On Thu, Jul 2, 2026 at 12:35 AM Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l < [email protected]> wrote:
> I very much agree Michael, it should be a movement wide effort with strong > intent and drive. And the reasoning behind Movement Strategy was that to be > able to engage local communities we needed local relay that were part time > employed to do that :) > > But in the last six months the number of C-Levels or trustees of any > Wikimedia organizations that have engaged in that discussion here is a > grand total of 0. I didn't count on wiki and other avenues, but I would > guess it's very close to that number. > I think this is a very important issue for the people who do the work of the Wikimedia movement to consider: If we want to ensure the future of our movement, it has to be a movement strategy built and implemented by the members of the movement. We can't rely on the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. to lead everything for us; the Foundation is fundamentally a service organization that manages infrastructure for the movement. The concerns expressed by WMF's C-levels internally have been narrowly about survival based on projected donation income versus spending over the next few years. How to make the projects' editor culture sustainable is in my opinion vital to our short-term *and* long-term survival, but is not something that WMF C-levels have expressed interest in or prioritized for work; they're concentrating on outreach and experiments to increase page views, reader retention, and donor conversions with the hope that editing will continue to happen as a side effect based on the traditional "funnel/pipeline". In my opinion this is a losing strategy in the long term, and I had tried to advocate for a broader lens that included specifically reaching out to editors with feature work that would keep them engaged in the things we were trying to engage readers in (in my department) and hoped to advocate for better cultural support for newbie editors (not my department but relevant to getting and retaining editors, vital to our entire pipeline). And this is not a brand new topic, many volunteers have been raising their > concern for a few years. And still, it feels like nothing is happening. And > I say "feel" because I also know those concerns are shared across > volunteers, employees and trustees across organisations. But no one with > meaningful resources is publicly leading the discussion. > > So yes, I very much agree with you, and I wish that was an outcome that > happened in the last few months/years, but it still hasn't. And I've also > tried not to share "solutions" to focus on trying to reach a shared > understanding on "there is a big problem here", but maybe I should share > clearer options? > Wikimedia is a participatory system and the people doing the work of the projects must also take the reins of its leadership if we want that leadership to be forward-looking and about the actual work done on the projects. After the Wikimedia 2030 strategy just sort of .... fizzled out I think we have to recognize that no one will come save us. We have to put in the work ourselves. -- brooke vibber Volunteer dev 2001-2005 WMF CTO 2005-2009 Volunteer dev 2009-2011 WMF Staff Software Architect 2011-2026 Volunteer dev 2026-
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