User:Cremastra/opinion
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In the final weeks of 2023, the community issued three non-binding resolutions to the WMF. The first addressed grants issued to organizations planning to be active on the English Wikipedia, the second was about grants to organizations unrelated to Wikimedia projects, and the third was a plea for more tech support.
The second resolution reads thus:
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.
Needless to say, that hasn't happened, although given it was non-binding who honestly expected it to do much?
But the Knowledge Equity Fund (KEF) is back, and 13 new grantees were announced this October. It's time that we have a community discussion, whether here or at meta.wikimedia.org, before this mission creep goes any further.
Why I oppose the KEF
[edit]Background
[edit]The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) plays a very important role for Wikipedia, and for all Wikimedia projects. Its goal is effectively the same as ours, albeit cloaked in some corporatese and buzzwords:
The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
We are all working towards the same goal: free knowledge, free educational content. Wikipedia is just one piece: other projects like Wiktionary, Wikisource, and Wikibooks help fill out the Wikimedia movement's work.
The KEF is irrelevant to Wikimedia
[edit]The KEF represents a shift away from supporting Wikimedia projects, and towards more general philanthropy, with the goal of giving surprising quantities of money to external organizations that support knowledge equity by addressing the racial inequities preventing access and participation in free knowledge.
. An admirable project, to be sure – but a Wikimedia project? The WMF awarded a total of more than one million (presumably American) dollars in round three of the KEF (or, Project Mission Creep). What about round 2? What have these honourable groups done with the money granted from the WMF? Project Multatula produced 16 stories, including two photojournalism essays, that touch on a wide range of issues in Indonesia, ranging from the role of indigenous women in society, public health, and culture to underprivileged youth, disability, and human rights.
I love photojournalism. But why on earth is the WMF giving fifty thousand dollars to produce stories about underprivileged groups, human rights, and culture in Indonesia? How does this align with the WMF's carefully worded mission statement? I don't oppose the KEF because I think the work that's being done is bad or wrong or harmful or a vast conspiracy. I oppose it because it is dishonest use of the WMF's money. After round three, there's still eight hundred thousand American dollars left in the coffers. I think instead of throwing the money outside the WMF, that money should be rerouted to help Wikimedia projects.
Where did the money come from?
[edit]The KEF isn't constantly getting money put into it, which is one thing to be grateful for. When the money dries up, it will be over (unless the WMF decides they want a second run). Here's what the WMF's KEF FAQ (my god, that's too many initialisms in a row!) says about the origin of the money: At the end of the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2019-2020 fiscal year, the Foundation had a budget underrun, due mainly to the cancellation of many in-person events as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic especially during a strong fundraising year. This gave us an opportunity to set aside funds for the year ahead (the 2020-2021 fiscal year), and to fund the Knowledge Equity Fund as a new pilot program based on the [[<tvar name="1">foundationsite:news/2020/06/03/we-stand-for-racial-justice</tvar>|commitments]] the Foundation’s leadership team made in June 2020, in the wake of global protests against racial injustice.
What our next steps should be
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