Wikimedia Foundation elections/2025/Candidates/Jonathan Cardy
Jonathan Cardy (WereSpielChequers)
WereSpielChequers (talk • meta edits • global user summary • CA • AE)
| Candidate details | 
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| Candidate video statement | ||
| Total word count for the whole application (required + optional questions) is 2500 words. | ||
| Have you read the minimum candidate requirements and verified you meet the minimum qualifications and the candidate eligibility requirements? | Yes | |
| Have you read the candidate guidelines and agree to abide by the guidelines? | Yes | |
| Required questions | ||
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| Why are you running for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees? What would you contribute? What would you like to learn more about? | This movement, and especially Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons has been an important part of my life for the last 18 years. But at the same time I have served on the boards for a number of non profits in the area where I live. I think I can bring my experience of serving on various charity boards, both grant giving ones and grant funded ones.
I took part in one of the earliest GLAM projects, the first editathon at the British Museum in 2010. Suddenly my internet hobby was something that got me talking to museum curators, later from2013 to 2015 I had a part time job at Wikimedia UK as their GLAM organiser. So I think I bring two useful things to the board, extensive experience on similar sized not for profit boards, and GLAM experience. | |
| Please describe your Wikimedia experience (such as contributions to the Wikimedia projects, memberships in Wikimedia organizations or affiliates, activities as a Wikimedia movement organizer, or participation with a Wikimedia movement ally organization). | I have contributed well over a hundred thousand edits each on English Wikipedia where I'm a Bureaucrat and have been an admin since 2009, and on Wikimedia Commons. I also have several thousand edits across 90 other wikis, with English WikiVoyage and English Wikibooks two where I have over a thousand edits. I'm one of the regulars at the London meetup, an active contributor at both EN WIKipedia and Commons and my GLAM involvement started in 2010 when I attended the first editathon at the British Museum. | |
| From your perspective, what should the Wikimedia Foundation be prioritizing over the next 3-5 years, and why do you see these as the most important priorities? | AI is coming, perhaps ineptly at present, but it is coming. However intelligence is not much use without access to sources. Individuals within our community have access to many paywalled sites that AI might not have access to, and much of our content is supported by links to long defunct sites that AI can't see. However intelligent, AI couldn't replicate what we now have without such sources. We can respond to AI with a combined strategy of getting access to paywalled sources to relevant Wikimedians, identifying what content can be trusted because of the reliability of other content added by the same editor or supported by the same lost site. Plus we need to get the AI operators to comply with copyright licences of sites such as ours. What AI is good at is converting other text to American English, and now would be a good time to improve our relatively low US readership by making EN Wikipedia more like the Chinese one, with various spellings of English a display choice for the reader. | |
| Please describe your experience with governing bodies of organizations (nonprofit or for-profit), mentioning the scope of your responsibilities, as well as the complexity of the organization (in terms of scale of operations, budget, number of people involved, or other meaningful measures) and the size of the board or body. | Over twenty years ago I spent a year as an elected representative on the European Works Council of a Dutch Multinational, ending when the subsidiary I worked for was sold. I was the only British member of that board.
From 2007 to 2016 I served two five year terms on the board of the Hampton Fuel Allotment Charity, (since renamed as the Hampton Fund). This is a local grant giving charity in my area, and by the end of my ten years I was Vice Chair, and chaired their General Grants committee which gave about a million pounds a year to local charities in their area of benefit. This organisation had a board of 11, about 5 staff and an endowment that was worth about $80 million. From 2006 to 2014 I served 8 years on the board of Richmond Housing Partnership, a Housing Association that owns and rents out about six thousand homes in South West London and employs a similar number of people to the WMF. From 2016 to January 2025 I served for 8 years on the board of SPEAR, a homelessness charity in South West London, ending my time there as the chair of their operations committee. Since 2018 I have been a Governor of Stanley Primary School, a state school that has about 500 pupils and a budget of about £4 million pounds. | |
| Questions from the Community (required) | ||
| These questions were sourced from the community. These questions are required to consider your application complete. If this section is not complete by 23:59 AoE, July 8 (11:59 UTC, July 9), your application will not be considered. | ||
| How do you plan to ensure transparency and accountability in your decision-making processes as a member of the Board of Trustees? | I've attended five Wikimanias and probably over a hundred meetups and editathons. I've been a regular at the monthly London meetup since 2008 and intend to continue to do so. I've also written articles for the Signpost on subjects as diverse as the RFA process and community health. | |
| What will be the first new issue you would like to bring to the attention of the Board for discussion, and how would you approach it? | When the endowment was first being discussed I supported it, partly in the belief that one day it would have grown to the point where we could announce to the world's cultural institutions that we had the money to be confident that Wikimedia Commons and Wiki Source could be funded for the foreseeable future. If we could promise them that Wikimedia Commons and WikiSource have the funding to be around for the foreseeable future, it would encourage more cultural institutions to deposit a copy of their digitised images on Commons and or WikiSource. | |
| How should decisions about trade-offs and prioritisation in Wikimedia technology or product areas be approached? Please explain what the trade-off is in your view. | I was at Wikimania in Mexico when the early discussions took place that lead to the IT wishlist, and I think that community support is the key to successful IT improvements. | |
| The number of Wikimedia affiliates has grown significantly over the past few years, but ensuring adequate resourcing can be a challenge. Given this, how might we rethink the movement ecosystem, including how affiliates are evaluated, engaged, and resourced? | For a global organisation we are over centralised. We started in the USA and haven't yet completed the transition to a global and federal model of governance more akin to that of the Red Cross. I'd like to see more of the affiliates become responsible for fundraising in their countries, and perhaps a split in the WMF with the creation of a Wikimedia USA. That needs to be accompanied with a grant funding/redistribution process that recognises that where we can raise the most money is not where our money can achieve the most benefit. | |
| As the Wikimedia Foundation's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) position transitions, what qualities do you believe the incoming leader should embody, and how would these contribute to the advancement of the Wikimedia movement? | No one person ever has a complete skillset, so when we recruit for a new CEO we should take into account the skills and qualities of the rest of the WMF leadership team. Though clearly the job requires diplomatic skills, people management skills and an international perspective. I would also like to the new CEO to have a background in academia. I see one possible direction for the movement in becoming closer to Academia. We share with academia an interest in communicating accurate knowledge to all humanity, and the right new CEO could improve our links there. | |
| Optional questions - Professional Experience, Skills and Education | ||
| These questions are optional. Responses will count towards the total word limit on your application. (Reminder: You will not have other opportunities to provide this information). | ||
| Please describe your professional career experience and relevance to board work. | My professional career used to be in IT and then local politics. From 2013 to 2015 I worked for Wikimedia UK as their GLAM organiser. | |
| Please describe how you handled, or advised others on, a complex problem in an organization. How did you work with others to address the situation? What was the change that resulted from your efforts? | I've been monitoring the request For adminship process on EN:WIki for many years and Ive been measuring both the drop in the number of new admins and the disconnect between the current community and the admin cadre. In 2023 after a request from an African editor I gave a remote presentation at wikindaba Morocco to try and encourage more editors from Africa to stand for adminship. | |
| Please describe your educational background, including degrees, certificates, and courses of study finished, and their relevance to board work. | I dropped out of University over forty years ago, I don't see my education or lack of it as particularly relevant to me in my 60s. Other that I can demonstrate that lack of formal qualifications doesn't preclude people from learning at any age and contributing to sites such as Wikipedia and its sister projects. | |
| Please add any relevant links describing your professional background, experience, profile (such as LinkedIn, staff page, etc.). | EN:User:WereSpielChequers | |
| Optional questions - Leadership Experience | ||
| These questions are optional. Responses will count towards the total word limit on your application. (Reminder: You will not have other opportunities to provide this information). | ||
| Please describe ways in which you have helped to form a bridge between multiple communities (such as by working on projects outside your home wiki, or working on a collaboration between multiple affiliates). | In 2010 I setup the death anomalies project which ran across dozens of language versions of wikipedia identifying instances where an individual was alive according to one language and dead on another. Thousands of articles were improved by that project, though it became defunct with the arrival of wikidata. | |
| Can you describe a policy, on wiki or off, that you helped to create or change? What did you learn from this experience? | I've been to five Wikimanias, and I've taken part in discussions about various potential bids. My experience from the Gdansk Wikimania is that catering for a diverse international audience should really avoid pork, and I say that as someone who really enjoyed the diverse pork dishes there. I have a UK passport and can go to most countries, but I'm conscious that I live in a country that is very hard to get visas for from much of the world, and I have supported policy proposals that Wikimania should either be in countries that welcome diverse international visitors,or should alternate between countries that are hard to get visas for and ones that are more open. The difficult balance is that there are also other criteria, obviously we shouldn't hold Wikimania in a country where LGBT wikimedians would not be safe. | |
| How have you been able to empower people to make their voices heard? | Request for adminship is one of the most stressful places on the English language Wikipedia. I have nominated a number of candidates over the years, ten of them successfully. Nominating can be a complex process with some of the most important interactions between nominator and candidate taking place by email. | |
| Can you describe how you have demonstrated the ability to guide others in solving problems, adapting to change or achieving goals, particularly at a leadership or management level? | I've managed staff, but more relevantly to this role, it has been an important part of being on a board of a not for profit, especially when you chair a committee as I recently did with the operations committee of a homelessness charity in my part of London. On wiki I think that guiding others is an important part of the nominator role in requests for adminship. I've nominated ten successful candidates for RFA on EN Wikipedia. | |
| Optional questions - Strategic Thinking | ||
| These questions are optional. Responses will count towards the total word limit on your application. (Reminder: You will not have other opportunities to provide this information). | ||
| Please describe your experience participating in or leading an organization in planning for its future. How did your work contribute to picking the right path for the organization? | I took part in Wikimedia's strategy exercise in 2009 and supported the idea that we should regularly survey the community. I think we are overdue to repeat that exercise. | |
| Verification | Identity verification performed by Wikimedia Foundation staff and eligibility verification performed by the Elections Committee | |
Eligibility:  Verified
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Identification: Verified Verified by: – NahidSultan (WMF) (talk) 16:01, 3 July 2025 (UTC) | |