[Foundation-l] Hiring of Interim Executive Director and Legal Counsel

Thu Jun 15 14:02:26 UTC 2006

Delphine Ménard wrote:

>To make a long story short, as I see it (and as I have made clear in
>an earlier post) the Foundation should *not* be ruled byt he
>community, no more than the community should be ruled by the
>Foundation. Separation as Aphaia put it and to which I agreed means
>that those from the community who wish to participate in the
>organisation are more than welcome, but that the community does not
>have the high hand on things it cannot be held responsible for. I said
>it earlier and I'll say it again, a great editor in any of the
>Wikimedia projects does *not* make a great board member/commity
>member/CEO/accountant, you name it. And the trend as I see it today is
>that people in the community judge by what they can see. And if the
>community is not involved in Foundation day-to-day business, they only
>see how many edits a person has. Not what their real skills are.
>
>Delphine
>  
>
One thing that democratic institutions do very well with is to get a 
diversity of opinions regarding a topic.  And to get opinions from new 
or shifting viewpoints earlier than most other types of governance units.

The Wikimedia Foundation needs to decide who their "constituants" really 
are in this case.  In other words, who do the board members really 
represent, and what is their purpose in being?  And what is the role of 
the WMF in regards to the Wikimedia projects?

The concern is that perhaps the board is becomming too insular and not 
really paying attention to the participants on the various Wikimedia 
projects.  My response to the above questions, from my viewpoint, is 
that the WMF exists as a support to see that the content on the various 
Wikimedia projects is developed in a consistant and organized fashion. 
 And to maintain the servers and other physical and intangable assetts 
that belong to the "community" that is putting all of this together. 
 They also exist to keep the needs of potential readers of Wikimedia 
materials and content in mind, as there certainly exists an audience of 
people who read Wikipedia but don't actively work in the creation of 
content.

One other constituancy group that is not often mentioned here is also 
the MediaWiki software developers.  While the software does exist to 
serve and help develop the community, there is a somewhat seperate 
community of people who are developing the software running all of this, 
and that is indeed a seperate "product" that adds to the dynamics of the 
WMF, and something that must be managed as well by the WMF board.  With 
very few exceptions these are all volunteers and are just as valuable as 
people writing Wikipedia articles.  And requires volunteer management 
experience.

The extra dynamic here is that there do exist multiple projects, and in 
essense seperate communities, including different groups speaking 
multiple languages.  fr.wikibooks has a very different group of people 
than zh.wikipedia, for example.  The WMF needs to cope with the needs 
and wants of both groups, and that isn't easy.

What the WMF does not represent is publishers who distribute Wikimedia 
project content, ISPs, or corporate sponsors, including grant agencies, 
nor any government.  It also doesn't represent critics of Wikipedia, nor 
people who feel they have been wronged by Wikimedia projects (read John 
Siegenthaler here), nor does it represent members of the popular press 
even though nobody likes bad publicity.

To this end, the view that there is some sort of seperation from the 
community and that there are two distinct entities, the foundation and 
the user/contributors is a falsehood.  The real truth is that there are 
a huge number of people that the WMF represents, and that they can't be 
beholden to a single group, such as en.wikipedia.  While Wikipedia 
certainly is the flagship project, the actual percentage of the total 
amount of Wikimedia content that is hosted on en.wikipedia, along with 
the number of participants, is a minority.  And a shrinking minority at 
that.  If you believe that decisions reached on the Village Pump of 
en.wikipedia represent the whole of Wikimedia projects, you have lost 
sight of many other participants that never get to those pages, even on 
Wikipedia.

My concern is that some recent actions, notably the checkuser policies 
but other issues as well, have ignored these other constituant groups 
and may cause some additional problems in the future if they are 
ignored.  I'm not saying that it is easy to get in touch with such a 
diverse group of individuals, but it is worth it to at least try.  Board 
members that are appointed because of close ties to current board 
members or because they are politically connected by whatever term you 
want to use to describe the politics, may not have the best interests of 
the Wikimedia projects at heart.  At the very least there needs to be a 
way to get a voice heard, and to have an avenue of appeal if you don't 
think something is working out, or that some sort of injustice is 
happening.  

Treating the user community as the enemy is going to seriously cause 
problems in the future if it is not addressed right away.  And some 
recent comments on this mailing list have made me feel like just that.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning