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Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-08-01/Election guide/Candidate Op-Ed, Michał Buczyński

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Here's a few questions I'm going to ask of everyone.

In the community, it's a widely acknowledged issue that the WMF has a hearing problem. Its financial resources are larger than ever, and yet we can't get the most of the support we want from the WMF, who instead spends time and ridiculous amounts of money on issues like branding. It took YEARS of screaming from the community, culminating in an open letter with 1000+ signatories to drive the very simple point that the WMF does not, should not, and will not ever stand for the Wikipedia Foundation with any legitimacy.

At the same time, we have huge amounts of support for increasing the modest resources of the community team. There are very tangible projects that have massive amounts of community support that get dropped because of this lack of resources.

So my questions are these. 1) Do you think the WMF has a hearing problem? If so, why do you think is the root cause, and what do you plan to do about it? 2) What do you make of the proposal to allocate at least 1% of the WMF warchest/yearly budget to the Community Tech team, broadly speaking?

Thanks for your time. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:40, 1 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Headbomb:, thanks for your questions and sorry for letting you wait: too many ongoing issues with running an affiliate, MCDC, health issues and regular candidating requirements like video messages. :)
Disclaimer upfront: in general I am with Mike and Shani that extra questions are very taxing, especially for the candidates with many duties (and I guess we want to elect rather people experienced and active :) ). Thankfully, per WMF Bylaws the candidates need to drop extra tasks when elected but before that they can (and probably should?) serve the Movement in other ways. Moreover, we are usually asked about our thoughts and ideas, while I think our actual actions and skillset should receive at least the same attention.
Having written that:
  1. Basing on my experience with the WMF: it is not a monolith, it is a big org with over 500 employees. Some people and teams are working actively to hear communities, some of them don't, but the general feedback is rather heard. I am pretty confident that in this case the communities were heard, just the decisions in large organizations tend to be slow in making and short in communicating (because many reasons, including complex graph of stakeholders and a need of legal safety). Certainly, it could have gone better but I am also hoping we all made right lessons from this story. (BTW mind it that there were also many people advocating for the change as it would simplify their lives a lot - which added much complexity and lead to some compromise).
  2. My chapter (Wikimedia Poland) boasts a strong community support programme and we consider it our programmatic axis #1. Regarding the Community Tech spending - in general I believe we should spend much more on the product/tools development: from MediaWiki through statistical tools assisting editting/patrolling/... in all the languages to Media uploaders, players, Wikidata etc. I don't know if it should be literally more funding for the Community Tech team, or rather more funding for dedicated teams. Considering the size of the budget and a needed scope of development, I think one team is not enough.
Hope it helps, aegis maelstrom δ 19:53, 22 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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