Talk:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Stewardship Needed for Adiutor MediaWiki Extension

This page is for discussions related to the Community Wishlist/Wishes/Stewardship Needed for Adiutor MediaWiki Extension page.   Please remember to: Sign posts using the four tildes (~~~~) Remain civil and polite during discussions. Place new text under old text (start a new post).

Voting

Unsure how this works, but this particular wish has my full support. There is a need for a consistent centrally maintained twinkle-like extension on most wikipedias and the Adiutor extension fits that description really well. Sohom (talk) 13:14, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

It has mine as well. Not because I particularly care about Audiutor, but because the WMF's hypocritical rules for what code they are willing to run are unnecessarily stifling people's creativity and need to be undermined. * Pppery * _{it has begun} 21:41, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

Open Letter to the Wikimedia Foundation

I am writing to announce my decision to withdraw all my contributions related to the Adiutor extension in response to the Wikimedia Foundation's approach to volunteer developers. After dedicating nearly two years of effort to developing the Adiutor extension and waiting over a year for an official review, I am disappointed to see a lack of responsiveness and action from the Foundation. The consistent delays have been attributed to limited team capacity, yet no steps have been taken to expand resources or to trust and empower volunteer developers to bridge the gap.

I have offered to serve as a volunteer staff member, taking on the necessary responsibilities without compensation, and even suggested formal applications for roles that would support my contributions. Yet, the Foundation's responses have either been noncommittal or entirely dismissive. When attempting to apply for a formal position, I was informed I couldn’t apply due to my location, effectively blocking my contribution opportunities despite my willingness.

The Wikimedia Foundation often promotes ideals of diversity, openness, and inclusivity, yet in practice, volunteer contributors who work outside the Foundation’s geographic and structural boundaries are faced with numerous obstacles. For an organization that publicly prides itself on values of inclusion and community, these barriers send a conflicting message, particularly to long-time contributors like myself, who have devoted over a decade to volunteering.

If the Foundation is willing to disregard the input of someone with over twelve years of volunteer experience, perhaps I have been supporting the wrong organization. Alternatively, it may be that the Foundation is disconnected from the reality faced by its contributors, assuming volunteers will remain supportive regardless of how their efforts are received.

For those of us who contribute to Wikimedia’s mission, this approach is disheartening and unsustainable. I hope the Foundation will reassess its policies and foster a more genuinely inclusive environment that values the contributions of volunteers, not only in word but in action.

Sincerely,
—Doğu ( m ) 23:18, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Doğu, I wanted to acknowledge that this has been a frustrating process. Ideally we should have determined that a WMF team sponsor was needed at the start of this process and come to a decision early on. This wasn’t something I was personally aware of until recently! I’m glad to see that we’re working on improved documentation for this process so that the requirements for deploying an extension to production are more explicit at the outset (T379526). I hope that this will make the process clearer for everyone in the future.

My team really appreciates your contributions to the Wikimedia ecosystem - you’ve been a big help with supporting Automoderator on tr.wiki, and I know the Design Systems Team has valued the Codex work you’ve been doing this year.

We think Adiutor is a valuable tool, as shown by the usage the gadget has had on Turkish and other Wikipedias, and personally I think it solves some needs my team has identified when speaking to moderators. That said, the Moderator Tools team has decided to focus on other tools and extensions for this year that we’ve already committed our time to delivering, in addition to the work we do maintaining existing products like The Wikipedia Library. Taking on responsibility for a new extension - especially one we didn’t write ourselves - is a substantial and ongoing commitment, making the team responsible for production errors, security issues, ongoing maintenance, and fielding feature requests. Although we know you’re active now to support the tool, that might not always be the case, or you might not be available when attention is required, so we need to make a trade-off between this and other work.

To address your concerns around our commitment to diversity: I understand your disappointment about not being able to apply for a staff position at the Foundation, due to your current country of residence. The Foundation has a commitment to diversity, with over 650 staff in more than 40 countries today. We currently only hire in countries supported by our partner relationships with Employers of Record (EoRs), which helps us manage the overall costs of hiring as well as ensuring consistency and fairness across employee benefits and compensation.

We’re really appreciative of the work that you and other technical volunteers do, and I’m sorry again that the process for deploying extensions has been unclear. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 19:07, 14 November 2024 (UTC)