Wikimedia Foundation Affiliates Strategy/Implementation/Affiliate health criteria/Reports/2024/Wikimedia Stewards User Group
| Affiliate basic information | ||
|---|---|---|
| What is the affiliate name? | Wikimedia Stewards User Group | |
| Please list the languages supported by this affiliate | any | |
| Please list countries where this affiliate operates | any | |
| Reporting timeline (e.g. January-December) | January–December | |
| Reporting year (e.g. 2024 or 2024-2025) | 2024 | |
| Primary contact (user name) | DerHexer | |
| Secondary contact (user name) | Base | |
| Goal delivery | ||
| What is the affiliate mission? | The Wikimedia Stewards User Group serves to coordinate and enable growth of the steward team and better involvement of stewards in Wikimedia governance. | |
| What are the affiliate goals? Link to the strategic plan, if there is one. |
| |
| Organizational development | ||
| How does the affiliate make decisions? How are decisions communicated? | Membership in the group is open to anyone interested in steward recruitment, tool development, or any of the other topics included in the user group mandate. Voting membership will be restricted to current and former stewards in good standing. When consensus is not reached, a formal, internal voting process was established in 2022: Steward decisions. | |
| What is the current state of the affiliate finances? Link to the latest financial report, if there is one. | no budget, no grants | |
Affiliate health and resilience
| ||
| How many people participate in the decision-making process in the affiliate? |
| |
| Has there been any significant changes in the level of the affiliate membership body (e.g. increase/decrease of number of dues-paying members)? | plus three members in 2024, everyone is a volunteer | |
| Are there any affiliate activities in the past year that were led by affiliate members? Please share the highlights. | see the more detailed report | |
| Leadership and inclusion | ||
Diverse, skilled, and accountable leadership
| ||
| What kind of skills does the affiliate leadership possess? | governance, communications, technology | |
| Is there any kind of succession plan for the affiliate leadership? | yes | |
| Are there any trainings that affiliate leadership undergo before they assume their leadership position? | no, but there are a couple of public and non-public handbooks as well as mentor-like support | |
| Are there any requirements for affiliate leadership to disclose their conflict(s) of interests? | yes | |
Diversity balance (especially gender)
| ||
| What is the diversity level of the affiliate leadership and membership body? | members can join without revealing their identities and there has been no survey about this diversity yet; however, among the ~30 members, only a handful are known to be non-male | |
| How is the affiliate leadership encouraging gender diversity in the decision-making process(es) of the affiliate? | decisions are made by consensus without any kind of knowledge of the diversity of participants | |
Universal Code of Conduct compliance
| ||
| How does the affiliate leadership ensure, enforce, and evaluate compliance with the Universal Code of Conduct obligations? | our members have advocated for the establishment of a UCoC long before it existed and are experts in UCoC-related activities
furthermore, we have a close relationship to the U4C members through a joint Discord channel there is no extra training for new members because it is considered mandatory when you become a member of the group | |
| Engagement and Collaboration | ||
| Please share the publicly available records of regular meetings, activities, events, or conference in the past year where the affiliate has participated. | due to the sensitivity of our work, we're using a non-public wiki where meetings are documented with the support of WMF staff
however, our annual group reports summarize our activities in detail | |
| Community connection | ||
| How many affiliate members are active contributors to the Wikimedia projects? | close to 100 %, see statistics for stewards, e.g. here | |
| How many affiliate members are not active contributors to the Wikimedia projects? | close to 0 % | |
| How many affiliate members are active organizers (of projects, events, conferences, initiatives, etc) within the Wikimedia movement? | 15–30 % | |
| How many people have participated in affiliate projects, events, conferences, and/or initiatives in the past year? | about 10, at Wikimania 2024 | |
| Partnerships and collaboration | ||
| Please list all activities/initiatives that the affiliate has organized or co-organized in past 12 months. | see the detailed report | |
| What would affiliate leadership list as the top 3 (three) capacities of the affiliate? (e.g. evaluation, community governance, programs and events, organizational governance and resource policies, conflict management, partnerships, fundraising, communication and media relations, contributor development, on-wiki technical skills, policy advocacy, etc) | technology | |
| global governance | ||
| communications | ||
| What are the 3 (three) capacities that the affiliate would like to strengthen in the next 12 months? | language diversity | |
| gender diversity | ||
| grant-making | ||
| What are the organizations, community projects, or groups that the affiliate had been working or seeking to work with to develop and support the 3 capacities? | Wikimedia Foundation staff and board, local functionaries, U4C | |
Report of the Wikimedia Stewards User Group (WMSUG) for activities from January until December 2024.
Governance
[edit]Membership to the User Group is open to anyone interested in steward recruitment, tool development, or any of the other topics included in the user group mandate. Voting membership is restricted to current and former stewards in good standing. In the first quarter of 2024, the annual steward elections within the global Wikimedia community took place, resulting in seven new stewards (two of them returning to this role). That’s the highest number of successful applications since 2020, last time topped in 2015. Around the annual confirmations, three stewards lost their access. Two of them resigned before the confirmation, one of them lost it with good standing after consensus among the stewards and global community. With one more resignation since the last report, only 32 stewards remain active as of 6 January 2025, three more than in the previous report. Recruitment for new stewards in 2025 has begun but the numbers remain low. The user group remains consensus-driven among members with co-contacts Base and DerHexer. The internal “stewards decision” process was not used in 2024, consensus was reached among the group without the need of voting.
Communications
[edit]Due to the nature of our members who work in security-related fields, an internal wiki was used with some WMF staff members having access where experiences about global abuse were shared (documentation of cases, processes, etc.). We also continued using a private mailing list (steward-l) where Wikimedia Stewards discussed various cases in more than 500 emails in the reported period, less than the 650 messages reported last year. However, communication heavily increased in some of the other channels (IRC, Discord); more than 15,000 messages can be reported in the internal communications channel with additional 800 in collaboration channels (see below). This is almost twice as many messages than in the year before (~ 8,500 messages).
More than 5,200 tickets were handled in the VRT stewards queues in the reported period (that's 30% more than last year), mostly queries about previous actions of Wikimedia Stewards. The numbers remain low (while writing this report, less than 50 tickets are open), thanks to the support of Steward clerks and individual stewards who heavily help out here. As of now, there are five steward clerks; that's one clerk less who became a steward in 2024. Besides VRT tickets, hundreds of requests have been handled on UTRS. As of now, the internal mailing list for WMSUG members is barely used. Most conversations take place in the other channels as per above.
Within the reported period, Wikimedia Stewards advised WMF on several topics on a monthly base and joined additional calls, especially on the topic of temporary accounts with one permanent steward liaison since the beginning of 2024. Within this year, a couple of Discord channels with the WMF teams (esp. Trust and Safety) as well as other functionaries, checkusers and U4C members were opened and led to a closer collaboration with some of these groups and immediate feedback for developers. In particular the good work around temporary accounts helped overcome last year’s impression that WMF involves stewards in many feedback rounds but doesn't integrate the suggestions. The role of stewards liaisons seems to be useful in general (it also exists for the Ombuds commission) and was proposed for the Product and Technology Advisory Council. The number of stewards joining these calls is still low compared to the number of stewards but a few more seem to be interested in tech- and governance-related conversations now.
Online activities
[edit]Most standard onwiki activities of Wikimedia stewards are visible on a statistics page: Stewards/statistics. For editcounts of the user group please also have a look at these statistics with about 170,000 edits and log actions in the reported period which is a little lower than last year. However, the dramatic increase of pageviews for the Steward requests pages from 2023 to 2024 (0.6 to 2.6 millon) can record that the overall workload at the frontline is also growing. Furthermore, many actions are not publicly logged because of the nature of these actions or take place in one of the 900+ local wikis where they cannot be counted up.
Beyond these activities, Wikimedia Stewards helped out as scrutineers for several elections, including the 2024 Wikimedia Foundation elections, 2024 English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee and Inaugural Administrator elections, Movement_Charter ratification vote and others, as well as observers for various WMF committees. Besides that, we completed annual activities like the admin activity review/2023 for administrators on small wikis and helped out with other global activities, like CentralNotice. For the latter, the WMF has hired a Support Specialist who helped update the usage guidelines and prepared additional steps like trainings, new request templates, etc.
Wikimedia Stewards worked on several tools, scripts, gadgets and MediaWiki code that support their activities (see Phabricator board). However, stewards also had to get familiar with new technical developments like global blocks (alongside old global locks) and temporary accounts which changed our workflows. Thanks to the closer collaboration with WMF, the transitions seem to have run pretty smoothly.
Offline activities
[edit]Stewards once again met at Wikimania for internal meetings and exchanges with other groups, in particular functionaries (hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation). More stewards than last year were present at the conference. One of the members of the WMSUG was awarded the 2024 Wikimedia Laureate for their continuous service as a Wikimedia steward. In his speech, wearing a WMSUG shirt, they raised the need for a Steward Conference for offline exchange. With more feedback from the group, the Wikimedia Foundation started preparing a meeting (maybe alongside the U4C) in 2025.
Furthermore, one member of the group was selected to represent the WMSUG at the Wikimedia Summit 2024 where they joined the topic group on Global Council and WMF. When the Movement Charter ratification failed, they also joined mediation conversations between affiliates, WMF and communities at Wikimania (“trilogue”). Stewards attended regional and local conferences like German WikiCon and WikiCon North America and shared their experiences there. It remains valid that an attendance of stewards at international events can enrich technical and global conversations.
Publications
[edit]A couple of presentations about temporary accounts were given not only by WMF staff but also Wikimedia Stewards, e. g. at the Bangla WikiConference, German AdminCon and WikiCon. Furthermore, the first complete list of all global rights and their local impact (here: German Wikipedia) has been presented at the German WikiCon, too (slides), and has been linked at a prominent dewiki info page.
Evaluation of the group status
[edit]Where the new stewards clerks were most important (governance) step in 2023, the much closer conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation and other functionary groups in Discord fostered the progress of this group in the last year. With a new Stewards Conference at the horizon, the health of the Wikimedia Stewards User Group and its members seems to be improving.
Nevertheless, with new technical challenges and solutions like temporary accounts, global blocks, etc., the number of tasks and conversations for our group is rapidly growing. And there is still a huge need for new stewards, especially from underrepresented regions, for the daily work. All in all, with the establishment of the U4C, the stewards role seems to be getting more technical than ever before. This clearer focus seems to be more attractive for this role and led to a slight increase in members and participation.
Altogether, 2024 has been a good step forward for the stewards and global community governance. For 2025, we hope that the role of stewards can emerge even further and that we can continue serving the global community in the best possible way.