WMF Board of Trustees: A Fish Rots from the Head Down

[Vigilant]

We've seen competent people get hired at the WMF and then quietly leave a few months later. They don't talk about it.

Board is captured by the WMF management now.
The CEO has been there a while.
This is a CTO/Product role which will give them control over all of engineering.

This CTO has extensive development and management experience.

The WMF engineers might as well just hand over the agonizers right now.

"I've reviewed the work you performed on Visual Editor, and am implementing the Agony Booth."

"Ah, a Flow engineer..."

[Vigilant]

<tune to Jeopardy plays in the background>

"What is, 'Not a damned thing?'"

[Zoloft]

Selena Deckelmann's first meeting:

"Hi, I'm Selena Deckelmann, glad to meet all of you.

Today I'd like to begin migration to a set of modern frameworks for data presentation."

[Vigilant]

What's the fucking point?

Teh Communitah rolled over and lost control of the WMF.

Are they just gloating and gravedancing at this point?

[Zoloft]

What's the fucking point?

Teh Communitah rolled over and lost control of the WMF.

Are they just gloating and gravedancing at this point?

Shani Evenstein
27 Jun 2022 8:31 p.m.
Hello everyone,

On behalf of the Community Affairs Committee, I am happy to invite you to
our next Conversation with the Trustees on 14 July at 18:00 UTC
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimed ... h_Trustees>
(find your local time <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1657821621>). You
are all welcome to talk with the Wikimedia Foundation Board of
Trustees directly
about our work guiding the Wikimedia Foundation.

The call will be held on Zoom with a live YouTube stream
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYg9sJ4Ml3M>. Because we want these calls
to be interactive, we encourage you to join us directly on Zoom. Request
the Zoom link by emailing askcac(a)wikimedia.org.

We will be providing live interpretation into Spanish and Portuguese. If
you would like to request another language, email askcac(a)wikimedia.org.

We will add the agenda to the event Meta page and send it here in the
coming weeks. For now, please save the date and register for the Zoom room.

Hope you see you all there,

Shani.

Shani Evenstein Sigalov
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/profile ... n-sigalov/>

Vice Chair, Board of Trustees

Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>

Remember to request the Zoom link by emailing askcac@wikimedia.org.

[No Ledge]

I thought I or someone else had posted about the Leadership Development Working Group before, but maybe not.

For background, look back at the "WMF spirals into incomprehensibility" thread where Jake posted a nothing if not helpful linked list of the 13 talk pages. One of those thirteen was titled Foster and Develop Distributed Non-Existent Leadership. I believe that based on this strategy recommendation they have appointed the 15-memberLeadership Development Working Group. Conspicuously absent from this group is even a single member representing the flagship English Wikipedia. There seems to be a lone North American from Vermont, representing Simple English.

Noting Andreas' special report about fundraising in the Global South and his observation that only a small amount of the funds raised were actually spent in the Global South, I note from the membership list of the Leadership Development Working Group that they actually want the Global South to be dominant in leadership providing direction to this global organization.

I can't complain too much though as they invited me to apply for a seat in this group, which I didn't do because my time is already over-committed to providing leadership to the English Wikipedia, and I wasn't clear on what I would be committing to getting myself into if I joined this working group.

I've yet to notice whether this working group has done anything yet.

[Vigilant]

Now they're selecting the questions that the sad little proles are allowed to ask of potential board members.

Every inch the WMF takes is another nail in the coffin.

[WikiWatcher]

Now they're selecting the questions that the sad little proles are allowed to ask of potential board members.

Maybe we should crowdsource some questions.

"On a scale of Nope to Jimbo, where do you stand..."

[Vigilant]

Please join us in pretending to 'elect' board members from among the choices we have narrowly laid out for you.

P.S. You guys aren't smart enough to have actual elections.
P.P.S. It's QED since you put this board in place.
P.P.P.S. Teh Communitah's power has officially been terminated.

[Vigilant]

People are asking, in the thread immediately above, to see how the affiliates voted.
WMF is refusing.

You don't even get the semblance of election.

Tammany Hall shit

[Smultronstället]

I thought it was good for a board to ensure they have people who can fulfill key duties like legal review, accounting, fundraising, and other basic skills. If the board doesn't pre-select for the qualities that are necessary, how will they guarantee that the necessary skill sets are all represented?

[Ryuichi]

I thought it was good for a board to ensure they have people who can fulfill key duties like legal review, accounting, fundraising, and other basic skills. If the board doesn't pre-select for the qualities that are necessary, how will they guarantee that the necessary skill sets are all represented?

They don't do the actual work.

[Smultronstället]

I thought it was good for a board to ensure they have people who can fulfill key duties like legal review, accounting, fundraising, and other basic skills. If the board doesn't pre-select for the qualities that are necessary, how will they guarantee that the necessary skill sets are all represented?

They don't do the actual work.

Right. It's just what I was taught is the effective way of organizing a board of trustees. The profs were business school and law school faculty. I wonder where they got that idea from.

I don't see why the WMF isn't able to do all of these: avoid getting victims of oppressive regimes killed in the trustee elections, be transparent, run an election the former way or consult the community before changing the arrangements, and have key skill sets represented on the board.

[Vigilant]

A new standup routine

The hypocrisy just rolls of them in waves

[Giraffe Stapler]

A new standup routine

The hypocrisy just rolls of them in waves

Don't forget to hit that "like" button and subscribe! Vote for me for the board!

[Smultronstället]

A new standup routine

The hypocrisy just rolls of them in waves

Don't forget to hit that "like" button and subscribe! Vote for me for the board!

I wonder how much of the community would get behind having a separate board election the usual way. It would be time-consuming, but having a selected group of people protesting the illegitimate board and explaining the problems of said board to the community and the press could be somewhat effective. It would at least offer a place to negotiate from. It wouldn't work if the legitimately chosen board members were incompetent though.

[No Ledge]

A new standup routine

The hypocrisy just rolls of them in waves

Thanks for posting the link to this. I found this about an hour too late to watch his talk live, but am interested in what he had to say.

How to Run a Top-10 Website, Publicly and Transparently

Wikipedia is the only top-10 website that is operated by a non-profit, but more importantly, runs fully transparently. Literally anyone can view detailed monitoring graphs for individual services and servers, see alerts fire in real time, and watch as engineers deploy code and debug problems live. It's not a one-way street. Participation from volunteers is encouraged and welcomed, with the Wikimedia Foundation giving out sever access to trusted volunteers, allowing them to view private logs and deploy changes. Even amongst smaller or other non-profit/public interest websites, this level of transparency and openness is really unheard of. Yet it is key in what has made Wikipedia such a force for good and, really, the Internet a better place. This talk will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of running a website in this way, including looking at case studies where this level of transparency enabled volunteers to provide key insights that fixed bugs and outages, saving the day.

PDF of the slide stack used for the talk

He says "transparency is core to Wikipedia" and then backs up that assertion by showing an article's revision history and a DIFF between two revisions, and the article's talk page.

Then he asserts that the technical infrastructure works the same way. It's maintained by volunteers and staff openly in a collaborative manner. He backs this up by showing a list of names who have submitted MediaWiki patches and who have approved MediaWiki patches with a good mix of volunteers and staff on both lists.

I wonder how they develop a consensus when there are technical disagreements? Are volunteers and staff equals or do staff have power to overrule volunteers?

How does someone obtain merge aka “+2” rights? Is there a public request for those rights followed by a discussion and !voting?

He shows several pages with open statistics for servers, databases and data centers. I don't know how to get these statistics nor how to interpret them.

Regarding "Phabricator transparency" your mileage may vary. My experience in this Phabricator discussion has been mixed. Getting technical help, for me, has often been like pulling teeth. It's like a big Adventure game, sure "XYZZY" is out there in plain public view, but you'll just spend hours, days or even weeks before you "get lucky" and stumble upon it or the light bulb turns on. In my last post to that Phab thread I just linked I pointed out how a Forrester post just blew unhelpful fog, now that I've solved it (see my open Bot Request for Approval). But I mentioned that I lacked "good flood monitoring tools" and nobody has yet responded to tell me about the tools shown in Kunal's talk! Pulling teeth.

Legoktm doesn't really assert in those slides that the Wikimedia Foundation is run publicly and transparently. Indeed he points out that donor data is stored separately, so public transparency runs into a wall when it runs into money.

[No Ledge]

He put several QR codes into his slides, that apparently link to pages such as the Wikimedia Developer Portal. I've already found that, but by following a conventional link somewhere.

I still haven't solved the QR codes puzzle. I was in a restaurant several months ago that had a QR code on the table for pulling up the menu on your phone. So I pointed my phone at the QR code, turned on the camera, it did nothing. I tried taking a picture of the QR code. Now I have a picture of a QR code on my phone, but still no electronic menu. I asked my waitress for help, but she didn't know how to make QR codes do anything useful either.

Maybe someone here can help.

Someone is trying to help here. --Z

[Vigilant]

Setting a new land speed record for gibberish!

June Meeting Outcomes from Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

The Board spent most of the meeting reviewing the Wikimedia Foundation’s Annual Plan, which the Board unanimously approved. This plan is a summary of the Foundation’s goals for the coming 2022—2023 fiscal year [2]. The
plan is now anchored in the strategic direction of our movement strategy: knowledge equity and knowledge as a service.

Too bad neither term is ever defined.

TL;DR - we're going to continue doing whatever softheaded dipshittery that we want with donor money.

Least transparent board in WMF history.

[AndyTheGrump]

The plan is now anchored in the strategic direction of our movement strategy...

I don't think the WMF knows how anchors work...

[Vigilant]

That's a whole lot of nothing speak

[No Ledge]

Selena Deckelmann's first meeting:

"Hi, I'm Selena Deckelmann, glad to meet all of you.

Today I'd like to begin migration to a set of modern frameworks for data presentation."

Selena Deckelmann finally checked in with her first substantive on-English-wiki edit after taking the Wikipedia Adventure at the beginning of October.

Comment: Hi everyone! I’m Selena Deckelmann, the WMF’s new Chief Product and Technology Officer. I hope I can add some detail and color to this important conversation. I joined the Foundation about four months ago, and I’ve spent that time learning about the sheer scale and complexity of the technical infrastructure that powers our work. (Krinkle shared this diagram with me recently and it’s a fascinating view of just one large part of what it takes to support 950 separate wiki instances and a website that is among the top 10 in the world.) I’ve read some of the comments here comparing our costs now to ten or fifteen years ago. These estimates are outdated, and do not account for the enormous growth of content and traffic our sites support today, and the increasing challenges of a more complex, dangerous and sophisticated internet. Back then, we did not have a sustainable model for the engineers who keep the site reliable, we didn’t have backups, and we didn’t have a second data center.

Compared to that snapshot from ten or fifteen years ago, the Foundation’s scale has increased to support the need - for our readers as well as for our contributors, for all of you. We now have two main data centers, four caching data centers in Amsterdam, Marseille, Singapore and San Francisco, and 32 internet peering connections. These systems ensure that wherever a person is in the world, Wikipedia and related projects are able to be accessed, quickly and reliably.

We maintain the software and infrastructure for all of these wikis and over 2600 community-contributed tools. We have more than 40 product and tech teams managing more than 500 software extensions, products, features and libraries that each require specialized skillsets (1+2), more than 3.2 million lines of code as of September 2022, 900+ customized instances of MediaWiki that need a ton of code-testing for every change (1), 50,000+ open phab tasks (1), and 50+ wishlists (1). We also maintain substantial data infrastructure that enables volunteers to gain direct access to wiki content and to analytical information about the wikis, and the Toolforge platform for volunteers to host tools which assist their work. The projects are now more reliable and faster than they’ve ever been; even during the record-breaking page visits we saw after the death of the Queen of England, Wikipedia never went down, when a fraction of that amount of views would have taken the site offline before.

This is an enormous volume of work, yet our overall efforts are still quite lean compared to the scale of needs on our sites. For example, before we added our latest Marseilles data center, staff internally used to worry that our primary European data site in Amsterdam was "too big to fail". It’s safe to say that maintaining Wikipedia, and supporting it as it grows with infrastructure and software improvements, is an enormous effort. This effort increases in scale and complexity each year, even as we seek to reduce the speed of our overall Foundation growth and better address issues of technical debt raised here and in other forums by volunteers.

I want to acknowledge the concerns I see on this page and in many other forums about the responsiveness to the specific technical needs of volunteers. While we have places like the community wishlist to understand and respond to community needs, those should not be the only places where we’re able to hear from you and work together on what you need. As part of my listening tour as I’ve joined, I’m speaking with both editors and technical volunteers to understand how we can engage better and work together on supporting the projects. I invited volunteers to a recent product and tech department meeting in Berlin, and I attended a recent board Community Affairs Committee meeting in which we talked about support for Commons and for New Page Patrol. And I participated in a subsequent roundtable meeting to discuss page patrolling issues across the wikis, from which further conversations, code review, and technical investigations have all begun.

One of the things I’ve said to Maryana recently is that planning out the future of work on Wikipedia and our many projects requires significant historical context, which is why I decided to spend several months on a listening tour before deciding to make significant changes to the work of my departments. In addition, the software that helps sustain the movement, and the internet itself, have changed significantly and grown increasingly complex over the last 20 years. The ever increasing complexity of our work isn’t something the staff speak about in detail, and I wonder if perhaps we should spend some time on that in the future. There’s a thread about the current state of Twitter in relation to their former staff and some of the kinds of issues site reliability engineers face at internet service companies. This is a worthwhile read and ''incomplete'' view of the kinds of issues some WMF teams face daily, which addressing requires many experienced people and their good judgment to resolve.

To achieve what we set out to do, Foundation and volunteers together – to collect and make available to the whole world the sum of all human knowledge in perpetuity – it’s just an incredibly large and nearly impossible challenge. I feel so excited that I get to focus on this problem with you all, and it will take some time to understand the complexity, the current reality and set out a strategic path for allocating resources across the product and tech departments at WMF. I continue to meet with people on my listening tour, and I invite anyone here to reach out to my talk page to share your vision about our future together. I don’t have specific answers yet, but I am making a commitment to listen and find ways we can more frequently and productively work together. SDeckelmann-WMF (talk) 00:38, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

[No Ledge]

I'd already seen that Mosquito Capital thread about Twitter.

[Vigilant]

She went from manager to VP in under 4 years at FireFox.

My money's on her not having the chops.

[No Ledge]

WMF BoT online community meeting from 3 days ago.


MY SUMMARY

• There was a $5 million fundraising shortfall which resulted in a reduced budget
• Deckelmann discussed the deployment of Vector 2022 and the ongoing community RfC about it
• After 31 minutes of top-down summaries, they started answering community questions
• Denny says Wiki Functions is not like ChatGPT
• The Leadership Working Group, in their first year of operation, has drafted a shared definition of leadership, and are now working on the plan
• 59 1/2 minutes in they started taking open questions
• The community wants more details, sooner about the US IRS Form 990 filings
• At the tail end, Jimmy Wales talked about ChatGPT. "It lies a lot, and makes up sources."
• But the ChatGPT developers have a similar tool that could look at images and write alt text (for visually-impaired readers) that accurately describes images which don't have any alt text

[Vigilant]

Setting a new land speed record for gibberish!

June Meeting Outcomes from Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

The Board spent most of the meeting reviewing the Wikimedia Foundation’s Annual Plan, which the Board unanimously approved. This plan is a summary of the Foundation’s goals for the coming 2022—2023 fiscal year [2]. The
plan is now anchored in the strategic direction of our movement strategy: knowledge equity and knowledge as a service.

Too bad neither term is ever defined.

TL;DR - we're going to continue doing whatever softheaded dipshittery that we want with donor money.

Least transparent board in WMF history.

Looks like they gave away a bunch of money that people donated to keep wikipedia running...

[rnu]

[*]The Leadership Working Group, in their first year of operation, has drafted a shared definition of leadership, and are now working on the plan

[Ming]

[*]The Leadership Working Group, in their first year of operation, has drafted a shared definition of leadership, and are now working on the plan

Golgafrinchan Ark Ship B

[Ming]

[*]The Leadership Working Group, in their first year of operation, has drafted a shared definition of leadership, and are now working on the plan

Golgafrinchan Ark Ship B

...which is completely in line with what Ming has always said the purpose of the WMF is: to own the stuff, take the money, and hire the lawyers, and nothing else.

[tarantino]

Looks like they gave away a bunch of money that people donated to keep wikipedia running...

I saw that. Andreas is trying to put Jimmy's feet in the fire.

Wikimedia Endowment board minutes becoming ever more minimalist

Dude, Where's My Donations? Wikimedia Foundation announces another million in grants for non-Wikimedia-related projects

People outside are starting to notice.

The Wiki Piggy Bank Wikimedia grows rich as Wikipedia donations are used for political causes

Wikimedia Foundation's Finances Raise Questions about Allocation of Donations Wikipedia is getting filthy rich while spending very little.

[No Ledge]

[*]The Leadership Working Group, in their first year of operation, has drafted a shared definition of leadership, and are now working on the plan

Golgafrinchan Ark Ship B

...which is completely in line with what Ming has always said the purpose of the WMF is: to own the stuff, take the money, and hire the lawyers, and nothing else.

Oh, my. It appears that the Leadership Development Working Group is almost ready to fold up their tent.

Our work this last year confirmed to us that leadership exists in our movement already, in the people and groups who manage culture & heritage programs, organize campaigns, run affiliate organizations, support movement governance on and off-wiki, train newcomers, and many more roles and initiatives.

we have decided to move forward with the implementation of the LDP in a more decentralized, localized manner. LDWG will wrap up its work by the end of September 2023. Afterward, we hope you, community members across the Wikimedia movement, will join us in developing leadership development initiatives -- small and large, in the different spaces and roles we occupy.

So the BIG step — the actual implementation of their grandiose plan that was over a year in the making — is a big, fat nothing-burger.

I didn't volunteer to join this group because I feared it would be a big waste of my time. My fears were well founded.

HELLO — what I'm looking for is help in developing leadership of the people who maintain the content of the encyclopedia. You know, the administrators, et al.

[rnu]

[*]The Leadership Working Group, in their first year of operation, has drafted a shared definition of leadership, and are now working on the plan

Golgafrinchan Ark Ship B

...which is completely in line with what Ming has always said the purpose of the WMF is: to own the stuff, take the money, and hire the lawyers, and nothing else.

Oh, my. It appears that the Leadership Development Working Group is almost ready to fold up their tent.

Our work this last year confirmed to us that leadership exists in our movement already, in the people and groups who manage culture & heritage programs, organize campaigns, run affiliate organizations, support movement governance on and off-wiki, train newcomers, and many more roles and initiatives.

we have decided to move forward with the implementation of the LDP in a more decentralized, localized manner. LDWG will wrap up its work by the end of September 2023. Afterward, we hope you, community members across the Wikimedia movement, will join us in developing leadership development initiatives -- small and large, in the different spaces and roles we occupy.

So the BIG step — the actual implementation of their grandiose plan that was over a year in the making — is a big, fat nothing-burger.

I didn't volunteer to join this group because I feared it would be a big waste of my time. My fears were well founded.

HELLO — what I'm looking for is help in developing leadership of the people who maintain the content of the encyclopedia. You know, the administrators, et al.

It took them only a year to realize that they are pointless. Honestly, that's more self-awareness than I've come to expect from people involved with Wikipedia.