WMF Board considering the removal of Jimmy Wales' trustee position | Hacker News Reader

WMF Board considering the removal of Jimmy Wales' trustee position

en.wikipedia.org

I'm just reading this before work, but it must warrant more follow up. Wales doesn't want to step down until Wikipedia is safe from "outside interests who do not understand our values". It's easy to imagine the sort of folks who'd want control of Wikipedia.

Was it earlier this year that we narrowly avoided the .org sale to a vague corporation? It'd be tragic to see Wikipedia meet that fate as well!

As a Wikimedian for over ten years, I'm concerned that the WMF has been listening less and less to the community over time. Examples include the Superprotect incident, Flow, and the rebranding (in which the WMF sought community feedback, and then proceeded to ignore it and do the exact opposite of the overwhelming consensus). I trust Wales more than someone nominated via the vague "community nomination process". This looks to me like a takeover by certain members of the Board who believe they know better than the community.

Please expand on those three incidents.

Please put in minimal effort yourself before demanding it of others in one sentence? This took 30 seconds:

#1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superprotect

> "Superprotect" was the name for a superuser tool granted to Wikimedia Foundation staff but denied to all Wikimedia community members starting in August 2014.[92][circular reference] Wikimedia Foundation staff used the tool to force the installation of the Wikimedia Foundation's software against the wishes of the Wikimedia community. This conflict was unprecedented. Erik Möller, then director of the Wikimedia Foundation, managed the Superprotect tool. The software in dispute was MediaViewer, which was a software feature that guided Wikipedia readers into viewing images in a certain way. Wikimedia commentator Andrew Lih described the superprotect feature as "Orwellian-sounding".

#2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Flow

> Flow, also known as Structured Discussions, is a project of the Global Collaboration team at the Wikimedia Foundation to build a different discussion and collaboration system for Wikimedia projects.

#3 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Comments_on_the_Rebranding_S...

I like Wikipedia as it is now. I presume Jimmy is responsible for this. I feel it’s going to be 5 years before Wikipedia is plastered in ads with selective editing rights going to paid sponsors if he’s gone.

> plastered in ads

Besides Jimmy's lovely face?

I'm inclined to treat "please donate" ads for Wikipedia itself very differently than paid ads for third parties.

I dislike them just as much. I dislike advertisements because I don't enjoy people trying to make me act irrationally. Wikipedia advertisements are just as manipulative as normal ads, if not more so.

Perhaps you can say that Wikipedia ads are manipulative, but I wouldn't say that it makes one act 'irrationally'. It's not irrational to support Wikipedia. In my view, they drive the point home that Wikipedia's infrastructure and governance is not free to maintain and the money has to come from somewhere.

I love Wikipedia[1]. And if they only asked for the money they needed to run Wikipedia, and did so in a straight-forward way, I'd be happy enough. But the reality is, despite what the frequent, heavily optimised ads might have a reader think, they have enormous amounts of money already, and lots of it is spent questionably or on other projects.

[1]Although I share Gwern's concerns as laid out here: https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism

>In my view, they drive the point home that Wikipedia's infrastructure and governance is not free to maintain and the money has to come from somewhere.

That might be true, but AFAIK "hosting" makes up a small part of WMF's budget. The ads definitely give an impression that wikimedia is struggling to pay hosting expenses, but this isn't really the case. According to their 2018 report[1] "Internet hosting" and "Depreciation and amortization" combined only make up 6.4% of their budget. "Salaries and wages" makes up 47.3%, but it's unclear how much of the staff is related to IT, rather than in admin or advocacy.

[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/fin...

On a different note: Is a person acting rationally when they make the right move for the wrong reason?

This comment seems hilariously out of place when you consider Facebook is being accused of undermining democracy with its ads.

I had in mind when I said normal ads fast food ads, cell phone ads, etc.

Ads on Wikipedia might take the form of a banner at the top and bottom of the page or they might take the form of suddenly the page for Nestle only talks about how great the company’s products are and doesn’t mention the Colombian death squads or child slavery.

I agree. I find Wikipedia's marketing communications very annoying and I've explained why in response to some of their emails in I think a constructive and polite manner. For the type of organization they are, the way they communicate is just patronising. I gave them money until they started asking for it in the manner they do now.

I dislike Wikipedia as it is now. I'm not sure if Jimmy is responsible for this, but it would be nice if someone sorted out the paradox of "notability" and/or reliance on proof-by-publication.

> "the paradox of "notability" and/or reliance on proof-by-publication"

What does that mean?

I've seen articles removed as "not notable" that "should be moved to fan wiki". The arguments for deleting them involve cryptic insidery jargon like "I vote delete because WP:NOT and WP:PRC"

Someone quite upset with the process ranted about how these kinds of deletions are to Jimmy Wales' financial advantage. I thought it was paranoid, but it's not an utterly absurd assertion, as Jimmy Wales does have financial share in one of those fan wikis.

Sources are publications, so things are proven by what established media says. Difficulty arises when publications are more likely to repeat a narrative than originate it (herd safety). As such the problem becomes: "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one" - only now echoed in an supposedly neutral "pedia".

Notability is the same problem: something is notable if there is published media about it, otherwise not so. My perception is relevance and truth are being outsourced to 3rd parties based on whether or not you blog post has corporate registration.

I've found true the observation that Wikipedia is great for uncontroversial topics, but if it's controversial, the mechanisms that are supposed to maintain neutrality falters.

Not sure who you can trust more in this conflict. I just know that political articles are full of partisan crap, I am sorry not to find better words for such a state.

I also know that the optimism and perhaps naivete was the better patron. Random vandalism of some pages wasn't even a large issue, but we can see severe framing in many cases and especially hot-button topics are often unbalanced.

Best articles come from random individuals from all over the planet. Certainly not from the WMF, but also not necessarily from a dedicated community.

I agree. I'd rather not explicitly state which side of the political spectrum I've noticed being a problem, but I've certainly seen a particular tendency to see articles that they politically oppose be much less neutral, and the references allowed in the first place very skewed towards one side.

I wonder to what extent it is that perhaps Wikipedia draws editors of a certain leaning (much as some professions seem to - on both sides).

Whatever, it's incredibly frustrating when you see the framing and feel the umpires are also often in the same bubble as the editor pushing their position on the article.

> I'd rather not explicitly state which side of the political spectrum I've noticed being a problem

Why do you hesitate to say that the left are causing a problem?

Same reason your comment appears in grey - they'd rather not be censored.

It's the same political side that has been working with the MSM, Twitter, Facebook etc. to silence opposing views and "fact check" stories they don't agree with.

even if the political articles are full of partisan views, they are not written on stone, there is scope for improvement as much as there is scope for vandalism. Everything involved, the internet, the information boom, the robust misinformation, high levels of polarization are really new and emerging challenges. This entire medium and its ecosystem is new, as much as troubling these things are, they are interesting too.

The question is, will the new leadership be interested in solving this problem? Or do they even view it as a material problem?

A primary concern of the 'politicization' of information is frankly the commitment to rigour and objectivity of the leadership cadre, who are often lacking in self-awareness with respect to these issues.

People who use Wikipedia for self-publicity are a much bigger problem IMO.

Until a few months ago, for instance, the Automatic Differentiation Wikipedia page had been gutted by someone looking to publicize their generally uninteresting pre-print on arxiv.

Random vandalism is a huge problem that requires a ton of ongoing effort to contain. It's mostly invisible to normal users because there are enough volunteers helping out with supressing it, but it's a huge effort nonetheless.

But how does all that even relate to the question of Jimmy Wales' seat on the board? The board doesn't moderate individual articles.

So Wales' position appears to be simply "the community needs to be more core to the leadership deciding process, and I'm the best person to see that happen."

I'm not disputing it, just interested in views on it - to me it seems reasonable as a default, but then I am concerned about what I see as a (political) bias on Wikipedia - mentioned elsewhere in these comments - that is presumably a reflection of a particular "type" being over-represented amongst editors (see equivalent biases each way in say, academia and the police) and wonder if having a stronger "professional" (neutral?) representation might not be such a bad idea.

At least some of the Board members who are proposing this move are people who I wouldn't exactly consider politically neutral (although, to be clear, they have made great contributions to the project, and I don't mean to diss them or anything). I think Wales is more centrist than they are if anything, although he does have a slight Objectivist slant.

I'm not sure political bias in Wikimedia governance is actually a problem though. The Wikimedia movement doesn't claim to be neutral, it has a normative mission to support free knowledge, and has pushed for certain political goals in the past (e.g., the SOPA blackout, suing the NSA, supporting human rights activists in authoritarian countries, and politically titled editathons like Art+Feminism/WikiLovesPride, all of which I personally agree with btw). Article content itself should be neutral, but that's a separate matter from governance. Everyone comes to the project with their own biases and there's no such thing as a "neutral person", but we aim to put those biases aside when editing content. (At least on Wikipedia; some smaller sister projects like Wikiversity don't have "neutral point of view" policies.)

WMF seems to have been colonized by the professional "nonprofit" crowd. They continue to burn ever more money and beg for more and more (rather than building an endowment).

In my opinion they're headed for collapse and I'd rather see more involvement from Mr Wales and less of the current crop of leadership.

If Wales gets kicked out and starts Wikipedia 2, I'll help edit it. Wikipedia has a lot of community problems, maybe Wikipedia 2 will fix them.

The problem is this has been tried in at least two significant efforts and the results pretty disastrous, at least on the political bias front.

Conservapedia - right wing

RationalWiki - left wing

Neither are remotely trustworthy for anything that might require a genuinely neutral take.

I'd like to see Wikipedia fixed rather than replaced, though I guess the complexity of doing that is partly what has spurred the article here.

Both of those wikis were started specifically to promote an ideology (conservatism, and internet atheist subculture, respectively.) Nowhere in the charter of Conservapedia is any admonition to be unbiased! "Be conservative" is in their name! (And their slogan, and their site rules...)

The same is true of Rationalwiki, but less directly. It was created by the promoters of a specific ideology, and as the chessboard of subculture politics evolved, the fact that the people who posted there were generally inclined toward promoting ideologies proved to be a more stable trend than any particular ideology. Right now it's one kind of leftist, but in the future it could evolve into a breed of leftism, or something else entirely. In any case, it will probably go on being ideological in nature, as it always has been, right from conception.

Wikipedia has done relatively well as far as political bias goes. Emphasis on the word "relatively," but it's not the worst thing ever. Jimmy Wales is the best person to lead an attempt to repeat that state of not-abject-failure, because we already know that he is a reliable supporter of democratic principles and sticking to the facts. (Democratic principles including the democratic principle of averaging the opinion of everyone who shows up.)

the democratic principle of averaging the opinion of everyone who shows up

This only works wrt neutrality if the people who show up are representative of the population as a whole, and as already discussed in other comments Wikipedia seems to draw a particular type in the same way some professions do.

Wikipedia is already pretty biased, especially when it comes to obscure writers or political figures. It’s clearly become an activist website, or at least one that looks the other way while pages are rewritten to fit the zeitgeist.

I’d like to see a Wikipedia in the old encyclopedia style, when being neutral was the goal. As stated in their own rules, Wikipedia just uses the collective opinion of its sources, many of which are extremely biased.

AFAIK, RationalWiki was never intended as a general-purpose encyclopedia, but primarily as a wiki to document the shenanigans at Conservapedia (which was intended as a general-purpose encyclopedia) which then broadened into "analyzing and refuting pseudoscience and the anti-science movement".

That begs the interesting question that is: what are the worthwhile alternative/competition to Wikipedia today?

In the past, we had competing dictionaries, encyclopedias, where the multiparties existence was a concrete reminder of checking any source of information against other competing ones.

Today, we mostly refer to Wikipedia as the online reference encyclopedia. What are the others? how are they operating? How would it operate if the Wikipedia monolith had to split into several forks?

Wikipedia is explicitly designed to be legally mirrorable and forkable and several mirrors and forks of it exist.

On the universal scale on which Wikipedia operates I don't see any, however in particular knowledge domains others seem much better.

Eg Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy.

This is presumably because Wikipedia's brilliant democratic approach has its inevitable downsides which professionally curated resources don't have to deal with.

As far as a universalist resource goes, Quora showed promise in it's early days, and StackExchange still has a powerful presence but I'm not aware of anything that directly competes at the same level of similar knowledge value.

Given the vast success of Wikipedia, it still seems odd to me that the 'old' Encyclopedia companies, who understandably had their hats handed to them from 2000-2015 ... haven't really seemed able to even take a real shot at being an alternative. Even the UI to these things still feel clumsy and outdated, made by 'book' people.

The UK gov. uses BBC as a Foreign Policy tool of sorts, I'm surprised they haven't done a similar with with their encyclopedia companies. Socializing them and having some kind of quasi-public editing by 'sanctioned' individuals (i.e. professionals in a field) may yield something usable on the relatively cheap.

Why did Jimmy Wales put himself in a position within his own organization where others can kick him out?

(Or am I missing something and is this not the case..?)

The goal of the institution is to objectify those who command its hierarchy. It's assumed to be possible to do. And in this assumption, we are led to be hopeful for an enduring service.

I fear that such an "objectification" would change the mandate of Wikipedia as soon as some subjects are installed.

> Stallman's concept specifically included the idea that no central organization should control editing.

Can you imagine that I have the feeling that some people might have a problem with that and see it differently and explicitly like to go back to old times of the classical encyclopedia?

Of course. These are ostensible goals. The goals don't have to be realized, in order for the hope to appear.

What governance models would prevent this kind of coup?

Ever since two beloved co-ops (PCC, REI) were privatized, I've been eager to learn about more durable, resilent models.

Are there case studies of other orgs to study?

The catholic church is an old organization.

Chick-fil-a, Elon Musk inc. immediately come to mind. Just keep it in private hands, the grubby profit minded masses don’t belong in some enterprises, non-profit or not.

I was very active in Wikipedia around 2005. Amazing it's been that long. I think Jimmy has shown to be a person of great integrity over all these years, and he should stay.

i wonder if wikipedia was community owned it wouldnt suffer from this kind of footballing

it really seems obvious wikipedia is a prize that some private interests would love to gain control over, and this type of action would result from it

Like with many things over the last few years something that should have been apolitical has become very politically polarized and partisan

I wish and hope Wikipedia would return to an apolitical non-profit out to disseminate factual information, but sadly I believe that ship has sailed.

Here's the problem: facts have a liberal bias.

If you try to create an apolitical platform, then you created a platform incompatible with facts.

Possibly related:

https://swprs.org/wikipedia-disinformation-operation/

An example of a recent unusual executive change in an influential community:

https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/k6iay8/rjoeroga...

Baseless conspiracy theory? See for yourself:

https://old.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/about/moderators

Another curious development:

https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy_commons/comments/k6eq7v/...

And then there's the craaaaaazy theory that QAnon is a CIA PsyOp (sorry, couldn't find a decent link and I am out of time). Would controlling such an entity not be useful in many different ways, in that it can be used very effectively to influence the beliefs of both conspiracy theorists, as well as non-conspiracy theorists?

People's perception of reality is a function of what information they consume. Controlling the major information distribution channels seems like it would be a good idea if you're the type of person/organization that desires to accomplish certain goals that may require public support.

Is anything like this happening today? How would one know, for sure?

I have never given assent to Wikipedia ever since I realize that Jimmy Wales just uses it as his personal piggy bank. He’s an arrogant cancer that should have been ushered to the door long ago.

Personal attacks will get you banned here. Perhaps you don't owe this person better, but you certainly owe this community better if you're posting to it. No more of this please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com