User:Alex Bakharev/BoardStatement

My Statement for the 2008 Board elections

I was born and lived half of my life in Saint Petersburg, Russia. I worked for three years as a postdoc at the University of Illinois and now for almost twelve years in Melbourne, Australia, as a research scientist in an industrial company. In 2005, my older son's school recommended some strange website named Wikipedia. A short inspection of that site revealed huge lacunae, egregious mistakes and an unbelievable systematic bias. I have tried to fix some and ... well, I am still working on wiki and enjoy it immensely. I have been a registered user since June 2005 and an admin on en-wiki since February 2006; some en-wikipedians might meet my AlexNewArtBot bot. Even before Wikipedia appeared in my life I had regarded myself as a good problem solver, and my wiki work has reinforced my confidence in my abilities to find solutions for both technical problems and interpersonal conflicts. I believe those skills might be handy for the board work.

What worries me is that the development of Wikipedia appears to be slowing down, perhaps even stagnating. There are a number of interconnected problems I believe we have to solve, with the keys to solution on the Wikimedia level:

We do not retain our best editors, they feel frustrated with conflicts and under-appreciated.
One source of these conflicts is the ambiguous nature of our policies. Even such important questions as when to delete articles on living people who requested deletion is not well defined. I think WMF should be more proactive in this regard.
Another source editorial frustration is the low regard with which wikipedians tend to be held in society at large. In some paradoxical way Wikipedians feel themselves as LGBT people before 1970ies. We try to work under pseudonyms and "outing" a Wikipedian can create a lot of real life problems. We need to communicate how important the project we are working on is to the wider community. We also need some sort of Proud Wikipedians Parade to show how wonderful the people working here are.
Many Wikipedians are harassed and stalked for our work here. There is also a real legal threat for many of us. WMF currently can do little to protect Wikipedians or even itself. We simply do not have money for serious litigations. I believe we need to have a special litigation fund for protection of Wikipedians as well as other possible forms of self-defence.
WMF needs more money. We need money for our servers, to have more developers, to have adequate compensations for WMF employees; we need money to promote our goals. On the other hand we do not want to sell our freedom to be impartial. I think we should be more proactive in seeking government grants and corporate sponsorship.

I think the problems outlined here are temporary. We can solve them and achieve our common dream: to have a single, up-to-date, comprehensive free repository of information like the world has never seen before.