Talk:Wikimedia Foundation/Legal/Community Resilience and Sustainability/Trust and Safety/Overview

A few issues

@PEarley (WMF): There are several issues with this document:

1. Where does the statistics about 38% of wikis not having any local admins come from? According to the automatically-generated stats from yesterday, there are only 7 such wikis.
2. The wording "the Foundation traditionally relies on peer-elected volunteers ("functionaries") to do most of the trust and safety work on behalf of their own project communities" is, ah, a little jarring. People tend to think of it as the projects handling their own stuff, and delegating responsibilities to the WMF as needed, rather than it being the WMF relying on the communities. As Katherine Maher frequently says, "This is a community with a foundation, not a foundation with a community." The community created the WMF, and the WMF is the community's support organization.
3. Using the word "functionary" to refer to admins can be a bit confusing, an the English Wikipedia uses the term with a more specific meaning.

There were also a few other statistical issues which I've now fixed. --Yair rand (talk) 21:22, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

Hello dear Yair rand,

I am delighted to see your interest in T&S work and thank you for the changes you made to the page content. I will provide below some clarifications regarding the concerns you raised in your previous comment.

‘The wording "the Foundation traditionally relies on peer-elected volunteers ("functionaries") to do most of the trust and safety work on behalf of their own project communities" is, ah, a little jarring. People tend to think of it as the projects handling their own stuff, and delegating responsibilities to the WMF as needed, rather than it being the WMF relying on the communities. As Katherine Maher frequently says, "This is a community with a foundation, not a foundation with a community." The community created the WMF, and the WMF is the community's support organization. Using the word "functionary" to refer to admins can be a bit confusing, an the English Wikipedia uses the term with a more specific meaning.’

In this context we explored using the terms “Functionaries” consistent with the second iteration of the movement strategy recommendations. This includes oversighter, checkusers and more broadly, cross-wiki roles such as stewards and OTRS, or local community elected-bodies such as arbitration committees, and administrators. In a nutshell, it speaks to the “official functions or duties” that communities by default handle themselves and does not imply any hierarchy related to the Wikimedia Foundation. If you have some suggestions regarding how we can better phrase this and diffuse future misunderstandings, kindly let me know.

“Where does the statistics about 38% of wikis not having any local admins come from? According to the automatically-generated stats from yesterday, there are only 7 such wikis.”

When collecting the stats we chose a particular methodology. We selected the 843 language wikis, purposely excluding ~115 that are special wikis such as steward-wiki or wikimania website. Then we deliberately excluded user accounts having administrator rights but less than 50 edits, so as to exclude placeholder accounts with administrative rights (see example here).

Overall, we found 4716 administrators across those 843 wikis. While 518 wikis have at least 1 administrator, 325 (38%) do not. It’s worth mentioning that, when lowering the threshold of edit count down to 0, we found over 5500 administrators and less than 5 wikis have 0 administrators. My assumption is that the stats tool you pointed out in your comment above does not apply an edit count filter as we did. In case you find it useful, you can take a closer look at the technical implementation of our methodology.

I hope the explanation above is helpful.

Thank you for you input and stay safe,

Samuel (WMF) (talk) 13:16, 3 December 2020 (UTC)