the right position to understand what we’re asking, usually involves multiple meetings to explain the partnership model, answer their questions, and assuage their concerns. We then need to agree on how access will be provided, and often need to get legal teams involved to review and sign agreements. Although this is all fairly rote to us at this point, and we have dozens of conversations on the go simultaneously, during this process it’s very common for the publisher to lose interest or to spend a lot of time in long discussions around the details (we signed with Wiley about 1.5 years after our first contact with them!). Once we’ve got a partnership signed and content is available to editors, we then need to keep the partner up to date and engaged with the program, so that if we need something from them, we won’t be disappointed to discover, for example, that our contact no longer works there. The reason I’m laying all this out is to explain that although this requires effort from our side, the bottleneck in this process is usually the organisations we’re dealing with.

I also wanted to be candid and note that we shouldn’t lose sight of how much content is already available! We regularly hear from librarians from around the world who are jealous at the range and volume of content we have available in The Wikipedia Library today, because it would simply be unaffordable for them to subscribe to it all. We did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and if the WMF was directly paying for all the subscriptions for the library, for the tens of thousands of users who qualify to use it, the total cost would come out to something like the entire current Wikimedia Foundation yearly budget! All this to say, although - obviously - I appreciate the message you’re sending here about how valued the library is, I personally think we’re already dedicated to growing it and making it as broad in its coverage as possible.

If you want to help us prioritise our partnerships, we have a suggestions page where you can add or upvote content suggestions. It’s not been obvious where these suggestions go historically, so we’re actively trying to do a better job of linking these to corresponding Phabricator tickets, where we’ll post updates on our progress, so you can subscribe to tickets to learn more about how things are going with any particular organisation. If you want to stay up to date with new content available through the library you can also sign up to our newsletter. I also just want to take the opportunity to quickly note that in my capacity on Moderator Tools I created Wikipedia:Moderator Tools/Automoderator to provide opportunities for en.wiki input into our team’s current project.

This message turned out a lot longer than I anticipated, but I hope it's a helpful overview. Happy to answer any questions you have about the library or anything I wrote above. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 09:03, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

What is a no-cost partnership? Levivich (talk) 15:21, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

@Levivich Instead of directly paying for content subscriptions like a typical library, we have agreements through which they provide us access for free. They see benefits from the partnership (more editors citing their content on one of the most popular websites in the world), and so we're usually able to convince them that it's in their interest to go down this route rather than charging us money. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 15:30, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Sam, I just want leave a drive-by kudos for the entire TWL team. I'm not privy to the internal details, but having worked on partnership projects like this before, I can only imagine how chaotic this is. Every partner has its own rules, its own API, its own licensing quirks, its own level of commitment, its own level of technical (in)competence, its own collection of demonstrably stupid and broken things that it insists must happen. Am I close? While I often rant about how clunky some parts of the system are, I recognize the heroic job you folks are doing and the incalculably huge benefit TWL provides to wikipedia editors. Thank you. RoySmith (talk) 15:56, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Extremely well-put, Roy. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 17:35, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

The library is the best development, by far, in my 17+ years of editing Wikipedia. Thanks to everyone who works on it. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:04, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

• Suggestion for TWL: Libraries buy licenses for digital versions of books they can lend to patrons. Consider a trial program to do the same for the TWL. Considerations:
  • Start with a small number of the most requested items and buy them.
  • Require a brief explanation from the borrower why they want to check out the resource. It could be a simple one sentence note such as: "I am writing articles on Albanian military battles in the 15th century".
  • To prevent hoarding, if a book is not returned by the return date, cancel the loan (if that's technically possible)
  • Use volunteers (editors) as gatekeepers, at least on this Wikipedia to save aggravation and distraction for WMF staff. Maybe someday WMF would fund a full time librarian but let's crawl before we walk.
  • Before checking out more books in the future, ask borrowers to point to work they did with their first loan. Again, a simple sentence or a few diffs would suffice.
  • Limit this to established editors.

--A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 02:32, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

Hi everyone – I’m Marshall Miller; I’m a Director of Product at WMF. I work with many of the WMF teams that build and maintain editing and reading experiences, including the Editing team, which is taking point on the Graphs extension, the Moderator Tools team, which operates The Wikipedia Library (please do check out the responses from Peter and Sam on those topics above), and other teams like Web, Mobile Apps, and Growth, each of which maintains parts of the software that I’m sure many of you use.

I’d like to address some of the overarching concerns raised in this RfC discussion about the foundation’s level of investment in technical infrastructure and software. I’ll explain below how we’ve made a deliberate shift this year to focus on the needs and ideas of experienced editors, but I know that even with that shift, it can continue to feel like key tools and features are neglected. I understand that feels demoralizing, and can lead to editor burnout. I can say that we’re striving to address that directly through how we spend our resources, and I’m hoping you all will notice the results in the coming months.

So to explain a bit how we’ve prioritized and budgeted this year – the product and technology area is the largest area of focus (both in terms of staff and budget allocation) at WMF. Much of that allocation is toward what we call “essential work” – which refers to the sort of maintenance, monitoring, upgrading, and fixing that keeps our sites running at a fundamental level and across hundreds of languages, including data centers, security, databases, etc. I know most everyone here knows that that kind of work is essential, even though much of it takes place behind the scenes.

Then there are the strategic parts of our work, which is about making substantial changes to how the software works. That work is laid out in this year’s annual plan. You can see that it says that this year, the Foundation’s plan is recentered around Product & Technology, and that we are prioritizing established editors over newcomers. We’re doing this because we know that the wikis depend on the most active volunteers, and that those volunteers have an outsized positive impact on the content. How we’re doing this is expanded upon on this page about the “Infrastructure” parts of the plan, and you can find further detail by following links on that page to the specific objectives and key results, and further detail on the budget here and here. It’s worth noting that the foundation committed to these priorities even while slowing overall budget growth for the foundation as a whole. And we’ve shared that these priorities are intended to be multi-year - meaning that this strengthened focus on our technical needs is meant to be the driving priority for the Foundation’s budget and plans in coming years.

I’d like to lay out some examples of outputs and upcoming priorities from the teams I work with, which I think show the current focus on experienced editors. These projects are all based on ideas and requests coming from experienced users, and are geared toward helping them have more efficient workflows, helping them be able to spend their time on the most important wiki work, and have control over how features are used on their wikis. If those don’t sound like the right priorities for experienced editors, we definitely want to hear how you see it. I think it’s also important to note that for each initiative in this list, knowledgeable and interested community members have been involved in the planning and design throughout – this helps us make sure that the plans to invest in experienced editors’ workflows will actually make a difference to them.

• New Pages Patrol / PageTriage: after the open letter from new page patrollers about the PageTriage software, the Moderator Tools team worked with patrollers to modernize the software so that future improvements and bugs can be much more easily addressed. The new version of PageTriage entered production this past week.
• Discussion Tools: over the past year and a half, the Editing team has rolled out the many parts of the “Discussion Tools” project, which added the “reply” button on talk pages and the ability to subscribe to specific threads on a long talk page, among other features to make it efficient to engage in conversation on the wikis. About 2.6 million edits have been published with the reply button, with 79% of those being made by users with over 100 edits. And for newcomers, data analysis has shown us that these tools have increased the quantity and quality of the comments they make on talk pages.
• Dark mode: having a “dark mode” for Wikipedia has persistently been a top wish in the Community Wishlist, and it is prioritized in this year’s annual plan and currently under development, along with the ability for readers and editors to choose their preferred font size. We’ve heard from many community members that these changes will make both reading and editing Wikipedia a more comfortable and accessible visual experience.
• Patrolling on Android: the Mobile Apps team is building a way for patrollers to easily patrol edits from the Android app, meant to give patrollers more options and opportunities to do their wiki work on their mobile device.
• Watchlist on iOS: the Mobile Apps team introduced the watchlist on the iOS app this past week, which gives experienced editors a new way to monitor important pages from their phones.
• Edit Check: we’ve heard from many experienced users and wishlist proposals that software could help prevent or improve low-quality edits from newcomers, which experienced users then have to correct or revert. To address this, the Editing team is building “Edit Check”, which is going to start out by automatically warning newer editors when they have added information without a reference, encourage them to add a reference, and then check whether their reference comes from a dubious source. This is meant to decrease the burden on patrollers while also teaching newcomers how to add reliable information. As of this past week, Edit Check is now being tested on several small pilot Wikipedias.
• Automoderator: English Wikipedia and some other large wikis have benefited tremendously from bots that automatically revert clear vandalism, like ClueBot NG. This takes a major burden off of patrollers and frees up their time. The Moderator Tools team is working to bring that capability to other language wikis that don’t currently have any of those sorts of bots, so that their patrollers can also focus on more challenging problems.
• Community Configuration: when WMF builds features, it is common that different wikis want the feature to work in different ways. We want experienced volunteers who know their wikis well to have control over how a feature works on their wiki – instead of WMF being the sole keepers of that control. The Growth team is building Community Configuration, which is a way for administrators to specify aspects of how a feature will behave for all the users on that wiki. This is currently implemented for the Growth features, allowing English Wikipedia administrators to specify, for instance, which sorts of edit suggestions newcomers receive. With the work being done here, administrators will be able to similarly configure many of the other features listed above, like Edit Check and Automoderator.
• Commons Upload Wizard: among multiple community concerns being addressed around Commons are upgrades to the upload wizard. These upgrades will help newcomers load content appropriately to Commons, guiding them toward making the right designations about licensing so that Commons patrollers can more accurately make deletion decisions.

That list touches on some of the projects specifically geared toward experienced editors, and does not include items addressed through the Wishlist process (more updates to come on how that process is evolving to better meet community needs). I hope that many of you follow along with the above projects in which you’re interested so that you can weigh in and help guide them.

How does this all sound? Does this approach make sense? What thoughts or concerns do you have about the work or the prioritization? -- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 04:55, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

Hello, I’m Runa Bhattacharjee, Senior Director of Product for Languages and Content Growth. I oversee the Community Tech team, which runs the annual Community Wishlist Survey. I am based in India.

The wishlist is an important avenue for the Foundation to understand and address the technical needs of volunteers. While the Community Tech team is tasked with a prioritized list of wishes during the year, they are not the only team who supports this work. More than 20 teams across our Product and Technology department support the wishlist process right from evaluating the incoming wishes, providing technical input, responding to dependent technical debt, infrastructure support, and various kinds of reviews. These teams also work on wishes and provide maintenance work for completed wishes as a core function of their roles. Periodically, the teams also gather (virtually) multiple times a year for dedicated wish completion sprints. Going forward we would like to do a better job of highlighting how editors' priorities expressed through the wishlist make it to teams across the Wikimedia Foundation.

To give you a few examples of recent work done through this setup:

• Auto-save feature now known as Edit-Recovery Feature that saves wikitext and other edit form information while typing, and allows for restoring it after the browser has been accidentally closed, or a power or network outage or browser crash.
• Better diff handling of paragraph splits -that allows viewers to understand when paragraph spacing was inserted between two versions of a page.
• "Who Wrote That?" - A browser extension that displays authorship information directly in Wikipedia articles, and was extended to more Wikipedias.
• Add link to CentralAuth on Special:Contributions that helps admins, patrollers, and other editors to find useful information related to blocked users, across wikis.
• Realtime preview that allows users using the 2010 wikitext editor to preview the page in real time when editing.
• Rewrite XTools - a project to update and maintain XTools, the wiki curation and moderation tools originally developed by User:X! and rewritten by User:Hedonil.
• Watchlist Expiry that allows users to watch pages for a limited period of time.

Recently at Wikimania I heard from volunteers their appreciation and support for the community wishlist survey process. At the same time some voiced their frustration and concerns about the process the way it is now.

Advanced editorial role responsibilities are growing across languages, regions, and affiliate needs. Besides a growth in volume of technical issues, there is also an increase in the technical complexity in the issues that the editors are bringing to our notice. It is important that we help connect the dots and make the necessary improvement within the Wikimedia Foundation so that editors' priorities expressed through the wishlist make it to formal priorities listed in our annual plan to make sure they are resourced and tracked more impactfully.

We have begun a process to improve and redesign the wishlist survey, with the objective to have an effective response system in place for the technical requests we know are of high importance like critical editor workflows. In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing more information about how the wishlist will evolve.Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF) (talk) 18:35, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

• Procedural query If proposals 1 and 2 pass, would they pass with the wording The English Wikipedia community is [...], because frankly ~40 in favor with ~20+ opposed is not representative of the English Wikipedia community (at least of those who are participating here) especially when compared to the overwhelming support in favor of proposal 3. Curbon7 (talk) 02:30, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

  My understanding is yes; while the support isn't as extensive as for #3, approximately twice as many editors support #1 and #2 as oppose it and so in my opinion it is still appropriate to say that the English Wikipedia collectively - though not unanimously - supports this position.

  For a different example, we still say that the Arbitrators are elected by the English Wikipedia Community, even though some receive less than 2/3rds support. BilledMammal (talk) 03:39, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

  Correct. Although this does also highlight the fact that we may need to make this page more accessible to editors in general - My first year at wikipedia, I dont think I even knew this page existed. If you look at the discussion above, the experience amongst editors is much higher than what would be typical of wikipedians - Which can be a benefit and a hinderance both. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 13:06, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Post-close

A small note of elaboration. I have determined that the Wikipedia Village Pump has issued the three non-binding resolutions, due to the support of discussion participants outweighing opposition. I have not stated whether this is supported by English Wikipedia, and the absence of reference to the Wikipedia community in the closure statement should not be seen as summarising the discussion. There is clear support that this discussion page supports these resolutions, with the third resolution being supported especially strongly.

1. The English Wikipedia community is concerned about the distribution of grants related to activity on the English Wikipedia that will either not contribute to our goals of building an encyclopedia or will actively hinder those goals. We request that the Wikimedia Foundation informs the English Wikipedia of all non-trivial grants that will result in activity on the English Wikipedia through the opening of a discussion at the Village Pump (WMF) prior to the grant being issued.
2. The English Wikipedia community is concerned that the Wikimedia Foundation has found itself engaged in mission creep, and that this has resulted in funds that donors provided in the belief that they would support Wikimedia Projects being allocated to unrelated external organizations, despite urgent need for those funds to address internal deficiencies.
   We request that the Wikimedia Foundation reappropriates all money remaining in the Knowledge Equity Fund, and we request that prior to making non-trivial grants that a reasonable individual could consider unrelated to supporting Wikimedia Projects that the Foundation seeks approval from the community.
3. The English Wikipedia community is concerned that the Wikimedia Foundation has neglected critical areas of the project, and that continued neglect of these areas may endanger the project.
   To improve the resilience of the project, we request that money be reallocated to hiring more technical staff, whose role will be to fulfill requests from the community such as those expressed on the Community Wishlist, as well as restoring access to tools such as grapher extension.
   To improve knowledge equity we also request that that the Foundation provides funding to assist established editors in accessing the resources they need to improve the encyclopedia, such as by increasing the number of libraries accessible through the Wikipedia Library and by giving micro-grants for the purchase of backlogged items at Resource Request.

Onetwothreeip (talk) 04:16, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

I'm still quite peeved that statement 2 directly targets the KEF for liquidation. It just seems unproductive to phrase it that way, which is a shame because the first portion of statement 2 raises a solid point regarding the apportionment of WMF funds. All I'm saying is it would have been far more productive to request that the WMF focus on WMF projects first for funding rather than just saying "Nuke it!!!!". Curbon7 (talk) 18:02, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

The resolutions can be amended by consensus as well. Onetwothreeip (talk) 21:50, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

For clarification, I'm not just whining because my position did not achieve consensus. I am well-aware that my support of the KEF is a minority position here on en.wp. I'm just trying to say that there is a more tactful way to word that statement. Curbon7 (talk) 05:37, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

@Onetwothreeip, I'm concerned regarding the lack of coverage regarding opposition for the resolutions in your close. Please consider amending it to be more detailed in summarizing the discussion rather than only providing a broad result.
Additionally, I see in the discussion that while there is a numerical consensus for the resolutions, there are also quite reasonable arguments opposing it. I encourage you to weigh the content of the discussions rather than merely the quantitative !votes.
(involved) — Frostly (talk) 04:39, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

I believe I have implied that there was more opposition to the first and second resolutions than there was to the third resolutions, without giving undue weight to that opposition. I have been purposefully concise to avoid amplifying any particular arguments.

Regarding the opposition to the first two resolutions, I could not find any objective reason to weigh the minority view disproportionately in its favour. There is much less scope to weigh the minority view greater than the majority view in a non-editorial discussion such as this, where editing policies don't apply. As a neutral closer, I cannot find (or should disregard) that one argument is subjectively or arbitrarily better than another, though I do not mean to suggest that I think you are saying I should. I can add the underlined to the closure comment. Onetwothreeip (talk) 06:04, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

• Wait what? (involved): 1. I thought this closed like two months ago? 2. I have determined that the Wikipedia Village Pump has issued the three non-binding resolutions, due to the support of discussion participants outweighing opposition is the least best closing rationale I've seen outside AfD. Folly Mox (talk) 04:48, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

  It did close a while back, was reopened, and then archived without close if I remember correctly. And now reclosed. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 05:07, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

  I closed it and the close was overturned. Honestly this RfC is so stale I doubt the WMF will draft a response to it. Mach61 (talk) 05:25, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

  There is simply not much more to say. There is greater support for the three resolutions than opposition, not only in number but in relative weight as well. I have elaborated above that there is a lack of any compelling reason to give disproportionate weight to the minority view, rather than a reason to not do so. Onetwothreeip (talk) 06:11, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

  I could have been a lot kinder in my characterisation of your closing rationale, but what about identifying common themes, subtopics, and rationales? I thought a close was supposed to summarise the discussion. See example. Folly Mox (talk) 07:09, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

  I appreciate that discussion closures can be longer, but I did not feel it was appropriate in this case to summarise the points of the discussion. Unlike closing a discussion for an editorial dispute, determining the reasons for the consensus wouldn't provide further editing guidance. The unusually lengthy closure comment in your example helps editors contribute to the article further than the direct question being discussed. There is not much more to summarise this discussion than editors choosing to support these resolutions, and I aim to avoid expressing an opinion on which reasons are good or bad. I would encourage anybody to summarise the arguments of the discussion. Onetwothreeip (talk) 07:53, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

  I think for long RFCs, long closes are better. Part of a good close is summarizing the discussion. The participants need to feel like you read everything and understood it, and enough of the closer's thought process needs to be disclosed to make the participants feel like the close is within closer discretion. –Novem Linguae (talk) 11:40, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

  @Novem Linguae:

  Summary: Resolutions supported due to discussion participants' concerns over Wikimedia Foundation funds being provided for non-encyclopaedia initiatives, funding of activities which cause article quality issues requiring editors to resolve, lack of notice to the community regarding grants being awarded, and desire for technical upgrades to Wikipedia. Onetwothreeip (talk) 01:37, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

• @Onetwothreeip: Regarding:

I have determined that the Wikipedia Village Pump has issued the three non-binding resolutions, due to the support of discussion participants outweighing opposition. I have not stated whether this is supported by English Wikipedia, and the absence of reference to the Wikipedia community in the closure statement should not be seen as summarising the discussion.

I find this a little confusing - it makes it unclear to me how the support of the Wikipedia community could ever be determined, if a CENT-listed RfC in the Village Pump is insufficient to do so. I think it would be helpful to close this as we would any other global discussion; simply stating whether this or isn't a consensus, without making the consensus limited to a specific area that doesn't reflect the true scope of the discussion.

Would you be willing to update the close to do so? BilledMammal (talk) 03:54, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

It is certainly unclear how the support of the Wikipedia community can be determined, without far greater participation. There have been discussions and votes on Wikipedia with hundreds of supporters (38, 45 and 78 supporters for these three resolutions). I found consensus for these resolutions, but there is not enough to say that the Wikipedia community supports the resolutions directly. Instead, it can be said that the Wikipedia Village Pump believes that English Wikipedia should issue these resolutions. I am willing to update the close to describe that this is not limited to a specific area, but neither should it be implied that it is unlimited. Onetwothreeip (talk) 05:04, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

I am willing to update the close to describe that this is not limited to a specific area, but neither should it be implied that it is unlimited.

Can you specify how you would update it?

It is certainly unclear how the support of the Wikipedia community can be determined, without far greater participation

In the past, a CENT-listed RfC at the village pump that comes to a consensus on the question asked. Can you clarify on what basis, and what policy or guideline supports that basis, that lead you to decide that it was insufficient in this case? BilledMammal (talk) 05:41, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

It can be described that the consensus is not necessarily limited to this talk page, but the closer can't determine the extent of the consensus beyond what they can see in front of them. I did not decide that anything was insufficient in this case and I made no decisions about how the Wikipedia community feels. The close was purely regarding how this talk page feels. Onetwothreeip (talk) 23:26, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

It was listed on T:CENT and had at least 78 participants. I do not think that saying It is certainly unclear how the support of the Wikipedia community can be determined, without far greater participation is accurate. To request any higher sets the bar way too high, to a number that is unachievable, imo. This was, by all measures, a well-attended RFC that was advertised in all the places necessary to make it a community-wide consensus rather than a local consensus. –Novem Linguae (talk) 00:42, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

@Onetwothreeip: I agree with Novem Linguae here; I think your close was broadly appropriate, except where you try to say that there was only a local consensus; I don't believe that such a statement is supported by policy. Would you be willing to adjust your close, or failing that revert it and allow another to close? BilledMammal (talk) 15:17, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Well I don't say that it's only a local consensus, it just can't be determined how broad the consensus is. If the resolutions had a thousand supporters for example (rather than thirty-eight), it would be much easier to determine a project-wide consensus. I could add this detail to the closure comments. Onetwothreeip (talk) 21:17, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

I feel like if you believe this, you should close the entire RfC as no consensus. That's generally what closers have done when they feel a higher quorum is necessary to justify changes. Mach61 (talk) 05:44, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

I don't believe that a higher quorum is necessary. There is enough consensus here to determine that the Village Pump supports these resolutions. Onetwothreeip (talk) 23:28, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

The difference between this and other RfCs is they don't explicitly claim to speak on behalf of the entire website/community. There have been very few other RfCs along those lines before, and they've more often been styled more like an open letter, or have gotten more support than these got (e.g. the SOPA/PIPA blackout). I'm involved, of course, but it does seem like a good point that if the RfC is framed as speaking for the entire Wikipedia community, it's setting itself up for failure because it would need a high degree of participation to be justified. Even if it's listed at CENT, if only a small number of people support something it's hard to close as consensus on behalf of the entire site. IMO the discussion didn't need unarchiving and closing. The WMF has certainly already seen it, has seen that there was more support than opposition, and has seen the arguments on both sides. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 15:37, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

Wikimedia's financial health

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-11-20/News and notes has a update on Wikimedia's financial health, including an audit report for FY2022–2023. Income is up $25m at $180m. Expenses are up $23m at $169m, including salaries up $13m to $101m and hosting up $0.4m to $3.1m. Certes (talk) 11:35, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

Proposal: add user-defined Common edit summaries to Preferences

I'd like to propose an enhancement to Preferences to add a feature enabling a user to enter a list of their own commonly used edit summary phrases, and then present them in the "Common edit summaries" dropdown that appears in Preview mode below the Edit summary input field.

In my case, I rarely use any of the potted ones, but I do have ones I use all the time, and this would be a real productivity enhancement. Probably one set per namespace to match current dropdown functionality, but just implementing mainspace would be a good start. (If I had my choice, I'd have the offerings be additive, i.e., organized as checkboxes, or permit multiple choices in the dropdown via Ctrl+select so I could assemble my edit summary by picking several, but this is probably a separate proposal.) Extra credit: in Preferences, if my custom edit summary list is empty, then prepopulate it grayed out with my top ten summaries in my last 500 edits (or top seven, as mainspace common summaries dropdown length is now). In the Preview mode dropdown, place user-defined list at the top, and if not fully filled out, then fill in remaining slots below from the potted summaries. When the cheers die down, extend to other namespaces. Mathglot (talk) 23:28, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

• Great idea. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 23:52, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

Does your browser not save them for you? Firefox does for me, so all I need to do is start typing and then select from the options FF gives me. Nthep (talk) 14:22, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Editting the desktop site via mobile and the keyboard does all this for you, including narrowing selection based on what has already been typed. Most of my summaries take no more than two or three taps. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:45, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

I use section edits almost exclusively (for many reasons, including ease of use, faster, fewer ec's, etc.) and the browser suggestions have to match from the very first character. For this section, it has to match /* Proposal: add user-defined Common edit summaries to Preferences */ which means there aren't any, except for my OP and further edits here. Same thing in, say, Mainspace or User talk space, where this feature would be really handy, and where browser suggestions help barely at all. Mathglot (talk) 00:32, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Copy and pasting are also easier on mobile. I cut the section details get the summary I need, and paste the section details back at the front. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:35, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

phab: is the right place for proposing new features in MediaWiki. But an easier way to implement it would be add this feature to MediaWiki:Gadget-defaultsummaries.js gadget. – SD0001 (talk) 18:45, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

Added to the Gadget talk page; thanks. Mathglot (talk) 01:44, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation banner fundraising campaign on English Wikipedia starts next week

Dear all,

The WMF is running its annual banner fundraising campaign for non logged in users in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK, and the US from 28th of November to the 31st of December 2023.

Thank you to everyone who has worked together to prepare the campaign this year! We’ve built up the collaboration process this year on the community collaboration page, at in person events (e.g. Wikimania and WikiCon North America), and in other individual discussions. More information around the campaign, like example banners and messaging, can be found on the community collaboration page. We continue to welcome ideas on the page.

Some more resources around the fundraising campaign:

• Love Wikipedia? Get to know the nonprofit behind it by Maryana Iskander
• ABC for Fundraising: Advancing Banner Collaboration for fundraising campaigns by Julia Brungs
• Preparing Together: Updates on 2023 English fundraising by Julia Brungs
• The Fundraising Report 2022/23
• 7 reasons you should donate to Wikipedia by Lisa Seitz Gruwell

Generally, before and during the campaign, you can contact me directly at jbrungs at wikimedia dot org, or the team:

• On the talk page of the fundraising team
• If you need to report a bug or technical issue, please create a phabricator ticket
• If you see a donor on a talk page, VRT or social media having difficulties in donating, please refer them to donatewikimedia.org

Thank you for the collaborative effort this year,

Julia JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 12:35, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

It's starting now? Then why have we had banners up for a month or so? There have been complaints here and at the Teahouse. Edward-Woodrow (talk) 19:04, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

Many thanks for all your hard work this year, for both you personally Julia and the entire team. Best, KevinL (aka L235 · t · c) 07:35, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

Another complaint

Another IP user (1.157.92.55 has complained about the advertising banners, this time at AN:

If the donations were ACTUALLY going to the editors who make this website, I would pay. But no, that money goes towards the Wikimedia "Foundation" and their ludicrously overpaid executives. Why can't they just relinquish some of their salary? WHY do you act like Wikipedia will fail without these donations? You DON'T need that money for servers so stop acting like you do. It's absolutely pathetic, sleazy, and utterly dishonest. I don't CARE about Wikimedia's projects, I ONLY care about Wikipedia, and if I'm going to be paying money, that money should be going to the ACTUAL users who create this website, not a bunch of overpaid bourgeoisie "staff" who accomplish absolutely nothing. Absolutely disgusting. And the INSISTENCE is utterly obnoxious - EVERY time I load a Wikipedia page your misleading begging loads up top and forcibly scrolls upwards to the top. Enough is enough. STOP LYING

Thought you might be interested. Cremastra (talk) 01:09, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

And honestly, I don't entirely disagree with them, although I wouldn't put in those terms. Cremastra (talk) 01:12, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

I am sorry that readers are upset and I also wouldn't have used those words, but the comment does match my own reasons for not donating money. I am glad that at least one potential donor is clearer about how donations are spent, and thus able to make an informed decision about giving. Certes (talk) 19:51, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

WMF executive pay went viral on Twitter, apparently. Saw this Business Insider story about it on Reddit. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 01:34, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

"The CEO of the most important website in history [Wikipedia] makes $790,000. The CEO of Docusign, a company that JUST signs documents for you, made $85,940,000 this year," I believe top positions should be compensated well. And 790k is only less than 1% of 85 million. It is a reasonable salary. Also, I suggested the fundraising ads, in line with the ads of The Guardian. After all, we don't want Wikipedia to be taken over by commercial ads in a bid to raise funds. Ads that come with demands of undue censorship and bias. Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 03:55, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

I have been quite critical of WMF fundraising practices in the past, but that rant is unhinged and amounts to trolling. I do not think that it should be taken seriously. Cullen328 (talk) 20:04, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

What rant? Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 21:38, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

I think he means the original post. The pay rates shown on twitter amounts to a storm in a teacup. They are quite low for the positions. Maybe other spending could be criticised, but not that. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 17:16, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

One interpretation is that, although top WMF staff each have a reasonable salary, there are too many managers and too few lower-paid staff assigned to more visibly useful tasks such as fixing bugs. Certes (talk) 22:39, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

The proliferation of middle management is the bane of all large organisations, I'm sure the WMF is no different. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 22:56, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

There is no risk that Wikipedia will ever be forced to carry commercial advertising, even if literally all fundraising were completely stopped for multiple years. jp×g🗯️ 11:12, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

This rant demonstrates a lack of understanding regarding the volunteer nature of Wikipedia. As well, see grants. — Frostly (talk) 22:06, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

I don't think it's clear from the comment whether the IP user understands that Wikipedia is written by volunteers and feels that the consequent cost saving makes requesting donations unnecessary, or if they think we ask for money and are refused. Certes (talk) 22:36, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

#2 (courtesy of the Teahouse)

Please STOP YOUR ONGOING BEGGING adverts asking for money. If you can’t manage the operation - CLOSE IT DOWN & go away - Stip ruining our experience 👎😡👎😡👎 2A00:23C4:D0F:1D01:9C29:17CA:2F74:C7EF (talk) 07:58, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

I'll be relaying any I see here. Cremastra (talk) 13:27, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

Is it productive to post these here? This feedback doesn't seem very actionable. –Novem Linguae (talk) 13:32, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

It's useful to know what some readers are thinking, even if those who feel strongly enough to comment are unlikely to form a representative sample. It's not actionable in that the WMF is unlikely either to stop begging or to close down, but the feedback may be helpful when wording future banners. Certes (talk) 15:53, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

I agree that continuing to copy these here is not useful. I'm sure the WMF is aware that some people are upset about their fund raising practices, and the complaints embodied in these posts are all things that have been talked about before. These kinds of posts don't add anything new. RoySmith (talk) 16:08, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

Agreed. KevinL (aka L235 · t · c) 23:38, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

I don't think volunteers should be heat shields for people upset at the foundation's fundraising. So what would the correct way to make sure these complaints are seen by the people they're meant to be seen if not posting here? Barkeep49 (talk) 03:02, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure that there is any benefit in making unconstructive rants more visible than they are at present. Volunteers are not acting as "heat shields" but more akin to spam filters. If you do think it's important that the foundation see it, then email it so as not to waste more volunteer time by posting it here. Thryduulf (talk) 11:10, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

VTRS gets loads of emails on similar lines to the posts quoted above. Nthep (talk) 13:21, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

They could post puppies and kittens are cute, and someone on the internet would have a rant against it. Unless someone posts something useful or interesting I don't see the point, I'm sure the WMF are well aware of their detractors. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:11, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

"If you can’t manage the operation - CLOSE IT DOWN & go away". So basically they rather have Wikipedia close down rather than see fundraising requests. I think whoever wrote that should simply go away from Wikipedia. Anyways, I suggested the fundraising ads because I read they have been very successful in The Guardian. No idea if it was because of my suggestion they implemented it or not but I support the ads, even though I don't donate money because I have donated thousands worth of my time. Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 03:24, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

I am not against posting these here, it's light tongue-clucking reading, but I think it serves no real purpose. My reasoning is as follows: For most feedback/reviews (think restauarant reviews on Yelp, product reviews on Amazon or your fave website), there's a human tendency to a bivariate distribution: people who loved loved loved it, and people who hated hated hated it; maybe a few just shy of that on either end. But the number of people who take the time to say a restaurant or product was decent, pretty much "met their expectations" is underrepresented, because where's the motivation to sign in, type that all out, and send it? You have to be a real data demon to do that. However, fund-raising is different: no matter how good the objective, nobody writes in to say how excited they were to receive the dunning request from Save the Manatees, or whatever there fave charity is; only some small fragment of the negative cohort bothers to write back, and their reaction is predictable. So, whether there are five posts thundering vitriol about our fund-raising or five thousand, I don' believe there's anything we can learn from it, other than perhaps the timing of when some social media platform posted a link to it, and how much influence they have, and there's nothing much we can do about that. I'm sure the WMF must do some A–B tests on the *wording* of such requests in order to measure the results (on the positive side) no doubt provides useful info, but I'd love to hear whether any A–B tests are done to measure negative reaction of the outraged-flame type, and whether anybody at WMF cares if there is. My guess is 'no' and 'no'. Mathglot (talk) 06:01, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

Hi all, I'm posting on behalf of WMF's online fundraising team. This is an interesting discussion around a topic we see as both important and challenging for the scale at which we operate: how to measure and ‘weight’ qualitative feedback. We work on it all the time, and we try to take both a human approach, e.g. building relationships through dialog, as well as running A/B tests to detect and improve points of friction.

On the more relational and dialog-based approach: we do rely on valuable feedback from various sources from readers, donors, and volunteers to inform the campaign, and we thank you for passing along more feedback. This year, we've been working with volunteers the past few months on the campaign and appreciate all the time and creativity everyone has brought to the collaboration process. We also recognize the increased volume in messages from readers at this time of year, and have staff dedicated to responding to inquiries who are monitoring our email address, donate[at]wikimedia[dot]org. Please feel free to forward any fundraising related messages to that email address and the team will follow up. We could also discuss having the team assist with responses at the teahouse, if that would be helpful. We welcome ideas for how we can better support volunteers during fundraising campaigns.

In our A/B testing, we often design tests that are aimed at improving user and reader experience, e.g. adding clarity around how to find the close button, improving the flow so that fewer donors get stuck or see error messages, etc.

I agree that online feedback can often swing to the extremes, but it is also true that any feedback contains a kernel of an idea that might lead to positive outcomes for all users. So we try to stay humble and receptive to input. Thank you and happy new year. - SPatton (WMF) (talk) 15:31, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation banner fundraising campaign on English Wikipedia ended yesterday

Dear all,

The WMF annual banner fundraising campaign for non logged in users in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK, and the US ended yesterday.

We would like to thank all of you whether you collaborated with us on the community collaboration page, or answered questions from readers on the Helpdesk, the Teahouse, or the VRT. Thank you all for your engagement during the Foundation’s biggest banner fundraising campaign of the year and for all your contributions to the projects. Thank you to all the donors who made the campaign a success and support free knowledge.

You can find the fundraising team across on meta if you have any questions or comments.

Best, JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 10:37, 1 January 2024 (UTC)