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News and notes

Wikimedia community votes to ratify Movement Charter; Wikimedia Foundation opposes ratification

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By Bri, Bluerasberry, and Andreas Kolbe

Wikimedia community ratifies Movement Charter, Wikimedia Foundation rejects ratification

Disclosure: One of the contributing authors of this article is a candidate in the WMF Trustee election. Remaining contributors ensured neutral tone and wording.

Black and white Wikimedia Foundation logo

As The Signpost has recently reported, the Wikimedia Movement Charter is a document which negotiates power sharing between the Wikimedia Foundation as a corporation and the Wikimedia community of volunteer content contributors. One way to describe the situation is that the Wikimedia Foundation does fundraising and holds the money which sponsors the Wikimedia Movement, but the Wikimedia community of users actually produce the content and define the ethics and values which motivate donors to give money.

With increasing regularity, the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia user community have differing opinions of right versus wrong, which strategic direction is preferable, and what projects get funding when resources are scarce. The hope is that a Movement Charter would clarify which powers and responsibilities are in the control of paid staff versus the volunteer user community. The stakes of this discussion include determining who decides how to spend Wikimedia Movement money, which include the US$250 million in assets and $180 million in revenue for the last reported year. The Wikimedia Foundation is keen on using the money to support programs of interest to Wikimedia Foundation staff, and the user community of content creators wishes to use the money for different programs of interest to content creators.

The present news is that the Movement Charter ratification vote was held between 25 June and 9 July 2024. The results were as follows:

  • ✅ Ratified by individual Wikimedia users - Individual voters like you voted 73% in favor and 27% opposed. There were 2,446 valid votes, with 1,710 “yes”; 623 voted “no”; and 113 "neutral".
  • ✅ Ratified by Wikimedia affiliate organizations - Wiki community organizations voted 84% in favor and 16% opposed. There were 93 votes for “yes”; 18 “no”; and 18 "neutral".

On 8 July the Wikimedia Foundation board held their own vote for ratification and on 11 July, before the community's election committee announced the results of the community vote, the WMF gave their position:

  • ❌ Not ratified by the Wikimedia Foundation The Board of Trustees voted 11:1 to approve a Resolution rejecting the movement charter and setting out a timeline for alternative steps. The only dissenting vote was by Mike Peel, who according to the Minutes stated his support for the draft movement charter in the meeting. Board member Nataliia Tymkiv (user:antanana) announced that the board would not ratify the Movement Charter.

WMF Trustee Victoria Doronina criticized the Movement Charter, saying it "clearly presents an attempt at a power grab by the affiliates." She also noted that "in the proposed form, GC would not work effectively and would be only a waste of resources". Regarding the Wikimedia community election on ratification, she said "'The quorum' is only 2% (!) of the eligible voters, and who know how many of them are the affiliates members". The Wikimedia Foundation board has proposed its own alternative plan, the Appendix to the Vote on the proposed Movement Charter.

Wikimedia community members are discussing the results on Meta-Wiki talk pages and in the Wikimedia-l email mailing list. –B, BR, AK

Wikimedia Foundation Elections, 3-17 September 2024

The 2024 Wikimedia Foundation Trustee Election, arguably the world's most important Internet election, will run from 3–17 September 2024. Wikimedia editors will choose 4 of the 12 trustees to serve on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. Duties of trustees include reviewing the progress of the Wikimedia Foundation CEO, and deciding to approve or reject the plan and budget which the CEO presents to the board every year. Mark your calendar, and prepare yourself and your colleagues to vote.

On 1 July, candidates finalized their answers to questions which the election committee presented to them. Read the questions and answers and consider discussing at meta:Talk:Wikimedia Foundation elections/2024 or wherever concerned Wikimedia voters convene. –BR

WMF soft launches Bulletin

The Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin is "an experiment on establishing a regular communication on highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation's technical work, work with communities and affiliates, as well as other stakeholders like readers, donors, regulators, the media and the public."

U4C Special elections

The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) special election is accepting candidates through 19 July, with voting from 27 July – 10 August. The first U4C election which concluded in June only filled 7 of the 16 seats, one short of a quorum. There are four community-at-large seats, plus five regional seats open.

The regional seats are for:

  • North America (United States and Canada)
  • Latin America and Caribbean
  • Central and East Europe (CEE)
  • Sub-Saharan Africa, and
  • South Asia

A rule to ensure diversity across home projects, means that candidates from the English, German, and Italian Wikipedias – which each had two members elected in the first election – cannot run in this election. This rule has resulted in the odd case that the North America (United States and Canada) regional seat cannot be filled by somebody who claims the English Wikipedia as their home project.

Brief notes

The tide is out. Will it come back in?
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  • The turnout for the Movement Charter vote was roughly the same as for all three votes on the Universal Code of Conduct, yet now it's suddenly not enough? – Joe (talk) 09:49, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Fourteen years a content editor and this is the first time I have heard of the Movement Charter. My bad -- but given the sparsity of the vote it appears I'm not alone in my ignorance. I would appreciate a follow-up article with some irreverent opinions telling us what it's all about. Money, I presume, and power over money. Too much money, perhaps? I have two initial questions. There's the old saw that once an organization acquires adequate office space it has outlived its usefulness. Are the Movement Charter and the Code of Conduct signs that Wikipedia now has adequate office space? Secondly, what impact will the Movement Charter have on the important part of the English Wikipedia: content? Not much, I hope. For all the nonsense that goes on, I like the English Wikipedia the way it is. Don't fix something that isn't broken. Smallchief (talk) 11:04, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Smallchief: There was a summary in the last Signpost. But yes, power over money is exactly right. It was an attempt to shift it from the WMF to a sort of three-way power sharing agreement between the WMF, affiliated organisations, and individual project contributors. I voted for it because I thought that it would increase the political power of the enwiki community and therefore enable us to direct more money towards improving our software and content. – Joe (talk) 12:18, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    So what's the next move of the hoi polloi to get more control of the money? Smallchief (talk) 13:02, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    A council as currently imagined would overwhelmingly channel resources and voting bloc power to smaller wikis and languages and affiliates, not en:wp. But those count as hoi polloi. One upcoming point of leverage for this is the grants-distribution body that will be set up by January to help set the target size for future grantmaking pools, and update the process for how current grants are distributed. – SJ + 09:51, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think it's poor form to have a candidate (who I am going to vote for) running for the Board be the one to write the snippet about the Board Elections. Surely another person could have written that. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:13, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Agree, and this isn't the only example I have seen of a qualified candidate leveraging normally-neutral platforms; there are definitely examples from other candidates. It is concerning. I think the article is neutral enough, but it raises questions about how neutral The Signpost will remain when one of its lead writers is writing articles about the election in which they are a current candidate, without disclosing the candidacy. Risker (talk) 20:53, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Barkeep49 and Risker: The situation is that I wrote the election update, and I am also a candidate in the election. The update is above.
I drafted the text and asked other editors (and the world, through the talk page) to review Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/Newsroom#Proposed_election_announcement_text. I disclosed the conflict there. I hope for neutrality.
The context is that The Signpost is holding on with barely enough labor to maintain it. It has been this way for years. I have been The Signpost election reporter for years as well. In all my years of asking for help I have never found anyone to commit to covering elections. The likely alternative is no updates in Signpost when election updates appear. There are people reading this issue of Signpost who have never heard of the Movement Charter, despite it being a proposed system for guiding the spending of a billion dollars. For all the millions of dollars the Wikimedia Foundation spends on strategy and outreach, and for all the weight of elections, in the end we are missing a link to push out notices. Similarly, most people do not know what the elections are. Please help.
Can either of you - or anyone else reading this here - please through your own writing or referring a volunteer to ensure that someone else writes election updates for the next couple of months? I absolutely do not want to be doing this, but I do not want to be in a position where I am the usual reporter on this and having trouble connecting to journalist labor.
Can you both please report this to the election committee? Ask for their help. Tell them to post press releases for Signpost, Kurier, and social media. I used to be on the election committee and wrote this stuff myself when I was. If there were neutral plain text to distribute for updates then I could stage that. Feel free to post a correction or disclaimer on the article above. Feel free to move this conversation anywhere more appropriate. Bluerasberry (talk) 21:18, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
meta:Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_committee#I_posted_election_in_Signpost,_two_people_raised_issue Bluerasberry (talk) 21:29, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My complaint was not with you but with the Signpost's editorial decision to let you be the one to write this item. Obviously I'm not speaking for Risker. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 21:41, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It would have been possible to rewrite the entire thing from scratch, but when reviewing this from BR's suggestion it seemed to me that virtually the entire text was objective statements of fact (e.g. when the election ran, where the feedback pages were located). I could have used information to write a different section on my own, but it would have resulted in text so similar to what was submitted that it would have been borderline plagiarism to put it under my own byline. The claims that wasn't objectively factual (i.e. it being the most important Internet election) I agreed with enough to take responsibility for a couched version of as editor (i.e. "arguably"). Beyond that, the remaining elements that could be seen as subjective (e.g. asking readers to read the candidates' Q&As, or discuss the election on Meta) I don't think are biased towards any candidate, except in the most banal sense that some candidates are bound to give better answers than others, in which sense the mere fact of having candidates explain their platform to the voters at all is biased. jp×g🗯️ 02:08, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think there were a few missed opportunities here. I think there was a missed opportunity for another signpost writer to write the blurb after BR suggested one be written, but I understand why it didn't happen (WP:VOLUNTEER). But I think this would have made a difference. For instance The 2024 Wikimedia Foundation Trustee Election is the world's most important Internet election is a defensible claim but it's one that we wouldn't let stand without evidence were we talking about an article. Changing it to arguably the world's most important Internet election doesn't change that it's not a line that would have likely not appeared if another writer had written it. And indeed we can see it wasn't characterized that way last year. Which present another option: the Signpost could have chosen to run an (edited) version of the coverage it gave last year. BR didn't write it, Andres did. Or there could have been disclosure. I'd have done it tied to the item itself rather than the article which is what Shushugah did, but either way can work. If any of these three options had happened I wouldn't have written anything and I hope the editorial staff will keep them in mind should future situations arise. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 16:16, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
From my perspective, all that was needed was a disclosure statement such as "the person who wrote this article is a candidate in the WMF Trustee election discussed in this article." I think the article is relatively neutral; however, I'd hope that everyone would value the transparency of such a disclosure. Risker (talk) 05:42, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Boldly added one to the top. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 08:21, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Diversity

  • >>A rule to ensure diversity across home projects, means that candidates from the English, German, and Italian Wikipedias – which each had two members elected in the first election – cannot run in this election. This rule has resulted in the odd case that the North America (United States and Canada) regional seat cannot be filled by somebody who claims the English Wikipedia as their home project. — How about getting rid of quotas instead? Carrite (talk) 19:08, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    The quotas should never have happened in the first place. I certainly plan to bring them up for discussion when the U4C does its mandated review of the charter/enforcement guidelines/UCOC itself. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 19:16, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
      • @Barkeep49 and Carrite: I was really glad to see that Carrite seem to agree with something I wrote! I don't draw the same conclusions that C and Barkeep49 are drawing though. It's just a case of a rule having unanticipated consequences. And the rule certainly needs to be rewritten. I had thought about recommending that French Canadians put up their candidacies, but that would not have corrected the poorly written rule. Or maybe suggesting that US Hispanics apply, or all the many immigrants who might write in their mother tongue, or Native Americans - the possibilities are endless - but they don't solve the real problem that maybe 80% of North Americans were disqualified. There's also a method that at first glance might appear a bit sleazy, but I think would be ok if properly policed. North Americans can likely list their home wiki as WikiData of Commons (for some reason I'm listed as "Outreach" - that must go way back and I'm not running for anything anyway). Heck, maybe somebody from EN or FR WikiSource or WikiQuote could get elected and I think that would be cool. I do think that diverse membership is needed, otherwise it would just be all Big Wiki membership, likely a North American and Western European club that might only apply the rules to Small Wikis and pass on *anything* related to Big Wikis. If you look at the past problems you might run into: Croatian Wikipedia, the Russian Chapter, a country chapter right in the center of Europe (I'll send a Signpost article about it if you want), even Japanese Wikipedia had a serious public complaint (but not likely one the U4C could have solved). For the small wikis trivially there was Scotts Wikipedia (but U4C might have been able to give some early help there) and I do hear things about other places (that I really don't have enough info to identify publicly) maybe 4 places in the middle east, 1 or maybe 2 in Africa, etc. I think the U4C needs the help of small wikis and needs to consider problems at big wikis as well. Diverse membership will help that. Smallbones(smalltalk) 23:44, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
        I think the committee needs many different kinds of perspectives to be able to meet its purpose and mandate. I too share a thought that people who are intimately familiar with how small projects work is a vital perspective for the U4C. Ensuring that a variety of people are on the U4C has been a matter of some discussion already and when the revision process comes up I look forward to more discussion and ideas for how that goal can be accomplished. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 16:20, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
        • @Barkeep49: - looking at your "This should never have happened link" and adding a few things up leads me to the following suggestion:
          • A simple fix for the problem would simply be to make the home wiki requirements not apply to the regional seats, only to the Candidate at Large seats (and regional seat home wikis don't restrict CAL eligibility). The only place the home wiki requirements would come in to play for regional seats would likely be North America/English - and that would happen almost every election since English home wiki editors are truly spread throughout the world (NAmerica, Europe (UK, Ireland, ESL Europeans), Africa, India, Singapore and Hong Kong, ANZAC, Pacific and Caribbean Islands, etc.) It might seem that the NA region might never have a chance of having an enWiki rep! Among Home Wiki languages spoken in the EU, however, it would almost never affect more than 1 or 2 (of 17? EU) Home Wikis (do the math, is it reasonable to think that 6 of 8 CAL members from just 3 Home Wikis would be seated?) and those countries might be different in each election Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:00, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

More of everything

  • It's very disappointing to see this 'us vs. them' misinformation: "The Wikimedia Foundation is keen on using the money to support programs of interest to Wikimedia Foundation staff, and the user community of content creators wishes to use the money for different programs of interest to content creators." (and other similar statements in those paragraphs). This omits a huge amount of what goes into the WMF's annual planning process, plus listening and engaging with community input, the Community Wishlist, and more. It is a very complicated issue, covering accountability, responsibility, and resource distribution, and just pitting it as 'us vs. them' over money is really unhelpful - Signpost, you can do better. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 01:19, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Agreeing with Soni and Mike, the tone of this article was much less balanced than the last. The whole paragraph starting with "With increasing regularity" is inaccurate – I don't see the frequency of any of this changing recently; the charter and council will not determine how the endowment or existing assets are spent. And while the WMF does develop a published plan that details plans and programs, which one could tautologically say are "of interest to staff", the communities have no comparable "shadow plan" or priority list of programs, something we should develop before anyone makes claims about 'programs of interest to content creators'. Our wide range of community groups have different and sometimes mutually incompatible priorities, which is healthy but no substitute for an implementable plan.– SJ + 09:51, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Well ... I also recall plenty of complaints that stuff on wishlists wasn't done for lack of staff and money, while the WMF decided to spend millions of dollars on funding NGOs that otherwise have no direct relationship to Wikimedia whatsoever. Just sayin'. Andreas JN466 11:36, 27 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • I wasn't aware of the Charter vote, but I would have definitely supported it, so throw me in that column. It's long been the case that the Foundation has supported groups and changes on Wikipedia that aren't beneficial to either the editor base or our readers, but more represent making the Foundation look better personally over anything else. SilverserenC 03:00, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]


  • As someone who voted against the Movement Charter, I also found the tone of this article uncomfortable. Anecdotally, I knew one or two editors who agreed with the charter and nearly 30 who did not; in fact some assumed the charter would fail the community vote due to this. It seemed underbaked, filled with inconsistencies and legalese, and the MC process over the last few weeks seemed very much a "We need to push this in" victory lap for affliates than actually addressing raised concerns with the process. I found the 4 July Signpost coverage far more neutral than the current one.
The current summary was drafted by a candidate for the BoT elections. And so the (in my eyes) mischaracterising Victoria's comments on this (especially the "vote me out for BoT..." bit) is quite striking in my eyes. I'd rather the Signpost do better with coverage like this, a simple acknowledgement or editor's note goes a long way.
Soni (talk) 06:00, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That mischaracterization stuck out to me too, and imo should be retracted as truly inappropriate. – SJ + 09:51, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that bringing Victoria comment out of context was truly inappropriate, and should probably be retracted. Darwin Ahoy! 10:40, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Soni, Sj, and DarwIn: You have my encouragement to edit the article as you see appropriate with whatever text changes, notes, strike-throughs, or disclosures are useful. I really should not touch anything at this point. Please help by editing. Bluerasberry (talk) 11:25, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Alright, I removed that sentence; then saw JPxG you are around -- feel free to do as you see fit. – SJ + 13:32, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I added another line to better summarise what I parsed as the message of that mail, and altered another line. I hope this is neutral, but happy for JPxG to correct it another way. Bluerasberry, thanks! Soni (talk) 13:51, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • It's odd to me that a movement of volunteers is waiting for the Wikimedia Foundation to bless the Movement Charter and the Global Council. Perhaps you should pursue grassroots organizing methods rather than waiting for the centralized power structure to dissolve itself. Hold another referendum among Wikimedians, or in which the Foundation and affiliates get a single vote. Recommend strategic priorities and pressure the Foundation to adopt them. Ask for money from affiliates who voted in support. Adamw (talk) 11:39, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Good comment! I cringe when I hear the words "Wikimedia movement." We are an online encyclopedia, not a movement. The prosperity of the Wikimedia Foundation may do more harm than good. Do we really need grants, programs, and PR? The core of Wikipedia is the platform and technical (and I suppose legal) support paid for by the Foundation and the content contributions of unpaid, volunteer editors. I'm unpersuaded that Wikipedia and Wikimedia should be any more than that. Smallchief (talk) 15:33, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Wikimedia isn't an online encyclopaedia (nor am I, for that matter). What would you call the people that support and contribute to the Wikimedia projects collectively? – Joe (talk) 15:39, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    "Supporters" and "contributors". Nobody calls the people who use other platforms a "movement": there is no "Twitter movement," "Facebook movement," "YouTube movement," "Reddit movement," etc. Wikipedia.org is a web platform. The WMF is the entity that operates this platform. Editors are content creators who create (and manage) content on the platform. Together, they do not form a "movement." Levivich (talk) 17:49, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Twitter, reddit, etc aren't trying to achieve some goal. Wiki[pm]edia is (namely to collect world knowledge or at the very least write an encyclopedia). Its common to call large groups of people working together to achieve some goal, a movement. If twitter was unified into some goal rather then just people yelling into the void, it too would be a movement. Bawolff (talk) 22:01, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Those are all for-profit social media platforms. I don't think Wikimedia has anything in common with them at all and if there's a term that makes me cringe it's "content creators". When I got started on Wikipedia, there was a palpable sense that by working together to freely share knowledge under a copyleft license, we were doing something different and radical. We weren't individuals creating content, we were a community working towards a common goal, aligned with the free software movement, the free content movement and the free knowledge movement. In that sense the word movement was a perfectly apt description of the community-of-communities of which we were a part, and the community and the movement were there before the foundation and before Silicon Valley bullshitters decided that those words sound better than 'customers' or 'people we spy on for money'. It depresses me to no end that so many people have lost sight of what makes us different. – Joe (talk) 22:37, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I get why people don't like the word movement. I really do. But as someone who edited some and loitered even more in the 2000s I really want to express my agreement with We weren't individuals creating content, we were a community working towards a common goal...the community and the movement were there before the foundation and before Silicon Valley bullshitters decided that those words sound better than 'customers' or 'people we spy on for money'. It depresses me to no end that so many people have lost sight of what makes us different. However, we describe ourselves I think we should try to recapture that sense of community working towards a common goal and what makes us different from other top 20 websites. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 22:46, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    "Wiki community organizations voted 86% in favor and 16% opposed." Eh? Am I misunderstanding something about how percentages work? Jim.henderson (talk) 05:47, 26 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes it looks like someone had trouble with rounding. The actual figures are 83.78% in favour and 16.22% against, as reported on meta. – Joe (talk) 10:58, 26 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    "Perhaps you should pursue grassroots organizing methods rather than waiting for the centralized power structure to dissolve itself." Thanks, Adamw, you put your finger on it. Andreas JN466 21:20, 26 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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