2024 WUG TAT Affiliate Annual Reporting Deferment Request Reasoning

Wikipedia is first and foremost an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language.

— Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, 8 March 2005

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.

— Wikimedia movement vision, Meta-Wiki, 2006

By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us.

— Our strategic direction: Service and Equity, Meta-Wiki, 2017

People-centeredness means that every aspect of our Movement must address the needs and challenges of the people who power it and whom it serves, so that each one can contribute in their best way to the sum of human knowledge.

The well-being, security, and safety of all participants is a prerequisite for sustaining and growing our projects and communities.

Striving for equity requires Wikimedia stakeholders to treat everyone fairly and based upon their circumstances.

Contextualization allows us to recognize that there is not a single set of processes that are efficient and effective everywhere.

— People-centeredness, Safety & Security, Equity & Empowerment, Contextualization @ Wikimedia Volunteering Movement Principles, Meta-Wiki, 2017

As demonstrated first in Tatar Wikipedia community strategy (2015->) and later in the WUG TAT's Objectives (2018), the only priority of our Language-oriented Thematic Community is using opportunities offered by various Wikimedia projects to contribute towards creation of all the soft infrastructure necessary for Tatar language environment to obtain identical capacities for use in information-knowledge access and scientific-business needs as those enjoyed today by English-Russian-Chinese-Arabic-Spanish and the sum total of all other human languages on Earth.

Based on the need to continue advancing in this direction and the newly discovered changes in Wikimedia regulations taking place over the course of recent years, that we are unlikely to be able to comply with any time soon, our community has come to decide on making the following

Requests to the Wikimedia movement international volunteers-led thematic committee

Dear Affiliations Committee colleagues,

This is to request your consideration of the possibility:

1. To allow WUG TAT to stay in touch with Wikimedia movement bodies via whatever contact persons it currently has until identifying a New Principle Contact Person, meeting Wikimedia requirements introduced in 2020,
2. To approve WUG TAT's desire to continue sharing its annual activity reports with own international Wikimedia volunteer colleagues for 2024 and upcoming years in whatever format it finds acceptable until it becomes capable to meet expectations of the 2024 Mandatory Affiliate Health Reporting format or whatever later editions or changes in this matter,
3. to defer WUG TAT being recategorized from Wikimedia affiliates in good standing into Wikimedia affiliates out of compliance for as long as possible if either 1, 2 or both are deemed impossible,
4. to recommend Wikimedia Foundation to assure timely and proper multilingual translation of all of the key movement-related content on its official website, foundation and [[:meta:|community wikis]], as well as various community surveys into all of the Wikimedia supported languages and otherwise communicating to respective underresourced language-dedicated volunteers communities in their respective local languages only,
5. to communicate the challenges we've discovered to other Wikimedia movement bodies that can support similar non-territorial language-oriented underresourced Wikimedia communities in continuing to feel themselves a respected part of the volunteering movement meant to advance towards the world, described in the quotes above.

We are conscious of the responsible function you are performing and grateful for your continuous support of Wikimedia volunteering movement's long-term sustainability needs. Thank you for whatever you come to decide as appropriate.

Why

This might not be an exhaustive list, but we hope it demonstrates our reasons for this request, once we discovered that a regular Activity Report is not acceptable any longer and we have to comply with a number of conditions we've been unaware of previously, which we feel we can't meet any time soonish.

1. WUG TAT is a Wikimedia User Group, a club of Wikimedia volunteers contributing into Tatar-language projects, supporting each other and sharing our Wiki-knowledge with each other, with other language speakers and all other Wikimedia stakeholders whenever they show interest, not a Wikimedia organization with formal processes and roles, and was never intended to be one.
2. WUG TAT members are not giving priority to any specific set of cultural values or types of knowledge, not interested in promotion of any kind - thus not looking into collecting, tracing, recording, verifying or discussing each other's or anybody elses personal views, details or other data, except for publicly available usernames and statistics and prize delivery details in cases related to recognition of their onwiki contribution as part of various content creation contests and marathons, or celebrating other achievements of our colleagues.
3. Majority of WUG TAT's currently active members and all of its contact persons are citizens and residents of Russia. In the course of 2022-2024 the country's Federal Legislators have adopted and the President signed into law a number of vaguely phrased changes to the governing laws "On Mass-media", "On Non-Profits" and others, which effectively forbid access to, sharing of and other forms of cooperation with foreign Non-Profit, Mass Media or Government-owned entities and their platform-based materials - finable in line with administrative law, punishable by prison time in line with Criminal Code or both. Russia has traditionally been the country where Courts rubber-stamps Prosecution opinion, but access to legal justice has been effectively further decreased. Meanwhile state political leaders are continuously introducing new or strengthening existing mechanisms meant to shield the Russian society from the erroneous thinking, which is not patriotic enough, not in line with the approved traditional Russian ideology, or tolerant of unfriendly NATO countries, their and other states' legal entities that do not abide by the current Russian legislation or spreading what's seen or suspected as anti-Russian views, as well as publicly calling to ostracize those not abiding by the newly-instituted behavioural norms. There were cases when an unspecified circle of legal and private individuals has been proclaimed extremist movements, consciously promoting enemy ideology, with no safeguards against new categories appearing at will.
4. Russian Wikipedia - the locally most well-known of Wikimedia projects - and US non-profit Wikimedia Foundation which hosts it have been previously found to be in violation of the Russian legislation. It is quite possible that the announced fines thereto have not yet been paid and court-decreed content corrections made by the respective language community. Unlesss the situation is resolved and Russian executive government bodies choose to escalate, the steps they could take will be recognizing Wikimedia movement as an undesired (read - extremist or terrorist) organization, any cooperation with any of the bodies thereof, individually-contributing editors or personal contribution thereto as collaborating in respective destructive activities and introducing some form of access limitation.
5. Russia country chapter Wikimedia RU's local Non-Profit entity is now in dissolution process, as it has been recognized a foreign agent following similar recognition of one of its co-founders and the last director Stanislav Kozlovsky. This has effectively sealed Persona Non-Grata status for all of Wikimedia projects and their language editions in Russia for years to come, whilst excluding Stas from public life from indeterminate period as well. His only fault being to attend Moscow court hearings in Russia vs. Wikipedia/Wikimedia Foundation cases out of curiousity and answering questions from journalists/media outlets, some of which were later themselves recognized as foreign agents.
6. International Wikimedia volunteers-led committees working in recent years on various aspects of Movement_Strategy development have come up with different documents and procedures to give some formal structure to the governance processes within the Wikimedia world, whilst Wikimedia Foundation later approved these as mandatory for all relationships with affiliated Wikimedia volunteers' entities (globally-distributed independent thematic partners). WUG TAT, due to its specific circumstances, did not take part in developing or discussing these, nor even could have participated effectively. It this case, official acceptance and adoption of the outcome documents, as well as abiding by the Wikimedia Foundation's unilaterally prescribed procedure would
   1. constitute a violation of cultural rights' of an independent linguistic community, that can't naturally meet or comply with these
   2. become the ground for suspicion that the UG, its individual members or an undisclosed circle of the wider language community members might be in violation of applicable Russian Federation laws (see #3), which might cause legal and various other risks to their civil, economic and wider human rights.

Steps forward

On top of the priority needs of every language-centered Wikimedia community, WUG TAT will eventually need to find a way to achieve the following to fully normalize its relationships with the Wikimedia Foundation and wider Wikimedia movement entities, such as various independent thematic volunteers' committees, country chapters, thematic and partner organizations, various user groups:

• to have access to the Tatar Meta infrastructure describing all Wikimedia movement principle bodies, procedures and processes, get acquainted with these, adapt and adopt own appropriate documents - to avoid context-dependent misunderstandings within the local community about things Wikimedia, as well as when communicating with the international colleagues to enrich them with locally-available cultural knowledge-based understandings
• to identify an individual who will be interested and capable to meet all expectations and consistently perform all functions to be a Qualified WUG TAT Primary Contact Person
• to identify a format and a procedure of bilateral and multilateral sharing, convenient to all

Community Consultation

Карар кабул итү / Approval vote / Утверждение

TT: Викимедиа проектларының татар телле бүлекләренә һәм мохитләренә өлеш керткән һәм 2024-12-31 кадәр татар телле вики-кулланучылар төркеменә кушылуны белдергәннәре тавышлары санала.
EN: Votes of users with positive content contribution into Wikimedia projects' Tatar domains or spaces that have declared joining Tatar language Wikimedia volunteers community no later than 2024-12-31.
RU: Учитываются голоса участников, имеющих положительный контентный вклад в татароязычные разделы и пространства проектов Викимедиа, заявивших о присоединении к объединению татароязычных вики-волонтёров до 2024-12-31 включительно.

Яклыйм / Support/ Поддерживаю

1.  Support Il Nur (talk) 17:03, 25 January 2025 (UTC)
2.  Support Frhdkazan (talk) 13:04, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
3.  Support --Әмир (talk) 19:26, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
4. {{Support}} ~~~~

Каршы / Oppose / Против

1. {{Oppose}} ~~~~

Барыбер / Neutral / Всё равно

1. {{Neutral}} ~~~~