Talk:Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is corrupt and bad

It is okay to criticize

In various ways the Wikimedia Foundation discourages the Wikimedia community from openly criticizing it.

I will not say that the Wikimedia Foundation is corrupt and bad, because the alternative that I see is that commercial big tech would fill the niche, but it is easy for me to say that the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia community have very different and conflicting values and ethics. I do not mind the conflict or even when the WMF does bad things - what does give me pause though is discouragement of the discourse.

I came to this essay when the author User:MZMcBride said that they would no longer volunteer to maintain en:User:BernsteinBot, which is a tool and major boon to the Wikipedia community. When a power user volunteer like MZMcBride, who has constructively put in 1000s of volunteer hours into technical, social, and ethical development of Wikipedia writes an essay like this, then that is an indication and a signal that communication has failed.

I am not sure what the answer is, but I want positivity and diverse discourse in the Wikimedia Movement. The criticism here could be phrased more constructively but it is valid, represents views of many volunteer community members, and is worth addressing directly.

I regret that in conflicts between the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia community, the Wikimedia Foundation pays people to argue its positions, but as steward of the donations that people give to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Movement, the Wikimedia Foundation does not have a process for sponsoring the development of criticism from the Wikimedia community. Bluerasberry (talk) 14:54, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

I have extensive experience dealing with the WMF. On the positive side, the WMF has the luxury of hiring some of the smartest most skilled and dedicated people for virtually any position. Everyone loves the public service mission of Wikipedia and other projects, and job applicants are eager to jump at the chance to work here. Staff have good intentions and want to make things better. On the other hand, staff are hired for their professional skills, they generally have zero knowledge about the community or wikis before arriving. Even long term staff generally have almost no understanding of how the community and Wikis actually work. Staff may "love" the community for the work we do, but they have almost no trust or respect in the community or community decisions. Their lack of understanding results in countless well-intentioned attempts to "help us" in ways that are harmful - often repeating the same bad ideas due to poor institutional memory. When staff have difficulty understanding why the community rejects one of their poorly informed bad ideas, Foundation culture tends to demonize experienced editors community as selfish or blindly hostile to change. When staff feel that community members are obstructing their well-intentioned (but misguided) efforts, they can begin acting in a dishonest, bad faith, or even retaliatory manner.

Regarding the page title, it's over the top, but perhaps useful for collecting serious problems that need to be addressed.

Regarding the current state of the page, I don't think a laundry-list-rant is particularly effective. I have added some well cited items to the list. For what it's worth, I'd suggest additional cites and evidence to back up major items, and cleaning out little things like "No dark mode". At best that's just a symptom of the enormous amount of misguided and wasted work.

If this ever does get better developed with cites and evidence, I could probably dig up a bunch of links supporting a cultural pattern of confirmation bias. Unfavorable data about Foundation projects disappears down the memory hole, other data is twisted to look favorable, and frivolous figures that seem favorable are hyped up. It creates cultural reality-distortion bubble making ongoing projects look good, even when they are failing badly. (VE retention graph, VE A/B test of completion success rate - both the result and the biased exclusion of early aborts, VE vs Wikitext edit completion stat, raw number of VE edits, non-editor initial perception of VE, MediaViewer survey results, Flow survey results, etc) Alsee (talk) 05:35, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

I agree with what you are saying and think that more open conversation would convert many problems into positive outcomes. It is so hard to discuss the problems. Bluerasberry (talk) 21:46, 20 October 2022 (UTC)