User:Peteforsyth/governance

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In its first 20 years, Wikipedia and related projects have catalyzed interaction by an unprecedented number of contributors around the world, and with a wide variety of skills, interests, and strengths. This interaction raises many questions around governance: How does such a large, loosely-affiliated, and principle-driven community govern itself? What issues emerge through the governing actions of the Wikimedia Foundation, other movement organizations, formal governments? How does technology guide and/or limit the ways that people interact, in intended and unintentional ways?

This page is intended to capture some notes on each of these topics. It's intended to summarize them briefly, with links to more in-depth coverage where available.

I've written on many of these, see the "governance" category on my Wiki Strategies blog.

Five categories of governance issues[edit]

Community governance[edit]

How volunteers make decisions and resolve conflicts in a theoretically "flat" hierarchy. In this section I focus more on English Wikipedia than other sites, because most of the community governance occurs within specific projects. (I may expand this to cover other projects in the future.)

From most- to least-binding, English Wikipedia has five "pillars" (central guiding principles), a number of policies, even more guidelines, WikiProject-based guidelines, and essays by individual users. Decisions are made by Wikipedia's unique version of a consensus model: w:en:Wikipedia:Consensus I presented on this topic at Simmons College in 2011; I don't think there's video, but my detailed notes are here: outreach:Presentation: Wikipedia governance and culture

  • [ACTRIAL refers to a successful effort within the English Wikipedia community to take an experimental approach to solving a problem involving articles by new contributors. I present it in this section because the efforts within the English Wikipedia volunteer community were effective and worthy of study. The WMF's initial response was hamhanded and dismissive, and much bitterness ensued. Six years later, the WMF took a strong step toward resolution, by designing and conducting relevant research: w:en:Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed article creation trial/Post-trial Research Report
  • Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee (ARBCOM): Wikipedia's "supreme court" that handles the most egregious conflicts among users
  • The Signpost: Wikipedia's newspaper, an institution that can help focus attention and discussion within the community
  • Requests for Comment, a mechanism for developing consensus
  • Elections (functionaries, ArbCom, WMF board, etc.)
non-English Wikipedia

Organizational governance[edit]

How the Wikimedia Foundation's decisions and actions impact the community, and how that community influences those decisions. I would say the WMF has been startlingly bad at this throughout its ~15 year history, though there are a few bright spots, and it is well worth putting a strong focus on those. The English Wikipedia article User revolt describes several of these.

  • Strategy efforts from 2004-present have determined WMF priorities, and have impacted inter-organizational governance and other areas. (2009-2010)
  • Spanish Fork: Jimmy Wales (prior to the existence of WMF) suggested advertisements. Spanish Wikipedia community disengaged from Wikimedia and started a new website. This is thought to be an important factor in the formation of the WMF. Key meta quote: "Many features that define today's Wikipedia had to be fought for, and by people mostly overlooked in Wikipedia's mythology."
  • Knowledge Engine: Executive Director and board member pursuing potential $100 million, mission-shifting initiative without transparency to community, or even to staff or some board members. This one was covered reasonably well by the mainstream press. The Signpost played a significant role.
  • Superprotect: WMF asserted new powers suddenly, without process, and in response to a relatively minor software initiative. WMF fails to engage when presented with a letter signed by 1,000 community members.
  • Flow: an effort to design a new functionality to manage communication among Wikimedians (to replace talk pages with something more sophisticated). Resistance throughout from community members, no clear refactoring of discussion created, project ultimately mothballed (though a version has been deployed on MediaWiki Wiki and perhaps elsewhere).
  • Visual Editor: New software launched prematurely over the objections of English Wikipedians and others; backtracking, without much acknowledgment or refactoring of the points made by community members; ultimately re-released after some improvements.
  • Terms of Use rewrite: Example of highly effective collaboration between legal experts on Wikimedia staff and wiki experts in the community. Never written up, so its influence as effective process was not widely felt within the organization or the community.
  • Assessment of Belfer Center Wikipedian in Residence program: Program on behalf of an important funder of Wikimedia was authorized and defined not by a programs-oriented department, but by the development department. Funded Wikipedian in Residence, who like the WMF staffer involved had little Wikipedia background, then guided the client in ways that violated Wikipedia policies. This is an example of a debrief that ultimately resulted in improved policies within the WMF. Leadership from both executive and staff levels contributed to a positive outcome.
  • Banner fundraising: Several interlinked issues (honesty in fundraising banners, prominence and extent of banners, etc.) come up year after year. Many in the community feel that attention given by the WMF is meant more to appease than to resolve the issues. This mostly occurs on the Wikimedia-L email list.
  • Office block of Fram
  • Board composition: Five board-appointed seats, three community-elected seats, two Chapter/Affiliate-selected seats; "Founder's seat" is the only one with no term limit; board expelled a community-elected member for unjustified reasons related to the Knowledge Engine (he was later re-elected); errors in appointing board members with insufficient vetting; board members speaking making disparaging public statements about Wikimedia projects with little consequence.
  • Approval of new projects, e.g. Wikivoyage and Wikidata, have often involved the WMF following review and advocacy from community members.

Inter-organizational governance[edit]

Relations among the Wikimedia Foundation, the Wikimedia Endowment, Wikimedia chapters and affiliates, and related organizations like the Internet Archive, Creative Commons, Electronic Frontier Foundation, philanthropic foundations, etc.

Governmental governance[edit]

Intellectual property laws, censorship...

Technical governance[edit]

How software (intentionally or otherwise) influences user behavior and the success or failure of peer production and community governance...how decisions about software are made. (The subject of my most recent essay: en:WP:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-04-26/Opinion )

  • In 2011 the WMF hired a Community Development Coordinator and a Bugmeister, two roles which helped formalize relationships between WMF staff developers and volunteer developers.
  • The Phabricator platform (preceeded by Bugzilla), along with the MediaWiki Wiki, and other resources, formalize the process for recording, prioritizing, and addressing bugs and some feature requests.
  • WMFlabs: An outgrowth of the 2008-2010 Strategic Plan, this site was a successor the Toolserver, and provides a resource for innovation and creating features for community members.
  • Community Wishlist Survey: Starting in 2015, the WMF began an annual program to collect information on what software features its communities desire, and focus organizational resources on the highest-ranked features. This program has been well received and has yielded worthwhile results. Its name and characterization is unfortunate, in that it presupposes that the community is but one stakeholder (alongside, e.g., readers) rather than a partner in the desire to serve readers.

Telling the stories[edit]

Stories about conflict and resolution in governance are important to a loose-knit community sustaining a sense of shared history, and preserving institutional knowledge and culture. They are also important in helping the wider world understand the product (the websites), by better understanding the philosophy and passion that go into creating them. They can also help organizations like the Wikimedia Foundation learn and capture knowledge about how to best interact with their community.

Stories about governance can be challenging to tell in a way that they capture broad interest.

I would contend that the Wikipedia and Wikimedia communities have not done a great job of telling their own stories, and the mainstream press has also substantially failed to capture important stories about one of the most widely-read and influential websites of the last 20 years.

For instance, the rewrite of the Terms of Use (mentioned above) was a great success, in terms of collaboration between WMF executives, staff, and community members. But it has not been told anywhere; you'd have to pore through disjointed discussion archives to get a sense of what happened.

The Signpost plays an important role. The Wikimedia Foundation does tell many stories, but perhaps unsurprisingly, it does not tend to tell stories about conflict. The mainstream press has done a good job with certain stories, but missed others. Almost entirely missed: Superprotect. Covered, but in less depth and with less prominence than it might have been: Knowledge Engine. Good individual stories: Spanish Fork.

Meta Wiki and email lists such as Wikimedia-L play a significant role as well.

Legitimate and appropriate criticism vs. trolling[edit]

Influence[edit]

How can individuals influence governance issues of various kinds?

How can organizations get engaged?

How can we discern common themes in the wishes of the hundreds of thousands of Wikimedia editors?

Climate change focus[edit]

See also[edit]

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