Dear Katherine,
Time flies. Since you join the Foundation, I see positive changes under your
governance. Since you are leaving, it will never be the same.
Hope to see you within the community. All best wishes are for you.
Best, Rachmat
On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 8:47am, Katherine Maher < kma...@wikimedia.org
[kma...@wikimedia.org] > wrote: Hi friends, fellow Wikimedians,
[Apologies in advance, this note is very long, and written in my native English
speaker style. Normally I try for shorter and more ESL friendly, but it was
hard to do this time. Thank you for indulging or at least, tolerating, me.]
It has been my life’s joy and pleasure to be a part of this movement with you
for the past seven years.[1] I came into the Wikimedia movement as a believer
in open culture, open source, and free knowledge. I leave my work at the
Foundation today knowing the Wikimedia movement stands for those things, and
something even greater.
To be a Wikimedian is to embrace humanity’s curiosity and fallibility, our
generosity and irascibility. It is to look across a world that we’re told is
divided -- by arbitrary borders, linguistic conquest, fear of the unfamiliar --
and instead see our common interest. It’s to know that we are each flawed,
unreliable narrators, and to believe that the best remedy to our intrinsic
failings is to patch our individual flaws with our collective strengths.
In the spring of 2016, I shared a pizza in Berlin with (our then-future, now
former, board chair) Christophe Henner. We were attending Wikimedia Conference
one month into my role as interim executive director, and had just finished a
challenging day of plenary meetings that brought us together as a community in
catharsis. Christophe was a candidate for the Wikimedia Foundation board. He
asked me, “What are we here for?”
I didn’t know what he wanted me to say, so I just told him what I thought.
“We’re here to make the world better.” It was a cliche answer, but true for me.
He laughed and leaned back in the chair. “Yes.”
This has always been what I read into the unstated part of our vision. “Imagine
a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all
knowledge.” This is a spectacular, inspiring, aspirational ambition, but it is
also missing something critical. For the past seven years, I have imagined this
world every day. And every day, I have asked myself, “Why?” Why does free
knowledge vision matter? What happens then? What change have we effected in the
world?”
Even after I leave, I’ll keep asking myself this. And as you continue your work
here, as colleagues, as contributors, as volunteers, I ask all of you to ask
yourselves as well -- with all that you do, and all that you contribute, and
all that you build. What are we here to do? Do our values, our structures, our
practices, and our constructs serve our purpose? And how do we ensure they
remain as alive and vital as our projects and vision?
The former president of Wikimedia Chile, Marco Correa, would say, “The
knowledge may be neutral, but the act is not.” I always understood him to mean
that while our projects endeavor to serve the most accurate, verifiable, and
neutral knowledge, our movement has never been impartial. We have always stood
proudly for a set of values: freedom of inquiry, expression, and assembly, the
right to privacy and memory, and the foundational value and dignity of every
human. We have defended them under duress and must continue to do so.
We should never lose sight of how revolutionary the act of producing free
knowledge is in the first place. I’ve always been struck by the myriad
motivations that bring people to this movement. There are those who write their
language into the future, their identity into public consciousness, who use our
projects to grapple with historical injustice. There are some who edit
Wikipedia because an act of fact is itself an act of self-determination in
places where information is used to suppress and subject.
If we let ourselves believe that we’re simply a free encyclopedia, we risk
losing sight of the power and possibility of our work. Knowledge has always
been a tool of power -- great empire and wealth have been built with its
service, and great injustice has been done in its name. The very idea of
liberating knowledge from power, decoupling it from access and wealth, and
placing its construction, utility, and value in the hands of every person on
the planet is fundamentally radical.
Wikimedia itself is a radical act. It is a verb, a constant action of
interrogation, revision, and evolution. It upends history, it challenges the
status quo. It is the confidence to ask ourselves why we believe what we
believe and whether our knowledge may change in the future. It is the
conviction to defend our values against pressure and threat, while robustly
debating among ourselves whether those values continue to serve the world. It
is the humility to cooperate, collaborate, and learn from others.
Someone asked the other day, “what is the biggest challenge Wikimedia faces?”
My answer was the same as on my very first day. Our biggest challenge is
ourselves. Our success, our complexity, our size -- it could be easy to believe
that we’ll endure forever on our current momentum, to see ourselves as a
website rather than a global movement, or to accept that our knots are too
knotty to ever properly unpick. It is often easier, and more comfortable, to
swim in the eddies of incremental evolution rather than face the urgency of
collective change.
But we carry out our mission against great odds, and it is essential that we
are clear-eyed about both the risks and the opportunities. There are the
challenges of competition and scarcity: We operate in one of the most heavily
capitalized and competitive sectors in the history of civilization (digital
technology), we provide one of the most valuable (yet nonrivalrous!) assets of
humanity (knowledge), we aspire to serve the entirety of the world equitably,
despite all of the ways in which the world itself builds implicit and explicit
barriers to that goal.
There are also the opportunities, which are themselves a form of challenge. We
see more people connected around the globe, more communities in search of
knowledge, more languages represented, more need for trustworthy general
knowledge, and sharper, more urgent questions of power, representation, and
agency. We see an increase in appreciation for the value of knowledge in
society, and for the importance of facilitating agreement on even the most
contentious of issues. Whether we make the most of these moments will be up to
us.
If we are to meet these moments, we will have to find new strengths. We must be
more clever, more bold, simply better than we have ever been. We must be
uncompromising in our generosity, and adamant in our excellence. We must be
more expansive, abundant, and inclusive. We should grapple with the ways in
which we have failed in the past, including instrumentalizing participation and
recapitulating exclusionary canons at the expense of truly global
representation. We must cherish our integrity and independence, while also
understanding our interdependence.
In recent years, our movement has begun doing just this. We’ve been
reconsidering our definition of “community” and “contributor”. We’ve been
interrogating our understanding of what knowledge is, how it is constructed,
and who is represented. We have been pushing for participation and
enfranchisement of underrepresented geographies, languages, and demographics.
We have been asking ourselves whether the paradigms of encyclopedic notability
and verifiability can sustain our mission, growth, and relevance. We have been
exploring what of our current work and practices might need to evolve in order
for us to meaningfully live into our mission of every single human.
We have been asking questions not only about our knowledge in Wikimedia’s
ecosystem, but about the means by which we realize our mission. We have always
been committed to open architecture and code, but those commitments have been
passive -- common tools, common rules. What does it mean to be actively open?
To go beyond protocol to practice, from standard to value? How do we ensure
that our technical infrastructure and experiences enable participation, agency,
and ownership by everyone, everywhere? How can our projects lead in privacy,
security, and openness by the light of their example?
In a very real way, this is all in our hands, and in the hands of anyone who
might seek to participate. Our projects are not owned by anyone, but they are
owned by all of us. They are edited, on average, 350 times per minute,
representing the opportunity, every moment of the day, to be a work in progress
-- to aspire to better versions of our movement, our projects, of ourselves. To
change in response to the world around us. Wikimedia changes as we do, and
change is what we make of it.
This is a constant invitation -- and obligation -- to make and remake
ourselves. Do the values that served us from our first day compel us to our
future? Are the decisions that we make, as staff, as volunteers, as movement
leaders, as community members, in service of our purpose? How do we adapt our
work for the world we live in while maintaining our vision for the world we
seek? What are we growing toward? What are we here for? What is the point, the
purpose, of free knowledge?
The answers to these questions may change, but the way we arrive at those
answers should not. We are first and foremost a community, and we should arrive
at our answers through open dialogue and consultation. We can’t bypass the
difficult bits, we must go through them to build the lasting parts. And the
only way we can do that is by committing, to consistency, communication, and
continuation of difficult discussions such as those raised through movement
strategy — questions of power, agency, decentralization, and autonomy. It is in
seeking the answers to these questions that we will find the ways in which our
movement will thrive.
We must see one another as mutual stewards and allies, finding the means to
disagree while valuing one another as people united in common purpose. We
should practice compassion, courage, and kindness for one another and
ourselves, and accept imperfection in the spirit of evolution. As staff, we
must show our volunteer colleagues respect as full partners. As volunteers, we
must return the sentiment to staff of the Foundation and affiliates. We should
break bread together, solve problems together, and see one another as equals.
To be a Wikimedian is to place your faith in the goodwill of people you’ve
never met. It is to believe in the power of an idea to connect a community; to
be an incorrigible humanist, wise to our failings but returning each day to do
better. It is to believe in human generosity, curiosity, and general good
sense. We not only seek to do the radical thing of making knowledge freely
available, we trust the world to use it well. To contribute in good faith, to
read us critically when needed, to donate to keep us going, and to criticize us
when justified.
We place our confidence in the world, and they place it back in us. We serve as
stewards, anticipating that our work must support and sustain free knowledge as
a public good for decades to come. We forge ahead against the implacable odds,
and we somehow keep moving. We throw our lot in together, bind ourselves in our
success and failure, and accept that our progress is a work in progress. We
believe that we can change the world, because we already have. [2]
I am grateful to you all for this time we have had, and the ways in which your
passion, empathy, and determination have expanded my world. I have been
fortunate to make lifelong friends with many of you, and believe there are
still many friendships ahead. I am leaving the Foundation; I am not leaving the
movement. I’m easy enough to find on the internet, but for all things Wikimedia
you can find me on wiki at User:Maherkr or Telegram. I’m also at
katherine.ma...@gmail.com [katherine.ma...@gmail.com] .
We are so fortunate to live in Wikimedia’s glorious moveable feast. It’s taught
me that there is rarely goodbye, just until we meet again.
See you 'round the wikis!
Katherine
[1] Sure, there have been moments of exhaustion, exasperation, and heartbreak,
but those aren’t for right now. And anyway, they’re entirely overshadowed by
that bounteous joy.
[2] And as of the end of today, this is officially just another Wikimedia
essay! YMMV. Thanks for reading!
--
Katherine Maher (she/her)
CEO
Wikimedia Foundation [https://wikimediafoundation.org/]
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