Wikimedia Foundation Community Affairs Committee/2025-01-30 Conversation with Trustees

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The Community Affairs Committee – a committee of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees – hosted a Conversation with the Trustees on 30 January from 14:30 - 16:00 UTC. This conversation was an opportunity for community members to speak directly with the trustees about their work. The Board of Trustees is a volunteer body of movement leaders and external experts in charge of guiding the Wikimedia Foundation and ensuring its accountability.

Recording of the call

How to participate

This conversation was held on Zoom. The conversation was also streamed live to YouTube, and PeerTube.

It was 90 minutes, with the first half covering updates and the second half dedicated to open Q&A.

The recording was immediately available via the same YouTube link and will soon be uploaded on Commons. There will also be comprehensive notes shared soon on this page.

Submit your questions

Participants brought questions to ask live during the open Q&A, or submitted them ahead of time to askcac wikimedia.org.

Agenda

Short updates including Board Elections and the Foundation's Audit Report
3 pilots (Product and Tech Advisory Council, Resource Distribution, Affiliate Ecosystem) + Movement Charter mapping exercise
Open Q&A

Notes

The below notes represent a summary of what was said on the call. For full context, please refer to the recording.

Celebrations

Wikimedia Commons turned 20 in September; celebrated at Wikimania through showcasing photos throughout the event, including at the Wiki Science Competition in the main square in Katowice, where the public came and enjoyed Commons photos of science
Wikispecies also turned 20, as did Indonesian Wiktionary
Ukrainian Wikipedia is 21 today
Wikipedia celebrated its 24th birthday two weeks ago. We’re already thinking about how we can celebrate the 25th birthday in a big way. If you have any thoughts or any plans in the works, let the Foundation team know! Leave a message on the project’s Meta talk page
WikiCon North America happened in October in Indianapolis, bringing together Wikimedians from Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean and the United States
WikiIndaba happened in Johannesburg, the Wikimedia CEE meeting happened in Istanbul, and WikiArabia happened in Muscat
Wikimedia Tech Summit happened in October in Hyderabad
Bangla Wiki Conference happened in November near Dhaka, which connected Bangla Speaking Wikimedians
The GLAM Wiki conference happened in the Philippines in September
Conference on Climate Justice in November in Peru
WikiCon Australia happened in November in Adelaide
Wikimedia+Libraries International Convention happened this month in Mexico City

Board updates

Board selection for community-and-affilaite selected seats. 6,000 community members voted
Two appointed for the first time, two re-appointed:
- Christel Steigenberger
- Maciej Artur Nadzikiewicz
- Victoria Doronina
- Lorenzo Losa
We will have elections again in September, call for candidates in June. So start thinking now if you or anyone you know may be interested
Lorenzo Losa (one of the current Vice Chairs) appointed as Chair-Elect. Appointing a chair-elect is a best practice according to the Affiliate Health Criteria as part of transition planning
Foundation released its 2023-2024 audit report in November, reporting on its financial status from July 2023 - June 2024. Available on the Foundation website with a summary on Diff and Signpost and FAQs on Meta
The Foundation Endowment also completed its audit for the same period of time (information available at the same links)
Purpose of these audits is to provide assurance to the Board and the public that the finances of the organization are in order, and that the statements provide an accurate view of organization’s financial health
Highlights:
- Clean audits
- Operating revenues of $185M, increase of 5% from the prior year, in line with target. Within that 5% growth, contributions from gifts grew 2.5%, representing a slower growth rate. Underscores importance of fundraising from other, diversified streams like Enterprise and Endowment
- Expenses up 5.5% to $179M, in line with the Foundation’s target to manage expenses within that range
- Also in line with priorities in the Annual Plan, growth in grants continued in spite of slowing budget growth overall. It grew 10% to $24M
- Expense savings made through move to a smaller administrative space in San Francisco to reduce lease expense costs by 80%
Form 990 will be released in a few months, also posted on the Foundation website with summaries and FAQ

Agenda

Introduction

In spite of concerns related changing legislation, AI and more, credible reasons to remain hopeful in terms of how communities have and will continue to come together
Updates on this shared in Maryana’s recent message to the community
- 2024 year when more human beings were eligible to vote than any other time in human history. Disinformation teams focused on elections in India, EU, US, where community processes prevented any significant disinformation on the projects. That’s something to celebrate.
- Results of Wikipedia’s first audit under the DSA as a VLOP. Wikipedia was the only platform that did not receive a negative rating.
- We are seeing increased threats, regulation and litigation across the world, including in India and a significant victory in Germany.
- Discussions happening now around updates to banner and logo policies. We are asking Wikimedians to help collect historical examples of how changes to logos and use of banners has happened in the past. See Meta page for discussion and office hour info.

Mapping exercise and 3 pilots

3 co-created pilots: Resource Distribution, Product and Tech Advisory Council, Affiliate Strategy. Also working on a mapping exercise on past community input around the Movement Charter process.
These are ways to address key ideas outlined in the Movement Charter process and take them forward. Foundation remains committed to a future Charter for the movement.
Pilots are co-created, time-bound experiments. Outline substantial changes to three areas that are of great interest to the movement: grants, P&T, affiliate ecosystem. Will give brief updates on each of these.

Mapping exercise

At the end of 2024, we started a mapping exercise to collect, organize and synthesize past community input into the Movement Charter process.
Foundation staff has worked with the Board’s Governance committee to pull together a summary of points of alignment, divergence and open questions. Been collecting feedback throughout this process on Meta and at regional conferences.
Content of the mapping exercise is now on Meta.
Core topic areas of content: values of the movement, movement governance / decision-making and accountability structures, movement ecosystem, movement resources. These are closely tied to the pilots.

Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC)

PTAC began in October as a one-year pilot.
Originates from Movement Strategy, but similar ideas have been around for even years before that. Supports the Movement Strategy recommendation to Coordinate across stakeholders.
Members of the Council will make a joint decision after one year whether and how to continue.
Council membership: 8 community members, 2 affiliate representatives, 2 Foundation trustees, 3 Foundation staff members including Selena CPTO.
The work will focus on wide, complex, ambiguous problems like prioritizing newcomers or experienced editors, platform improvement versus feature development. PTAC will also discuss a strategy to ensure success of the movement, and will publish recommendations about future development.
PTAC has met a few times about where we’d like to see the movement invest more or less. Talking about key metrics. Unpacking charts and MediaWiki discussions.
PTAC met for the first time in person this month. Went more in-depth on goals and processes. Council published an overview of the meeting and recommendations for the Wikimedia Foundation on Meta.

Resource Distribution

Experiment with a new global body to help set grantmaking goals for funding themes, regions, and in order to make sure that our structures fit the evolving needs of the movement.
Updated proposal aims to set up the body in March. In February there will be a call for candidates. More information on Meta.

Affiliate strategy

Chapters, thematic organizations, user groups, movement partners, hubs–all of this is going to be covered under this umbrella.
Process has included gathering of information on existing systems and ideas with AffCom and affiliate EDs. Also looking to get information from chairs of affiliates.
AffCom is going to publish their thinking in the coming weeks based on the information gathering that has happened so far.
More information on Meta.

Open Q&A

Set of questions around how the Volunteer Response Team (VRT) works. Their guidance and accountability/oversight about their processes and policies is not clear. Resistance within VRT to answering. VRT works hard and it’s a thankless job, tasked with answering questions from the public. They also make decisions about whether content gets uploaded to Commons without oversight by community. They answer questions from high-profile people and yet we don’t have insight into how they answer them. It’s not a Wikimedia Foundation function, but surely the Board should be concerned to have some sort of oversight and to ensure openness.

Topic was discussed at the beginning and end of Q&A, with some additional concerns voiced from another attendee about transparency around VRT processes. The Foundation will look into these questions and provide a response to the question asker–as VRT is a completely volunteer-run process (and thus something the Foundation and the Foundation’s Board doesn’t intervene in), questions are best addressed in a different venue.

Update on the procedure for the Sibling Project Lifecycle. The published procedure was revised, but I’m wondering if there’s been any updates to timeline or next steps, or whether it has been ratified.

If you look at the bottom of the Meta page, you’ll see the most recent update.
Procedure was approved, CAC gave permission to the Taskforce to run two pilots, idea was to check if procedure works.
Taskforce reviewed projects that were submitted and made two recommendations to the CAC–one was a process to approve opening new projects, one was to close projects.
Wikijournals was not the project that was taken in the pilot phase, we looked instead at Wikispore. But we discussed Wikijournals at length and if there’s interest in learning more about that discussion, can reach out to askcac wikimedia.org.

I started a free knowledge encyclopedia called Justapedia in English focused on the US. Focus in creating this other encyclopedia was to provide the view of Americans from America. We forked some articles to get the new wiki started and have grown over time. At Wikidata, project is considered a fork of Wikipedia. I see us as an independent wiki with some forked articles. Since it’s considered a fork it’s automatically excluded from search results. I’d like to ask about how Wikidata is considering mirrors and forks.

What goes into Wikidata is way far from the Board’s role. Overall, a concern of the Board is Wikipedia being positioned as a platform that doesn’t allow for or incorporate many different views, and would love to continue to see all views being represented directly in Wikipedia. This isn’t a Board matter really but can be discussed separately (Jimmy offered to connect individually on topic).

From the Board NoticeBoard (paraphrased):Grants appear to be going to editors who are well-intentioned but may not be able to contribute productively to the projects. Common issues include creating items without regard to notability and failure to respond to feedback. This means these funded programs are creating additional work for volunteers doing clean up. In some cases additional grants were given to people who already had the track record of unproductive contributions. What are the Foundation’s thoughts on this, and what is being done to mitigate this issue?

This issue has been raised to the Grants Team, and the VP of Community Growth has directly responded.
In general, we agree that engaging newcomers means also ensuring they have the right support to make productive contributions. This will mean a better experience for everyone involved.
This particular grants program was in any case sunsetted a while ago. The grants team tries to prioritize this in the application process by asking prospective grantees to connect with and list a trainer in their application if they don’t have a lot of on-wiki experience yet.
In general, when we see the Foundation as a grantmaking organization, how we are trying to get into the weeds of grantmaking is on the one hand more than many grantmaking organizations, but how to do that in practice and make sure we are correctly balancing newcomers and experienced people is tough. How to make it better and ensure that we are improving the processes is an ongoing conversation with the grants team.

In the Commons community call on Wednesday one question is about new revenue models to allow for development. How come the regular fundraising pot would not be available for investment in Commons?

All of the Foundation’s resources are intended to support all of the projects. Fundraising pots aren’t used differently for different projects at the Foundation.
The February 5 conversation with the Wikimedia Commons community about impact and funding model was more a general discussion about how to direct current funding towards a set direction, rather than exploring new ways of funding Commons other than general fundraising. The conversation around funding on the call was meant to gauge volunteer interest and support on the approach to funding, rather than to decide on a specific plan.

When is Annual Planning beginning and how can the movement get involved?

Aim is to be constantly connecting with communities, someone mentioned the Commons calls which are an example of how that’s already happening.
Many ways people can join in, on-wiki, on calls, at community events.
Included in Maryana’s update that went out this week, Selena (Chief of Product and Technology) put out questions around everything relating to external trends, metrics and more. Getting involved with these questions would be a great way to input into Annual Plan priorities now, but there are many ways detailed on Meta.

An office move was mentioned as part of the Audit Report. Can you say more about that?

The move has happened, there is still an office in San Francisco in a smaller space.
We’ve downsized the footprint of the Foundation’s physical headquarters. We now have a much smaller administrative space that has reduced our leasing costs by around 80%. This is in response to our staff composition around the world and transition to additional staff outside the San Francisco Bay Area.

How will the mapping exercise help us advance toward a ratified Movement Charter?

A major goal of the exercise is to look closely at where we as a movement agree, disagree, and what questions are still open. The Movement Charter process and vote included many comments, as do on-wiki discussions. Mapping document provides an overview of all of it.
We are moving forward the three pilots that were identified as areas of agreement in these conversations.
The idea is that all of this work will move us toward a Charter to serve us in the coming years.

What decisions with PTAC make?

PTAC is focused on identifying areas of P&T work that needs prioritizing and preparing a recommendation for the P&T department of where to invest in the coming year.
This recommendation will be published in the coming days for review by community.
In general, the Council will tackle things like: priorities and tradeoffs for things that are relevant to the community, while not going into more specific lower-level issues like specific feature decisions or Phabricator tickets or things like that.

Can we please get some clarity about in which jurisdictions editors can be exposed, their identities subpoenaed, and summoned to libel suits? I am an Indian national currently in the USA.

This is a question that got addressed during the last Terms of Use update and in other places. This link has public answers to this and some related questions.
There is no real legal situation anywhere in the world where what you do will be entirely guaranteed free of legal consequences. When you participate in the Wikimedia projects, you are doing something fantastic and global in nature, that can mean exposure to a range of laws around the world, not just US law. That has to be considered. Terms of Use talk about this risk.
The Foundation’s role is to try to minimize that risk as far as legally possible. There are many ways we do that. For example, Temporary Accounts, which have been in the works for years, is something that we are rolling out to ensure that IP addresses for logged out users aren’t visible to the casual user but rather to people doing anti-vandalism work. We also have a strong position toward compliance with subpoenas about user data detailed in our Transparency Reports each year; there’s also a legal fees assistance program to allow community members to find and pay for legal fees. We also have a Human Rights team active to help users stay safe.
We in general don’t hold much data about users or readers. But there are also measures community members can take to protect their online data.

Given the US political situation, are there any moves to assist Foundation employees who may no longer wish to remain in the US? Are there plans to reduce the number of events in the US, especially for groups who no longer feel welcome?

The best we can do is monitor, check in on staff and understand what is needed.
The Foundation has a relocation policy that is always on offer as a resource for staff.
We are paying close attention in understanding what the impacts might be, in making any decisions related to location.
When we fund any conference, we do a full assessment around location. It’s an imprecise exercise but we are highly intentional about selecting places where we are asking people to gather, and to manage risk within our control as best we can. It’s a tough set of questions we’re all grappling with on a daily basis right now.

Why are legal policy pages not translated by the Foundation?

One challenge with translating legal policies is that the specific language can matter quite a bit, so they can be difficult to translate with the precision required.
Many policies are translated, some are not because they’ve been around a long time and we didn’t have as good of a practice for preparing translations in the past.
We should look more comprehensively at the policies as a whole and what language they’re available in, because it is important to us to serve people in languages beyond English.