Talk:Wikimedia Foundation elections/2025/Candidates/Jonathan Cardy

Reminder – complete your application for Board selection

@WereSpielChequers:

Hello,

Thank you for submitting your application for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees selection process. This is a friendly reminder for you to do the following before the end of the call for candidates period:

• Make sure that you have completed the WMF Board of Trustees Candidate Pre-Onboarding module;
• Make sure that you have read the minimum candidate requirements (including voter-eligibility) and verified that you meet the minimum qualifications and the candidate eligibility requirements;
• Make sure that your application is complete, including answering all the required questions, and that your whole application (required + optional questions) does not exceed 2,500 words; and
• If you have not done so already, submit your proof of identity to the Foundation per the protocol outlined here. You need to take this step even if you have submitted this proof previously for some other role.
• Please note: According to the Wikimedia Foundation bylaws, all Trustees must resign from any other board, governance, or paid positions at the Foundation and Affiliates within 2 weeks of appointment to the Board. You cannot be a paid member of staff on any affiliate while being a Wikimedia Foundation Trustee.

These steps must be completed by 11:59 UTC on 9 July 2025 otherwise your application may be deemed ineligible. Should you have any questions, feel free to contact the Elections Committee at electcomwikimediaorg.

On behalf of the Elections Committee,

RamzyM (WMF) (talk) 17:36, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

Optional questions from Sodium

I had a discussion about your candidacy with some other folks on the Wikimedia Discord and I wanted to ask you a few questions

• The way your candidacy is framed feels very very enwiki-centric, how do you plan to surface other communities like Commons, Wikisource (or even the concerns of other-language Wikipedia communities) some of whom have very different needs from enwiki ?
• Plus we need to get the AI operators to comply with copyright licences of sites such as ours. - This sounds like a simplification of a deeply complex policy and technical issue. How familiar are you with the nuance behind the copyright v/s AI debate ? Are you familiar about WMF efforts to combat AI scrapers or otherwise invest in helping create datasets to help in AI training ? Where do you map those initiatives in your head when it comes to Wikimedia's position for/against AI ? Where do you stand on Wikimedia's AI strategy ?
• If we could promise them that Wikimedia Commons and WikiSource have the funding to be around for the foreseeable future - What do you recon are the biggest challenges currently facing Commons, Wikisource and other smaller projects ? Do you see funding as the primary issue or are there technical, structural or product issues to be tackled as well ?
• You say you have a background in "IT" -- this feels like a extremely dated terminology for what is a vast field -- could you explain/expound on what your background there is?

Sohom (talk) 02:56, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

I'm sorry if you think I'm EN wiki centric, most of my edits are elsewhere, and I've been involved in cross wiki projects such as the death anomalies project.

Yes I'm aware that AI and copyright is a complex area, and there may be WMF initiatives that I'm not aware of. However I've been interested in this area for years, and my understanding of the problem is that the WMF has been more focussed on making sure that data from the projects is used than in making sure that large end users respect share alike and attribution.

Promising the cultural sector that WikiSource and Wikimedia Commons are going to be around for the foreseeable future is a long desired GLAM objective to encourage more digital donations of material to Commons and WikiSource. Challenges within those projects are a very different question. Three of the areas I'm aware of that need more investment are internationalisation, image identification and undeletion of images coming out of copyright. My wife is Georgian and I know that most of her friends and relatives have to use Latin alphabet keyboards to write with on Facebook etc, I suspect many other linguistic communities have similar problems and need interfaces that let them use a Qwerty keyboard to edit wikis in their own alphabet. I do some categorisation on Wikimedia Commons, I've seen software demonstrated offwiki that would allow easy finding images of similar things across commons, or geolocating and finding images nearby, both of which would help make Commons files more accessible. We also need tools that allow Commons reusers to find potentially better images than the ones they currently use, as an image used in Wikipedia for ten years may have been the best image we had available ten years ago, but possibly isn't now. Systematic undeletion is a whole other area. We have been deleting files that are in copyright for more than twenty years, long enough that we can now start a process of undeleting files as their copyrights expire.

I earned my living in IT from 1983 to 2007, 24 years mostly of working with what were then large mainframe databases. Yes if I were going for an IT job now my knowledge is dated, very dated. But it is part of my background and was extended over a long enough period that I have an understanding of the way that some IT problems disappear or change over time simply through changing IT economics. It has also been a skillset I have sometimes used on wiki, including usertesting of software such as the visual editor. WereSpielChequers (talk) 11:02, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

I'd also add that one year when the UK wasn't in Wiki Loves Monuments I helped categorise the Irish contributions, and in the process added images to articles in a variety of languages. My experience is that if a language version of Wikipedia has an unillustrated article on something and you add a photo of the article subject, you can do so without a caption. At least when the article subject is a building or neolithic monument. WereSpielChequers (talk) 09:18, 29 July 2025 (UTC)