Talk:Affiliate-selected Board seats/2019/Nominations/Nataliia Tymkiv

Tell us your achievements

Thank you for being a candidate and for introducing yourself. In your statement you talk about many things that needs to be done and what you are going to do if you are chosen again. Since you have already been serving on the Board of Wikimedia Foundation I would like to know your achievements. Can you show us the impact of your work? I would like you to tell us what you already did to achieve those things that you care so much. What did you do to support our editing communities? What did you do to improve our platforms technically? What did you do to provide more timely and responsive support to affiliates? What did you do so the movement is more envolvement in advocacy? What did you do for the Wikimedia 2030 strategy process? What did you do to make our community grow in diversity and inclusion? Thanks in advance.--Jalu (talk) 01:52, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

Hello, Jaluj! Some of the things I care about cannot be delivered on a big scale and at once everywhere, if one wants them to be delivered profoundly... Namely, diversity and inclusion - in a lot of communities this very concept would require changing culture, which is never easy to do... In my home language community, the Ukrainian Wikipedia, I was among the initiators of a Ukrainian version of Women-in-Red month. At the end of 2017, we had 13,69% of female biographies in the Ukrainian Wikipedia at the beginning of the month, and we have gained 1% during that month - more than 400 articles created about women - and what is more important I think, we got more people aware of this existing gap, so some of the editors continue working on this even now. That project helped us to get in contact with other people and organisations, who care about this issue, and, for example, this year, a teacher in a university gave her students a task to write articles to Wikipedia on their course topics... The important things about it is that the course is named: Introduction to Gender Studies, and her students wrote around 100 articles during the course. And that (I believe) can be an “introduction” to changes in my language culture - some of the topics were just not existent in Ukrainian!

The next step is organising an article contest in June about Women in STEM - to showcase that STEM is also for females. This string of projects (they do need to be connected, this cannot be a one time event/project), of course, is not applicable to my role as a board member of Wikimedia Foundation, as it only shows my personal commitment. But, this experience in trying to change things in one local community is important for understanding how difficult it is worldwide, and also how harmful we can be if we just try to implement things based on not enough research or bad assumptions. The board of Wikimedia Foundation is mostly involved in governance, thus even the bylaws changes I was leading, for user groups to be able to vote in Affiliate-selected trustees process can be an example of that (even though the impact we won’t be able to see for now, the changes are too recent).

The Bylaws now state that the Board of Wikimedia Foundation should be committed to diversity when appointing Trustees - if there is a will, there is a way (for example, Raju, Lisa, Esra'a, Tanya). The community and affiliates even now might be more inclined to select white males to the Board - just because our biggest language communities and more powerful affiliates statistically include fewer females, and it is quite impossible for people from smaller language communities to be visible enough to get selected.

As a member of the Board I also supported the decision on allocating resources to anti-harassment, making it a priority. This is a still ongoing effort, of course. But we do stress that harassment is a problem for our editing communities, and we need to make us a better and safer place - without this we would not be able to grow, and would not be able to increase diversity and inclusion. They go hand in hand.

As a Board member I was supportive of Wikimedia Foundation concentrating its efforts on modernising our platforms, which is reflected in our Medium-term plan 2019. And again, my role in this is understanding how important this is for the future of our projects, providing guidance and voting to support the decision.

I do not think that the Wikimedia Foundation is currently providing timely and responsive support to affiliates, and that is something I would like to work on. Right before I joined the Board, I have compiled a page with useful tips for new affiliates, as a new affiliate needs “intel” maybe even more than money at first. Now it is here. As a board member one actually has fewer chances to help affiliates directly - but we can attend community events and speak, explain. And guide Wikimedia Foundation in correcting its course to recognising the value there is in affiliates - for local partnerships, for supporting local initiatives, which Wikimedia Foundation would not be able to support as well, especially in other (than English) languages. I participate in community events (CEE, Iberoconf, Wikimania, WMCON), Board Q&A sessions, and I am willing to be transparent and accountable to the community.

As a board member I was supportive of us, Wikimedia Foundation, changing how we see advocacy - I believe we need to be more involved and present where the decisions influencing our ability to thrive, are made. We need to build relationships, we need to have a strategy on how we make ourselves heard and not mixed with Facebook and Google, as if we are the same kind of organisation. And again, this is a change which is happening now - that’s why Advocacy and Partnerships are among our goals and working groups, both in the 2030 Strategy, and in the mid-term plan.

With all that said, I am a part of the Roles & Responsibilities working group, and (like all other current Board members) I was involved in the work of the group, and again, this is ongoing work so it’s too early to speak of outcomes.

As a volunteer administrator of the Ukrainian Wikipedia I am usually pointing out to other editors that we need to be kinder to newcomers, and even if they have created a page we are clearly going to delete immediately, it is still better to leave at least a message on their talk page, saying something like this: “Yay, you have manager to create an article successfully! But we would probably need to delete it, as there are some rules, please read them, and stay around, if you have question - just ask us”.

Deleting an article of a newbie without human written explanations - they are not fluent in Wikipedia jargon yet - feels really cruel, and does not help us grow. Whereas teaching, explaining, helping - does help. Even if in the end people understand that Wikipedia is not their thing - they would still be thinking more positively about us, maybe helping us in other ways. It might happen that yesterday you were explaining a rule to somebody, today you are explaining to them about how to form an affiliate and apply for a grant - and tomorrow they will be the ones making our projects a better place --アンタナナ 15:14, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

I am sorry アンタナナ but I was asked to move my question to the main page, so maybe you would like to move your response there. Thank you so much. --Jalu (talk) 22:39, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

WikiDonne out of time endorsement

We were out of time, but we want to inform the community that during the official discussion (via email) of 29 April 2019, the Members of WikiDonne User Group, unanimously decided:

To endorse the candidacy of Nataliia Tymkiv at the election of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), for the reasons you can find here Endorsement

On behalf of WikiDonne UG. --Camelia (talk) 08:57, 30 April 2019 (UTC)