Hoi,
Fae a few points..First board members are volunteers like you and all the
things that are asked of a candidate represents a significant amount of
time. In addition there are timelines and the notion of a process to
improve questions is not really feasible. Also I said it before, many of
the questions asked have nothing to do with the remit of a board member.
Effectively, issues are put before the board and the board typically asks
the WMF org for a proposal.
As to autonomy of communities, they exist within boundaries. In the past
projects have been put on notice, have been deleted and senior people from
a project have been banned (most recently at the Croatian Wikipedia).
Given that I am a member of the language committee, there are plans to do
away with Incubator and have projects provisionally created. When the
content of the project shows that it does not represent the language or
other significant problems it will be removed. This ensures a much easier
integration from the start for a starting project. NB a language will first
have to be considered "eligible". After this, it will have the prospect of
activation given the policies of the Language committee.
As to funding of what you call external .. calling the paid-for API
external is disingenuous. We already provide this service, it is part of
our commitment to share in the sum of all knowledge. With this service we
provide a better service to commercial entities that ask for a service
level and are willing to pay for the additional service. This service
improves quality all around. As to payments to external parties. I am all
for it when it provides a real service to our movement. I would
for instance make Wikicite a shared project with the Internet Archive
because it would deduplicate services and the combination will improve
services to us and to them.
You call the process opaque. It is. It is because it is attempting to bring
more engagement from all over the world, the way it is done is new and
there is a difference between the operational reality and the expectations
during the planning phase. This is not a community process even though the
objective is very much to engage a wider public.
Thanks,
GerardM
On Mon, 5 Jul 2021 at 08:18, Fæ <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm surprised at how odd the "selected questions" read,[1] which will
> probably result in off-topic or wooly answers by the candidates unless
> they have "abstracts" somewhere to unpack the coded language.
>
> "What is your opinion on the claim of autonomy by Wikipedia
> communities and the attempts of the Wikimedia Foundation to regulate
> control over community?"
> - No idea what issues this is attempting to cover, exactly which
> claims about autonomy, is WMDE going to spin off to become a public
> library, is the WMF going to get rid of project sysops and replace
> them with contractors? The question could have been a lot more
> specific.
>
> "How should the Wikimedia Foundation engage with emerging
> WikiCommunities in the near future (next 2 to 3 years)?"
> - What emerging communities, what is a WikiCommunity? Many (external)
> communities exist that don't have specific Affiliate representation,
> is this what it is implying. I don't know.
>
> "What do you think about the Wikimedia Foundation using funds for
> purposes not related to Wikimedia projects?"
> - The WMF uses funds for all sorts of things unrelated to the specific
> projects, for example, the Commercial paid-for API is an external
> commercial service, it is not intended as a service to the projects
> and the projects never asked for it. It's weird to have an 'official'
> question that implies other stuff does not exist.
>
> Agree that the opaque process followed for choosing these questions,
> then having no community process for improving them, is a missed
> opportunity.
>
> Links
> 1.
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/Candidates/CandidateQ%26A
>
> Thanks,
> Fae
> --
> [email protected] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
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