Hi Yair, I agree with your underlying sentiment. When we look at threats facing the Wikimedia movement, I continue to think that the risk of people being able to inject their national and identity politics into the movement is pretty great. While I may personally agree with many of the views being put forward, as you note these types of actions have the very real potential to create an unhealthy division among contributors and others.
Wikimedia is a global movement and many people in the world have strongly held and diametrically different views about gay rights, abortion, free speech, the role of women, etc. Those views should rarely be relevant to creating free educational content. I don't think it's appropriate for Wikimedia to take stands on these issues. If staff of the current iteration of Wikimedia Foundation Inc. want to make such statements and take such positions, that is technically their prerogative, absent intervention from the Board of Trustees, however it certainly behooves other Wikimedian to point out what a bad idea it is. To put it another way: there are people who work at Wikimedia Foundation Inc. who voted for Donald Trump for president. While you may disagree with his policies and these staffers' decision to support him for president, needlessly and divisively injecting this kind of politics into the workplace is neither healthy nor appropriate, in my opinion. Yair Rand wrote: >Three days ago, the WMF put out a statement on the Wikimedia blog >explicitly urging a specific country to modify its refugee policy, an area >that does not relate to our goals. There was no movement-wide prior >discussion, or any discussion at all as far as I can tell. I guess this is referring to <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/01/30/knowledge-knows-no-boundaries/>. In terms of various people at Wikimedia Foundation Inc. attempting to speak for the Wikimedia movement, there's also <https://policy.wikimedia.org/>. I've raised the lack of attribution and the "veneer of authority and legitimacy" issue at <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Public_policy>. At least the recent blog post was signed by Katherine. That's better than some of these other essays. MZMcBride _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
