Template talk:Foundation content

Problems

Meta-Wiki is a community site, run by the community, and not the Foundation. It does not speak from the WMF's voice. Pages do not announce whether on any particular page "The Wikimedia community is welcome to maintain this page", as all pages on this site belong to the community, and notices speak from the communities voice. If the WMF decides to help maintain a page, it would be improper for the page to say that users "are invited to help us [the WMF?] maintain it", as the users are not helping the WMF. ("you are invited you to help us" is also a wording error.) The WMF also does not get to declare certain pages "WMF-owned" and uneditable. Finally, whether or not the WMF is assisting in documenting something is not exactly the most important thing about a page, and slapping such a huge notice on every WMF-related page indicating that it is or isn't edited by staff would be a mistake.

As this template has many issues, I think having this "live", as well as inviting translations (which will likely need replacing) is inadvisable. As such, I have blanked the template for the time being. --Yair rand (talk) 05:55, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

@Yair rand: We have been asked for many years to help clarify which pages the Foundation is helping maintain and which we are not. The lack of clarity on the issue continues to cause problems and confusion. If you have an alternative solution - I am open to it - but please do not undo an idea being tried out. There is no claims to ownership - simply a request that official content not be edited directly - which is hardly the first time we have made this request or had this conversation (nor will it likely be the last - but let's not conflate issues). I recognize you may not like this idea, but please respect that we also have a role in maintaining content about the Foundation on this project, and the lack of this label often leaves people displeased we are not maintaining content about the Foundation - which we did not create or have any capacity to maintain. Alternatively, we could just move all Foundation content off Meta-Wiki - but that also seems highly ill-advised. If you have a proposed alternative wording to suggest or another idea to consider - please propose it here, but please do not blank out the template in personal discontent. Thank you. --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 13:50, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

I've edited the wording to avoid suggesting WMF page ownership, or that pages about the WMF work differently than regular pages. I also changed the "warning"-style icon to the blue one, as lack of WMF participation isn't exactly an "alert"-style situation, and generally toned down the styling. What do you think?

There's another issue, that the WMF currently doesn't actually maintain most of the pages labeled as WMF-maintained at all, but perhaps there are distinct plans to change that? There's a difference between "declarative" and "descriptive" notices, and I suspect there will be issues if the WMF considers a notice to be the former and editors want it to work as the latter.

When the WMF wants people to not edit a page, I think a better place to make that request would be the talk page, not on the page itself. If something's a quote from the WMF (or other official source), that can be made clear so that users know not to edit it (see the box in Mission, for example), but it is not needed for entire pages to work like that. --Yair rand (talk) 16:53, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

@Yair rand: I think those edits are appropriate, I will double check with a couple folks internally, but do not anticipate any issues. Thank you for making a suggested improvement - I appreciate you working with us on this idea. Regarding official positions - I would certainly like it if posting on the talk page was sufficient, but from what I have seen, unfortunately it may not always be enough as some people do not always check the talk page. Additionally, when people are going to a Meta-Wiki page to get the Foundation's official position on something, and that position has been edited from a volunteer account, it can create confusion on if that position still applies. Ideally, over time, perhaps we can find better solutions. And perhaps we just should not attempt to use community spaces for official positions. I also see that variable as likely to be used a minority of the time. However, I am intrigued by attempting this idea, and accept responsibility for removing them if something better comes along and they seem no longer needed. Thank you! --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 17:54, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

@Yair rand: Offered some minor copyedits, let me know what you think. Thanks! --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 18:02, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

@GVarnum-WMF: Most of it looks fine, but I'm concerned by the change of "assist" -> "collaborate with the volunteer community". It's important that volunteers not get an impression that changes might require permission/consent from staff. The wording should imply that staff take part in maintenance, while not implying any particular authority or exclusivity. Maybe something like "participate in maintaining"? I'm not sure whether there's a risk that some might take it as "[only] staff participate in..." The "collaborate" wording avoids that issue, but comes with possibly being taken as implying authority (or non-wiki-like editing). --Yair rand (talk) 05:51, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Request for the Wikimedia Foundation to move to its own wiki

I request that the Wikimedia Foundation should move their content to the locked WikimediaFoundation.org wiki which is for Wikimedia Foundation staff only. The Wikimedia Foundation claim to have community consent for co-drafting content is not working out. In practice, the Wikimedia Foundation publishes their own corporate perspective which differs from the community perspective, yet with this template, the WMF is claiming collaborative coauthorship with community volunteers. In practice this template intimidates volunteers from editing. Wikimedia Foundation staff get paid to argue with volunteers about what content is supposed to be here, and volunteers are helpless to defend themselves due to having limited resources to debate when the other side will endlessly hire lobbyists to promote their position. For volunteers in lower and middle income countries, getting into a dispute with Wikimedia Foundation staff can either threaten their access to Wikimedia Foundation grants, or at least, there is a broad perception that chapters and usergroups in active disagreement with the Wikimedia Foundation will face financial and other penalties. There have been too many instances where some community stakeholder has had ideas which are contrary to the Wikimedia Foundation strategic objectives, and the result is always that the Wikimedia Foundation spends money to promote its way while volunteers have no such access to resources or a path to advocate for themselves.

The Wikimedia community always advocates for the Wikimedia mission. The Wikimedia Foundation has to find a balance between sustaining itself as an organization, and also advancing the Wikimedia mission. This creates a conflict of interest, as the Wikimedia Foundation will choose to advocate for itself in times when the ethics and values of the Wikimedia community of editors, volunteers, and readers will have a different position.

I request that the Wikimedia Foundation create a budget so that the Wikimedia community can organize its own independent thought, conversations, and opinions, specifically with the focus of reviewing conflict between the Wikimedia Foundation and the community stakeholders. For itself, the Wikimedia Foundation has no hesitation to allocate budgets to promote its strategic plans which it originates without community participation, and which the community protests. When donors give money to the Wikimedia movement, they do so because they believe in the values of the volunteers who have existed long before the Wikimedia Foundation, and who are part of a broader movement. The public global trust is in the community movement and not a faith in the structure and good intentions of the corporate process and institution. The Wikimedia Foundation is not the community, and every staff person at the Wikimedia Foundation wants a career, the esteem of their coworkers, and the approval of their superiors.

In many circumstances lower level staff at the Wikimedia Foundation have been fearful of the community because they know that higher level staff at the Wikimedia Foundation are ordering them to do projects and work without community consent, approval, or knowledge. The transparency is lacking, and there is no community consensus or support in place for this template's process of Wikimedia Foundation staff claims to be curating content in collaboration with the community. If Wikimedia Foundation really insists on having a collaborative content template, then have staff fund and train community groups to organize the community editing events to develop this content, which is the wiki collaborative way.

If anyone at the Wikimedia Foundation wants to answer questions in a video town hall answering to discuss resource sharing and community and Wikimedia Foundation relations, then please let's arrange it. It would be all the better if in advance, the Wikimedia Foundation funded diverse community groups around the world to independently say what they want and speak for themselves, without Wikimedia Foundation staff editing the summary consensus statements. Please Wikimedia Foundation have mercy on the volunteer and the Movement, I would like to believe that some of you in there still believe in community empowerment and will fund the community like you fund Wikimedia Foundation staff. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:10, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

@Bluerasberry: Thank you for that feedback on wiki housing and many other items. There are obviously and not surprisingly many other people who would like us to remain on community wikis, and we have collaborated on Meta-Wiki content since the start. However, it is always helpful to hear different perspectives. --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 19:45, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

I agree that, in an ideal situation, the WMF would not pay any staff to document itself on Meta-Wiki: The best case would be if the WMF declassified all appropriate internal material (that is, all internal documents/reports/communications/etc except those that would cause risks relating to legal, security, or personal privacy issues), allowing the community to effectively document the WMF on Meta, helped with the raw info. Unfortunately, essentially all documents are locked down, despite requests for their release, and unsolicited requests for particular pieces of information are typically rejected/ignored.

But with the current level of organizational opacity, I think that if the WMF were asked to move to their own site, they would set up a much more brazen/overt PR mill, and we would be left with scarce documentation based heavily on government-supplied/required data and offhand comments by staff (this makes up a lot of the sources in any case, unfortunately), as well as badly-detangled PR statements from the Foundation site. Relative to the alternative of WMF just staying away without opening up, the current situation here on Meta does improve how much information we get, however slightly. It's a bad state of affairs, but we work with what we have.

Assuming the above description regarding intimidation/penalization is accurate (which I have no reason to doubt), I think we would be better off working on that problem on a broader level than trying to just avoid it on this wiki by minimize work overlap with the WMF. --Yair rand (talk) 06:50, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Essay Disclaimer

It strikes me that when the official option is given, this is basically stating that this is the position of the Foundation, but it doesn't mention that the position may not have gained any sort of consensus. As a result, I've added a disclaimer similar to the one in Template:Essay to this template when the official parameter is given.

In general, I don't believe there should be mainspace pages on Meta (or anywhere else) that are not open for public editing and are not flagged with something similar to the Essay tag. (That is, pages in mainspace to which the wiki process doesn't apply.) TomDotGov (talk) 19:25, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Proposed edit

cc @GVarnum-WMF:

This could be made shorter and more welcoming with three changes:

s/"staff and contractors"/"staff"/ (the difference is trivial, confusing even to people on staff, and hard to translate)

s/volunteers/community/ (the term "volunteers" is confusing + can be inaccurate here; and staff are also community members)

change negative framing to positive framing for requested edits; general simplification for easier translation.

This page/section's content represents the Wikimedia Foundation's official position. The Foundation requests that any substantive edits be made by staff. Others are encouraged to suggest edits on the talk page.

Wikimedia Foundation staff participate with the rest of the community in maintaining this section's content.

Wikimedia Foundation staff do not actively participate in maintaining this section's content.

–SJ talk  00:50, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

I agree it would be nice to find a positive sentence. Not sure about removing "contractors" because I don't know what people read into the word "staff".

The sentence "do not actively participate" is quite confusing: I was tempted to remove the template on pages where staff is definitely contributing, but I gather the expected meaning is "don't necessarily participate". Perhaps the sentence could be changed to something like "No Wikimedia Foundation staff or contractors are tasked with maintaining". Nemo 06:11, 20 April 2023 (UTC)