Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF): Difference between revisions

Discussion page for matters concerning the Wikimedia Foundation

Hello,

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Communications and Product teams would like to implement a small test on centralized notice banners to encourage more people to download and use the Wikipedia app. It will be a simple banner, targeting logged out mobile users and will run for just a few days, starting on December 15. The goal is to get more people using the app so that they become more engaged with Wikipedia in the long term. This is increasingly important as our Wikipedia traffic is changing, and it is part of our Foundation’s annual plan. If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know. Thank you so much.

—ARamadan-WMF (talk) 18:16, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Is the rate of app downloads decreasing significantly? We should probably have a specific reason for implementing another advertising banner, as these seem to be somewhat unpopular within the community. ✨ΩmegaMantis✨^blather 02:48, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@ARamadan-WMF Are you sure that “get[ting] more people using the app [will cause them to] become more engaged with Wikipedia in the long term”?

I prefer web browsing over apps. (I don’t understand why, for example, Home Depot even HAS an app. Browsing their inventory and ordering online works perfectly well from a web browser. Similarly, when reading The New York Times online, their web page nags you to use their app. Why? Reading the NYT using a web browser is perfect, in my opinion.)

Reading plus editing Wikipedia on a tablet and also a Windows PC, using a browser, is a great experience for me. I read WP using my phone. I don’t generally edit from my phone, but some long-term editors do. Does using the app really drive engagement, and how can you tell? David10244 (talk) 05:06, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@David10244: Are you sure that “get[ting] more people using the app [will cause them to] become more engaged with Wikipedia in the long term”?: Apparently the Wikipedia mobile app has games that are supposed to keep people engaged now. T400512 says they’re going to add even more in the future. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 23:23, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Note most of these new features only come to Android in the first place. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 08:39, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@ChildrenWillListen OK, thanks for that info. (Personally, I dislike games on mobile devices, but of course people do have their own preferences.) Are people really “engaging” with Wikipedia if they are playing games? Even if the games are hosted within the app, time spent playing the games is time not really spent engaging with WP…

Oh well, we don’t need to drag this out. David10244 (talk) 07:21, 4 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@ARamadan-WMF: I haven’t used it in while, but if the app restricts editing or has missing features compared to mobile web (due to underdevelopment) it should make it clear that mobile web is better for that task. Otherwise, you are pushing Wikipedia-lite: a watered down, crappy version of Wikipedia and people will disengage entirely out of frustration. There must be a list of restrictions somewhere (or the app is better in every way?) that you have evaluated before pushing the app with a banner.

@David10244: not that I am a proponent of a Wikipedia app, given the development costs, but apps can have more features compared to the web. From my hazy understanding, apps can:

• allow easier payments (didn’t the WMF just announce you can donate from the app using Google/Apple pay?)
• securely store the number page visits locally (the WMF is developing donation banners based on number of views)
• Allow users to upload a photo in a free file format when your phone uses a proprietary format
• Send push notifications to your device (e.g. you have new messages), etc

Commander Keane (talk) 08:36, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

2 isn’t planned to my understanding. Sohom (talk) 04:38, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don’t like mid-thread posting, but here goes…

@Sohom Datta maybe I am confused or didn’t explain it well, but on on mediawiki.org: “The apps already locally store and surface the user’s reading history” and in relation to the new banner placement widget, “Readers will be able to […] choose how often they want to be reminded, based on the number of articles they read“. Commander Keane (talk) 10:39, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It is not “securely” stored so much as available due to the nature of such apps, but sure. Sohom (talk) 15:42, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Commander Keane Hmmm. I can see some of that, but:

• Payments: You can pay from Web pages. I buy stuff all the time online. Some web pages accept Google Pay and Applepay.
• Web pages could do different donation banners server-side, or with cookies.
• I certainly don’t want push notifications, but to each their own…

David10244 (talk) 07:29, 4 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ironically, I am leaving this comment using a mobile browser because the app doesn’t allow access to any of these notice boards. ~2025-35367-57 (talk) 14:11, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I am leaving this comment from the app after the reading comment above. With an account I can manually leave a comment here by editing the wikitext of the whole page. I don’t see any “reply” buttons anywhere though. A streamlined way to upload freely licensed photos would be a great addition to the app and one of the few clear advantages to editing on a phone (while we are apparently trying to get people to download the app). Right now (on Android using the official app), I have to switch over to the Commons app and it’s all but clunky. I imagine it’s also a more straightforward addition than improving the mobile’s editing interface. Rjjiii (ii) (talk) 20:17, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe the IOS app lags behind in capabilities? I tested logging in and there is no way to navigate to these boards; the Home page simply scrolls endlessly back in time. ~2025-37129-61 (talk) 23:21, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, okay, then yes they are different. On Android, if you open a new tab it begins on the Main Page. This may be coming to IOS as well, because I think that new tabs only started showing the Main Page this year. Rjjiii (ii) (talk) 05:43, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Rjjiii (ii) So the app has lagged behind the functionality of the Web page for many years then, if the Main Page is just now coming to the app! 🙂 David10244 (talk) 07:32, 4 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Rjjiii (ii) I would hate not seeing the Reply buttons! David10244 (talk) 07:30, 4 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Aside from the editing issues mentioned above, the app also mostly ignores the main page content which our community has decided to show on any given date. Aside from the featured article, it substitutes its own things without community approval, such as having a Most-viewed article section, using the Commons featured picture of the day instead of our choosen WP:POTD, and replacing our set of anniversary articles with its own OTD that isn’t vetted or necessarily on our list. I’ve no idea who curates that, but I don’t think we should be promoting something that fights against the community’s editorial decisions. It also sucks in incoming links from browsers, making it more difficult to view the project on the Web even if you want to.  — Amakuru (talk) 07:29, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  That’s terrible, and should be discussed at an RfC at VPP, and then probably removed from the app. I thought the WMF didn’t do content and left that to the wikipedia’s? At the very least they should be able to tell us how / by whom the sections on the App main page are created, and why they don’t use the local ones. I don’t have the app so haven’t checked this, I do remember the reluctance they had to remove the Wikidata short description from it: I hope any necessary changes this time will be quicker and in a more collaborative spirit. Fram (talk) 09:10, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Amakuru, @Fram It is very hard at a technical level to exactly extract the on-this-days section of the main page in a reliable manner due to it’s free flowing nature, as a result to my understanding of what the underlying code is going for a compromise, it is parsing November 28 (today), using the much more standardized format of those pages to serve chronological information from the page. The first OTD entry on the app is “Over seven hundred civilians are massacred by the Ethiopian National Defense Force and Eritrean Army in Aksum, Ethiopia” which corresponds to a community generated entry on November 28. For what it’s worth, I don’t think there is a conflict with the communities editorial decisions here, the content being shown here is community generated and is prominently linked to in the first link in our OTD section. This is not WMF generated content, it is literally content we have decided is good enough to link from the main page. Sohom (talk) 16:47, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  There is a huge difference between content linked from the main page, and content shown on the main page. Basically, this gives vandals a clear method to vandalize the main page on the App. Fram (talk) 16:52, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I personally don’t buy this argument, if content is one click away, people going to the page, through mind you the literal first link on OTD will have a pretty bad impression of Wikipedia anyway. Not to mention that this concern is effectively the same threat model as if somebody where to vandalize a DYK or OTD and the preview of the article showing up on hover on the main page, however, we as a community typically do not fully protect DYKs or OTDs. For what it’s worth, I think there are mitigations against this kind of scenarios, in that I think there is aggressive caching and if the code sees a empty page, they will revert to showing a cached version + the app randomizes and caches which entry folks see, and so the chances of a person vandalizing the page and it immediately showing up on the main page are pretty slim. Sohom (talk) 17:03, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The clickthrough is minimal compared to the impressions the main page gets though. Vandalizing a linked page will reach a few dozen people or so (assuming the vandalism is up for a few minutes), vandalizing the main page reaches thousands of people in the same timeframe, and is much worse for PR as well. I don’t know about the caching and whether that helps (though the “empty page” is a very uncommon type of vandalism). Would probably be best to test this (not with vandalism, but by constructively changing some text which is visible on the App main page, and seeing how long it takes to change on the main page). Fram (talk) 17:23, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Hmm, I went to edit November 28, and realized that it seems to be protected under pending changes, that would make it much harder to get vandalism over to the main page for today. (it might be instantaneous for us cause both of us would bypass pending changes). Sohom (talk) 17:57, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The incoming link issue has been a particularly pernicious issue for me, the only obvious end-user solution for it is to delete the app which is presumably not what is wanted. CMD (talk) 09:17, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I really like some of the app landing page features, and some of the editorial(!) decisions like the POTD and OTD can be refreshing. However, the 17 fair use images shown (I stopped scrolling after a few days worth of feed), often cropped and with no way to tell they do not have a free licence, was disappointing. I am guessing there were 17 fewer fair use images on the Main page during that period.

  I think the app is getting ignored by the community and, for better or worse, pushed by the WMF. Commander Keane (talk) 10:58, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It seems that POTD corresponds to c:Commons:Picture_of_the_day. – robertsky (talk) 11:24, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I agree the incoming links issue has been one of the reasons I have the app set to never open wikipedia links, and Android somehow still disobeys me sometimes :(. Sohom (talk) 16:52, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I tried the app the other day, it is dreadful. How they do the lead image is really strange, and some of the features don’t make sense. The app should be designed with the community, idk what they think they’re doing Kowal2701 (talk) 12:39, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Kowal2701, Please provide actionable feedback, what exactly is “dreadful”, why is it so ? What is “strange” about the lead image? Sohom (talk) 16:50, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  First off it’s horrendously impractical for editing, I could list dozens of things but it’s very clear it’s not intended to be used by editors so I won’t waste my time. I deleted it after 10 minutes. Just on the tabs:

  • the Explore tab, I don’t understand what they were going for. The Main Page is carefully curated, idk why it wouldn’t be kept (the layout is ugly and monochrome as well). For something called Explore, I’d expect them to use Wikipedia:Contents, or propose random topics for people for people to learn about, or whatever. Something that actually lets the reader explore the encyclopedia, ie. where they can navigate themselves rather than getting random articles on Polish towns etc.
  • Places is an interesting idea, but what is its purpose? Is it for Americans to learn geography? Why is it only limited to settlements, administrative divisions, and landmarks? Why are administrative divisions presented as a point? Could it be tied into country outlines (eg. Outline of Myanmar)?
  • The others, sure they make sense, I wouldn’t really use them or find them helpful other than “Search”

  On the app, it just isn’t a wiki anymore. I can’t edit any of the tabs. I don’t like the personalisation. The lead image appears as a banner at the top, and the infobox is collapsed under “Quick facts”. It boggles my mind that the team working on this thinks they can redesign everything without community consensus, especially when it’s done so poorly. The website is brilliant, just copy that over and maybe add a couple more features for exploring, that’s all that needs to be done. It being awful for editing also means we’ll get less new editors, which is what we really need to have begging banners for. A “reader” version and an “editor” version that people can switch between might make more people aware of their ability to edit and make it more accessible so they try it out. This being said, the idea of prioritising the app is great, it bypasses Google’s LLMs, but the execution and process was very poor. Kowal2701 (talk) 17:23, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I’ve been somewhat involved in discussions related to the Android app so I can give you the high-level “why” of the design choices. Back in the day of Vector, when the app was first created our UI, infoboxes, image placement, warnings and even our main page sucked on mobile, taking up often more space than was available on mobile. As a result, the team at the foundation had to make certain optimizations/tradeoffs (like hiding the infobox, lifting the lead image etc), and changes to the layout of a variety of elements to get it to work on mobile. Since then, there has been significant improvement in our ability to serve mobile-first content, particularly due to collaborations between technical editors and WMF teams to overhaul and improve Wikipedia’s templates and user interfaces to be mobile oriented. There is still a significant amount of work to be done before we can get to your standard of “hey they could just put the website into the app” and for folks to be happy with it (not to mention that even then, a significant amount of engineering will be required to replicate mobile-web-only features using Java code).

  To a few of the more specific points, the explore tab was developed to copy the essential features of the current main page back when showing the main page wasn’t a option, similarly, the way the “places” feature works is that it uses your geolocation to find articles close to you, unfortunately, we only use coordinates in administrative divisions and such, limiting the feature. To the point of using outlines, our outlines are free flowing and outside of using a LLM, there is not a lot of ways to extract structured data that can be used to augment this features through outlines. I can see a situation where we use Wikidata to augment some of this data, but such uses have been frowned upon by the community back in the day (see also short description), which is why I think the app avoids it Sohom (talk) 17:52, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  To that point, @ARamadan-WMF, is there a place we can leave feedback on the design of the Android app? Sohom (talk) 17:59, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Thank you. The technical aspects are beyond me, I just find the website on mobile pretty good all considering (on iOS btw). I can understand some of the design changes like collapsing the infobox, I just wish things like this were run past the community, like in batches. This project operates by consensus. I’m sure WMFers see it as given that some in the community are going to rage against anything they do, but involving the community at earlier stages would negate a lot of that. Kowal2701 (talk) 18:19, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I installed the App. It gave me Dutch as default language, but allowed me to another language. But after adding English, the app hecame quite a mess with the two languages mixed. I thought I would get some switch to see enwiki only or nlwiki only, but no, I got something unwanted. I have removed it again, as it also interfered with my standard Wikipedia editing on the phone here. Not a fan… Fram (talk) 19:10, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Eh no I agree, the “using different languages” thing is weird for me as well. It’s always given me English though, maybe it picks the language based on location now ? Sohom (talk) 19:44, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I got Lao, Italian, and Arabic IIRC Kowal2701 (talk) 19:57, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Sohom Datta I know this is a few weeks old, but… Why do we have a Wikipedia app at all? The effort devoted to creating such an app could have been used to improve the layout on smaller screens, as you mention.

  I wonder why many apps exist today. Why does Home Depot, or Wal-Mart, for example, even have an app? Their web sites work fine on mobile and tablets.

  What does the Wikipedia app do for us? David10244 (talk) 23:07, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  Well for one, the talk page button isn’t easily accessible while reading a page, you have to click the “more items” ellipses to find it. Worse, the “learn more about this page” link appears as broken HTML, making it vastly less likely for app users to click in and read it. There’s no ability to access category pages, and the notice boards are completely walled off from the IOS app. ~2025-37100-27 (talk) 23:43, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  No VisualEditor (and the joys of visual citation insertion, etc), no access to Help desk/Teahouse (without pushing you to the web on Android, ~2025-37100-27 suggest zero access on iOS). Not suitable for new editors. Not suitable for experienced editors. There are more limitations.

  I thought the app was just a bit of fluff that the WMF was going to half-develop because cash was slushing around. Without VisualEditor (a 13 year regression) and Noticeboards (a 21 year regression) it is. Minor landing page issues, as discussed above, are not my major concern. If the WMF intends to make the app equivalent to mobile web then I am on board. I will test, and file bugs/features ’till the cows come home. We all could.

  If it going to remain dreadful, then I would like to keep editors on mobile web (and lets face it, mobile desktop), or push them away from the app ASAP. This would not involve a mobile banner promoting the app. I do think the reading experience is superior on the app. But people read Wikipedia because those before them have edited to create that content. Appealing to financial reasoning: over time, you will get less and less donations with less and less editors. Commander Keane (talk) 01:04, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  In the iOS app, talk pages are often difficult to get to. But what’s much worse is that it appears impossible to reach an article from its associated talk page. MichaelMaggs (talk) 09:25, 14 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Hi all, thank you for the thoughtful questions and concerns raised here. My name is Jaz, and I am the Lead Product Manager for the Mobile Apps Team.

The banner is intended to be a time-limited test that would only be shown to logged-out mobile readers on Japanese Wikipedia (in Japan) December 15-16 and English Wikipedia (in South Africa and India) December 15-18. The purpose is to understand whether a simple banner can help raise awareness that the Wikipedia app exists, especially among new readers, and if those readers retain at the same rate as readers that discover the app organically through the app stores.

Why do we want to drive more traffic to the apps?

Our broader goal is to help new and existing readers return to Wikipedia because they find it a compelling place to learn. To address this we want to experiment with ways that help new generations of readers find Wikipedia useful, return frequently and eventually become the editors we need to keep the projects healthy.

There are two shifts in reader behavior that are driving this:

• The number of people visiting Wikipedia, and the ways that they visit, have been changing for several years, with fewer people arriving to the site through external search engines.
• Based on our existing data, we know that readers on the apps return more frequently and engage more while they are reading than readers on the mobile web, thanks in part to built-in platform features. Readers who install the app tend to come back more often and explore more content directly on the platform. However, install rates are stagnant and primarily come through organic searches in the app store.

In short: We think that having people come to us through a platform we control, instead of mostly through search where we have no way to ensure we remain as visible as we have been, is key to remaining a vital, viable movement. This is a small test to see if this could be one way of helping that.

Because long-term sustainability depends on new readers returning and eventually becoming editors, as outlined in the Wikimedia Foundation’s annual plan and the Readers work, we want to connect people with the reading environment where they are most likely to stay engaged. For new generations there is a higher tendency to rely more on mobile apps and personalized experiences when learning online.

The difference between apps and mobile web

Several people raised very valid concerns about the apps not fully matching mobile web functionality. This is correct, and we want Web to remain the primary environment for editing workflows that are not supported, or are less than ideal, in the app. For users interested in editing on the apps, we will ensure that easy and intuitive ways to transfer over to the web are available: We want readers to be able to easily use the apps for all the things the apps do well, and lead editors to the web for editing. If you are interested in efforts to improve mobile web editing you can read more here.

On the apps, we want to focus on the needs of readers who prefer mobile-native experiences and are accustomed to personalization, like enabling readers to pick topics they want to see more, showing them trends in their reading patterns or notifying them if they haven’t met a reading goal. This shift allows the apps to focus on what they are uniquely good at, including reading on the go, offline capabilities, personalization that respects privacy, push notifications, and other mechanisms like widgets that help readers return more consistently.

Why do some features vary by platform?

I see there is a question of why some features are on one platform but not another. The way our team works is to see if a feature performs well on one platform before bringing it to the other so we are being thoughtful about where we put our time and energy and not scaling features that do not work or aren’t desired. Tabs is a recent example of a feature that was originally released on Android and highly requested by iOS app users, so we prioritized releasing it there recently. You can see a similar approach to Year-in-Review which was only available on iOS last year but is currently available on both platforms this year, with improvements based on feedback the team received.

How can you get involved?

We welcome ongoing feedback about the apps, especially from editors who use them or want to use them more effectively. App development is shaped by community input through Village Pump discussions, project pages, the support email channel, and app reviews. You can leave feedback at any time on our discussion page and stay informed by subscribing to the app newsletter. I’ve tried to respond to all of the great feedback here, but will also take a pass at individual comments again and will respond inline if I missed something over the next few days.

Ultimately our goal is to run this test thoughtfully, learn if it increases retained installs, and discuss the results with you all to determine if efforts like these could support the overall health of Wikipedia’s reader and editor ecosystem. If the apps are not personally your preferred platform or you do not have strong opinions about their direction, that is okay, we understand we have a diverse community with diverse preferences and interests, that’s what makes it so great. The web teams also regularly welcomes feedback on how to improve the mobile and desktop web experiences for readers and editors.

But the key thing is this: The internet is changing and fewer readers are finding their way to Wikipedia, or come less often, because search traffic doesn’t work the way it did in 2003 or 2014 or even 2021. This means we have less chances of making more people edit. We want to find ways to make it easier for readers to return to our articles. This is a small, limited experiment to see if this can help readers return. If we can make readers come to our own platform, and return, then we can send them to the mobile web for editing, keeping our ecosystem healthy.
JTanner (WMF) (talk) 20:21, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. Is there anything on the app that pushes/nudges people into editing on the website? Another concern is that a lot of people make their first edits by correcting spelling errors etc. while reading, if the app is cumbersome for editing it’ll drive away would-be-editors and would mean people who get into ‘full-on’ editing slowly and gradually are lost since it’s a big step to visit the website purely to edit. Could the ‘edit’ button on the app redirect to the web? Kowal2701 (talk) 20:55, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Kowal2701, thank you for this question. You’re right that many people make their first edits while reading, and we don’t want the app to make that harder. Some experienced editors have told us they want to be able to make small, quick edits directly in the app using wikitext, while others prefer to be redirected to the mobile web and use VisualEditor. We want to strike the right balance so both groups are supported and are able to execute handoffs seamlessly between platforms. A part of us exploring this problem space is also determining the best approach and timing for sending new editors to mobile web. We want to provide a good user experience.

From a technical standpoint, the app currently sends people to the web for certain workflows, so redirecting the edit button when it’s the preferred experience is absolutely possible. At the moment we are gathering existing research on this topic, and early next year we’ll reach out to request feedback. I’ll make sure you’re notified so you can participate in shaping the path forward. In the meantime you’re welcome to subscribe to the related Phabricator task where you’ll get automatic updates via email and can weigh in along the way. JTanner (WMF) (talk) 22:50, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @OmegaMantis, @ChildrenWillListen, @Sjoerddebruin, @Sohom Datta, @Commander Keane, @Rjjiii (ii) tagging to ensure you were able to see my reply. Looking forward to talking with you more. JTanner (WMF) (talk) 23:05, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the ping. So the app is a reading companion (with fringe benefits like push notifications). That is fine. As I said above, the reading experience is better than browser and I can see the WMF’s motivation. Maybe I will end up using the app for reading Wikipedia too :-).

Ideas to evolve readers to editors:

• phab:T409603 (as mentioned above) is a priority – put a VisualEditor browser link at the top of the wikitext edit box, and a link back to the app once the edit is completed. As mentioned, the wikitext editor is for experienced editors but it is probably a good idea to show the wikitext when they hit the pencil for responsiveness and so they know that Wikipedia can be edited by them – and after the shock of seeing 2025 wikitext they can retreat to the palatable VE. Or maybe they will give it a go in the app.
• There absolutely needs to be a link to a help page, with the forums (on browser, DiscussionTools is essential) and editing documentation. Whether that is Help:Contents or a newly tailored page I don’t know.
• Somehow, each article’s talk page (and what it is for) needs to be easier to find than right at the bottom. Possibly at the top of the collapsed right side bar. I know years ago got the community rejected the software feature for people to report errors and it got removed, but new editors are hesitant to make changes and more likely to ask on a talk page.
• Allow users to curate the content in games. After they play, have a “write your own question” link. I have always wanted games for Wikimedia projects, and they are wikis after all. The user supplied content system does not need to be sophisticated.
• Given the editing limitations on the app, the community could leave a talk page message for anyone that has edited using the app and not progressed to browser and let them know about browser and its advantages. And how to disable the OS deeplinking (app launching when clicking a link), that is mentioned above.
• Put the tagline “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” on the landing page. Given the fall in Main page views, I thought it would disappear forever. Anecdotally, the idea that anyone can edit and everyone is a volunteer has never been effectively conveyed.
• I am not sure how the new user on-boarding works with the app, but I assume we get them to mobile web efficiently somehow for the dashboard, mentorship etc.

Commander Keane (talk) 11:05, 4 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Commander Keane, hey I meant to reply to this and totally forgot. You wrote, “Allow users to curate the content in games. After they play, have a “write your own question” link. I have always wanted games for Wikimedia projects, and they are wikis after all. The user supplied content system does not need to be sophisticated.” They are sort of doing this. Those dates are pulled from Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries. That builds on the scrutiny that all main page sections get for fact-checking and spam-checking. I don’t know to what extent it would be good to encourage this, but there might be a way to direct people to that project where they could suggest dates? I believe the WMF’s short videos did something similar by leveraging DYK hook facts. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 18:25, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Rjjiii. I did read somewhere that is where they pull the questions from, I didn’t expect them to write the questions themselves, or hire a consultant ;-). I played the guess which event happened first and the questions were robotic, mundane, and the difficultly didn’t ramp up (they were really hard to begin with!). A timer, search box and time penalties for hints would add elements of risk and adventure. It seems to be a trend of WMF development that doesn’t lean on Wikimedian (human) involvement: the games, the short videos, the current Semantic Search discussion I see you at. Commander Keane (talk) 06:14, 14 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, perhaps an unfair comparison, but Microsoft Encarata’s “Mind Maze” let you pick a topic and ramped up in difficulty. I am both hopeful and skeptical about these projects getting more readers and therefore more editors, Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 06:19, 14 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I used to love Mind Maze! And the small set of words spoken in various languages. I also don’t know if games would be worthwhile long term, but I know they will not be good in their current state and approach. I will add there is no need for games to be app-only. Commander Keane (talk) 06:40, 14 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@JTanner (WMF), hey sorry for the late reply. (This is my main account; I’m Rjjiii (ii) above on mobile.) I get why the app is valuable and wish you all luck with it. I want to address a specific part of your message because I think it overlooks something: “Several people raised very valid concerns about the apps not fully matching mobile web functionality. This is correct, and we want Web to remain the primary environment for editing workflows that are not supported, or are less than ideal, in the app. For users interested in editing on the apps, we will ensure that easy and intuitive ways to transfer over to the web are available: We want readers to be able to easily use the apps for all the things the apps do well, and lead editors to the web for editing.“

One problem with that is that for whatever reasons right now, the mobile app does not render articles the same as the desktop or mobile web versions of Wikipedia. @Kowal2701 wrote above, ‘The lead image appears as a banner at the top, and the infobox is collapsed under “Quick facts”.‘ I get the explanation on why this might have been done, but so long as the rendering is different, it’s going to result in content that does not look right on the mobile app. Here is a concrete example:

Some images are diagrams:

Diagrams are one case where an editor making decisions is going to be taking into consideration (most likely) the desktop environment first as it is where most people edit, and the mobile web environment second as it is now the main place where people read Wikipedia articles. There are a lot of articles where a diagram makes even more sense as a way to explain the topic than these welding ones. Take the citric acid cycle, which has a great diagram that makes no sense for the mobile app’s top image.

This is not the only difference in content choices, but it’s one that often sticks out to me when I check things on the mobile app. Take for example, 3 welding articles: Shielded metal arc welding, Oxy–fuel welding and cutting, and Flux-cored arc welding. Their lead images are respectively a photograph, a diagram with embedded text, and a labelled diagram with text in the caption. The photo works great on the app, and the SMAW article has its diagrams in a body section. The two diagram lead images both look a bit weird when the diagram is blown up as the top image. The labelled diagram is better for accessibility, but becomes almost meaningless as the top image.

It’s even worse in the cases where a complex diagram and an infobox both make a good introduction to the topic. In the featured article, electron, which is a topic inherently too small to photograph, there is a great diagram of orbitals with a caption explaining in accessible plain text in the infobox. For the mobile app, a reader is shown half the diagram in the top image and the explanation is hidden away in the collapsed infobox.

→ TL;DR

Regardless of the reasons why the mobile app is rendering differently, it’s going to result in the mobile app often delivering suboptimal or even broken content to readers who are editing on mobile web or desktop and therefore testing on mobile web or desktop Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 18:41, 2 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@JTanner (WMF) How does an app help people “return” to Wikipedia in any way that a browser bookmark would not? David10244 (talk) 23:09, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@David10244 (I am not JTanner): in a browser, a websearch is forced down your throat. Every time I open my a browser I see a tantalising Google search bar, why should I choose to click a Wikipedia bookmark? Google summarises Wikipedia’s information without making you visit and offers to sell you something all at the same time! (This is sarcasm). The app can also personalise your feed based on previous reading habits, should be smoother for loading and can send you notifications – a sure reason to return. On a mobile device, which includes most readers, hopefully they will launch the Wikipedia app rather than their browser. Having said all that, the app ignores editing in favour of reading. Also, Wikipedia’s search is bad and Wikipedia poorly presents information to answer questions. Commander Keane (talk) 00:59, 20 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Commander Keane Hmmm. OK, I see how that might apply to some people… I am not sure why, but I don’t like most apps (even though I use them). I said elsewhere that Web sites like Home Depot or Best Buy are perfectly fine for me in a browser, even on my phone, and I find that Home Depot’s app (in particular) is slow and badly designed. These companies don’t need an app, IMO!

I generally read and edit Wikipedia on a tablet. I can’t imagine trying to read OR edit on a phone, although I know that some people do.

Not to discount your answer, and I appreciate it, but for me: My reading habits are pretty random; loading pages is fine (perfectly smooth) on my Android tablet and on my Windows 11 PC; and I get notifications in either place. I think that phone users get notifications now too, and that was a big problem for a long time.

I often do a Web search for topics, knowing that a result from WP will be near the top. I’ll read that and/or click on some of the other search results. (When I read WP articles, I get sucked in to editing, then I’ll go read VPT, or some Phabricator tickets, or the Help desk questions for fun.)

Thanks! David10244 (talk) 05:31, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

WP:DISCLAIM says that Wikipedia will not deploy disclaimers about potentially sensitive/objectionable content. However, the footer on mobile (default skin) does not contain a link to disclaimers, unlike desktop versions. Is there a reason for this? Szmenderowiecki (talk · contribs) 06:40, 2 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

There are plenty of debates about the extent to which Wikipedia should have disclaimers, but putting all that aside, I just want to confirm I’m replicating the more technical aspect of what you’re noticing. There is a list of links at the very bottom of the screen on desktop, with things like “Privacy policy,” “About Wikipedia,” etc. “Disclaimers” is among those links. On the standard mobile web view, there is also a list of links. However, it does not contain the disclaimers link (nor, I’m noticing, the “About Wikipedia” link; it also has a “Terms of Use” link that on desktop is absent and appears instead just above it in MediaWiki:wikimedia-copyright-footer, which is a bit odd in that the privacy policy is not treated the same).

I’m not quite sure why that is, and whether it was a deliberate decision or just a technical artifact (perhaps those links are English Wikipedia-specific in a way that the others aren’t and got missed when building the mobile version). Cheers, Sdkb ^talk 15:50, 2 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like the Minerva skin hides the “Disclaimers” link under the hamburger menu instead of putting it in the footer for some reason. Anomie⚔ 16:36, 2 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Sdkb nailed my concern. Anomie, fair enough, but it’s confusing as hell. Szmenderowiecki (talk · contribs) 21:38, 2 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

You mean a reason besides the mobile version being crap that should be chucked in the bin?–User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 18:19, 4 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Szmenderowiecki, thanks for sharing this concern. This situation dates back to 2013, when the mobile site wasn’t fully integrated into MediaWiki’s skin system and we supported WAP phones. The main menu had two items “Random” and “Home” and was the primary menu (see wayback link). There was a small footer but nobody was clicking on the links there. It was therefore decided to merge the two menus.

That said, the Reader Experience team at WMF will take a look at this to see if we can bring consistency between the mobile and desktop footers. Appreciate the flag again! EBlackorby-WMF (talk) 00:29, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

There’s a lot of stuff that just isn’t on mobile for no discernable reason, like categories and navboxen. jp×g🗯️ 02:26, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

And no Help link in the hamburger menu :-(. Commander Keane (talk) 02:40, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently Toolforge (i.e. WMF) now hosts a site called “Wikiflix”, of which Wikidata proudly proclaims[1]: “All WikiFlix content is generated from Wikidata and maintained by that community. ” Well, no, that’s not true. Every page has a text intro which is taken straight from enwiki, without any attribution at all. Compare e.g. their page for Nosferatu with the lead of our article Nosferatu, or their page with our It’s a Wonderful Life. No idea why they consider films like Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle[2] or Close-Up (1990 film)[3] as public domain, but it again has the text copied from us. If they are still copyrighted, then this really is a bad idea.

It’s sad to see what is supposed to be a sister project neglect to show the most basic respect and instead claim that what is provided on Wikiflix is somehow the product of Wikidata editors. Fram (talk) 09:08, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

WMF is not the creator or maintainor of Wikiflix. It is hosted on toolforge, which is a cloud computing like service for volunteers to host their programs and code which help wikimedia projects. That particular tool is created by @Magnus Manske ~/Bunnypranav:<ping> 10:51, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Who, then, is responsible for things like compliance with copyright? Phil Bridger (talk) 11:07, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

That, I am not sure of. Copyright infringement in general in prohibited when using wikimedia cloud services (toolforge is a part of that). I just wanted to say that wmf does not operate Wikiflix, I do not have any comments on the lack of attribution done by Wikiflix, or any other issue raised. ~/Bunnypranav:<ping> 11:16, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@JJMC89 @Lucas Werkmeister @Pintoch @SD0001 @Sohom Datta is this something which falls under the remit of the Toolforge standards committee? RoySmith (talk) 12:22, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Taking a cursory look, for the wiki page itself I would encourage folks to edit the Wikidata page to provide credit to Wikipedia contributors/expand on who curate the content being displayed. Wrt to the lack of attribution within the tool itself, maybe raising a ticket with this repo would be a good place to start. For what it’s worth, (in my personal opinion) the toolforge-standards-committee should be the point of last resort (not unlike arbcom) and should be contacted when y’all have made attempts to reach out to the maintainer, but there hasn’t been any movement/there has been a refusal to follow Wikitech:Cloud_Services_Terms_of_use. Sohom (talk) 12:43, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Sohom Datta thanks. To be honest, I’ve been following the progress of the TSC for a while and I’m still unclear on exactly what it is supposed to be doing. In any case, I do see that a ticket was opened about a month ago on this very topic with no apparent response. RoySmith (talk) 12:54, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I’ve opened another issue focusing more specifically on the attribution problem. RoySmith (talk) 13:09, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. Fram (talk) 13:26, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@RoySmith Facilitating right to fork requests would be it’s primary function. I have mentioned/forwarded this thread (about Wikiflix/Wikivibes) to the list for further comments to see what folks think/what we can do. Sohom (talk) 13:29, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Is that list publicly accessible? RoySmith (talk) 13:39, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@RoySmith The list should be toolforge-standards-committee@lists.wikimedia.org. The archives to the list are non-public since there are cases where these discussions include non-public information (like non-compliant code/exposed secrets etc). Tbh, the best way probably to reach us/get a public response is to file a phab ticket under the toolforge-standards-committee project. Sohom (talk) 13:50, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

On his github page he last responded in February 2024, none of the 7 issues there (oldest March 2024) has had any response at all. Fram (talk) 13:26, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. By the way, the similar site for sounds, Wikivibes, has the same problems. Fram (talk) 11:31, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

well, the two projects share the same code base, that’s why. – robertsky (talk) 13:54, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Attribution added. —Magnus Manske (talk) 14:51, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

[4]Where? Fram (talk) 15:10, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

It says Description from Wikipedia, under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. in the tiniest font size possible ^/s on “entries” that have a description. example — DVRTed (Talk) 15:14, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Just checked on that page (which I might had cached) and some pages I hadn’t visited yet, and I can’t see it and a search for “description” yields no results… Fram (talk) 15:29, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

That’s odd but it’s very likely due to caching. I guess the “entry-page.html” component is cached in the browser for you. You can either visit the page manually to force update the cache https://wikiflix.toolforge.org/vue_components/entry-page.html (it shows up as a blank page) and go back to one of the “entries”, or you can try in a private/incognito window. — DVRTed (Talk) 15:53, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, yes, now I see it, and it’s indeed barely legible. Fram (talk) 15:55, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I’m seeing it. It’s a little hard to read, being in 6 pt type and (partly) in blue on a black background, but I’d argue that it meets the “any reasonable manner” requirement of CC-BY-SA license statement. RoySmith (talk) 15:57, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Any indication how you will prevent copyright violations? Because there seem to be quite a few of those among the more recent films, and since the only purpose of the site is to provide an easy link to full video’s, that seems rather bad… Fram (talk) 15:57, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Close Up is in the public domain in Iran because copyright only lasts 30 years there. —Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 16:24, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like the site is linking to versions of these films hosted on other sites and playing them in an embedded video player. If the films are copyrighted, this would violate the English Wikipedia’s rules on linking to pirated material (WP:COPYLINK), but it’s not hosting the content, which would be more problematic. In Switzerland, for instance, such a link is generally not illegal, with some asterisks of course. Toadspike [Talk] 19:25, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

But we don’t really care about Swiss laws? COPYLINK explains “Knowingly and intentionally directing others to a site that violates copyright has been considered a form of contributory infringement in the United States “. So now that the Wikiflix editors know about this, they should remove these links. Or else Wikidata should stop supporting this site, and Toolforge should probably cease hosting it. Right? Fram (talk) 09:20, 9 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Fram, Whether or not Wikidata supports Wikiflix feels like a discussion for the Wikidata community to have. Please discuss it there, not on the English Wikipedia. For what’s worth, this page on the tool points out that video links should be only added for public domain material.

With respect to where the data is coming from, for Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle (and basically all the items on wikiflix), the data of the youtube video is present on the associated wikidata item (using the P1651 property on Q1773542). At a technical level, the tool is doing nothing but surfacing wikidata’s data in a slightly different format. If you have issues with the YT data being on Wikidata (where they also link to the youtube video) you should WP:BRD and engage with the Wikidata community. This does not appear to be a WMF or even a Toolforge issue, this is a Wikidata community issue and the correct forum to hash this out is Wikidata:Project chat. Sohom (talk) 10:49, 9 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

“At a technical level, the tool is doing nothing but surfacing wikidata’s data in a slightly different format. “? That’s a very strange way of looking at this. The tool is changing Wikidata (a very large general informational database with links to many, many different places, which may occasionally include copyvio links, just like Wikipedia) into a specialized small single-purpose site with additional Wikipedia text, with the sole intention of directing people to places where they can find films, but without any care whether these links are to copyvio’s or not. Why wouldn’t this be a Toolforge issue? If I start “Wikinudechildren.org” at Toolforge, only showing images of nude children which are already at Commons (i.e. “resurfacing” their data “in a slightly different format”), then you would claim that this is not a WMF or Toolforge issue either? After all, I don’t add anything that isn’t available yet, I just make it much much easier to find it and don’t care about the appearance such a selection might give. Fram (talk) 11:19, 9 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Linking/displaying/surfacing public domain material with a latent risk of potential contributory copyright infringement due to a noisy data source (as a tool) is very different issue from one actively promoting CSAM obviously (which for the record would require engineering outside just surfacing commons content). Promoting CSAM is a T&S issue which should be dealt with swiftly with a ban. Surfacing public domain videos and audio however, is not a illegal activity in itself. Looking at the codebase, there are controls to make sure that the wiki-data items were at some point marked as being in the public domain (by checking if they are linked to Q19652 through P6216). The fact that a few have been mislabeled is at best a oversight and at worst Wikidata editorial problem that the needs some moderation as I have said above. (for example, I’ve added a the exclusion property to the item which should remove it from Wikiflix consideration).

Taking a step back, I think following up a statement that where I basically said “the tool works like so” with a response “So, by extension of your logic, you think CSAM is fine? Do you?” That is uncalled for and frankly unhelpful to the point of being disruptive. Sohom (talk) 17:43, 9 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The images hosted at Commons shouldn’t be CSAM (or they should be deleted there), plenty of images of nude children are not CSAM and I never claimed anything of the kind. But compiling/presenting acceptable material in a new manner can still be offensive. I’m glad that you immediately found such a page unacceptable, but you haven’t explained why the two scenarii are so different (again, assuming that the base material in itself, whether they are Wikidata pages about movies or Commons images, are acceptable in the original context). “The tool works like so” doesn’t mean that an acceptable content line shouldn’t be drawn somewhere and that you only should be concerned about technological aspects. Fram (talk) 09:51, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

To rehash my statement above, you might have missed (which for the record would require engineering outside just surfacing commons content). I will refuse to elaborate further due to WP:BEANS, but you can have it from me that both situation are not parallels at a technical level in the way you are trying to insinuate. That being said, even if I for arguments sake assume in this context that both of these were somehow technologically equivalent and we apply the “is the presentation unsavoury” context, I still fail to see how Wikiflix is necessarily in violation given that there have been significant backend effort to restrict the films to only public domain ones (unless somebody banned public domain content while I was out on holiday). I don’t think this is a spicy take, but we generally should not de-platform individual tool developers over vandalism/miscategorization that is outside their control that can be easily fixed by editing Wikidata items. This is especially relevant given that this isn’t a casewhere the tool in it’s current form is itself actively circumventing policies, Terms of Use, laws or even actively encouraging users to add copyright infringing material (even the “list of candidates” is filtered to public domain content only and contains a disclaimer that only public domain material will be considered). For what it’s worth, when I made the comment “the tool works like so” my thought here was to clarify the argument “but is there is a mechanism for random non-editors to indiscriminately add YT links to any content through the tool”. I still stand by the meat of the message in that this is a wikidata problem, not a Toolforge/WMF one. Sohom (talk) 10:12, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

“we don’t really care” – please speak for yourself. On the rest, I agree with Sohom that this is a Wikidata problem, not an enwiki problem. Toadspike [Talk] 13:13, 10 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I have not been following every detail of this thread, but I agree that this has moved onto topics which are not enwiki issues, so this conversation should move to some more appropriate forum. Perhaps wikidata:Wikidata:Community portal or somewhere on meta? RoySmith (talk) 13:22, 10 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

In what way does WMF/enwiki care about the Swiss laws for non-Swiss material? Fram (talk) 09:53, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

What has whether or not the WMF or enwiki care about Swiss law for non-Swiss material got to do with Wikiflix, Wikidata or anything else relevant to this thread? I agree with RoySmith that this thread has run its course here. Issues related to Wikidata need to be directed to the Wikidata community, any issues actually relevant to the English Wikipedia should be raised in a new thread. Thryduulf (talk) 20:45, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The Swiss laws were raised by Toadspike, I still don´t know why. They are irrelevant for this whole discussion, but saying thzt was apparently not allowed either. Quite baffling. Fram (talk) 21:05, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I was adviced to post this issue here, since there’s no other suitable place for it.
It’s a rather unusual incident that technically occured outside of Wikipedia but is deeply intertwined with it.

Yesterday the chairman of the board of the NGO Wikimedia Estonia Robert Treufeldt talked about my user page on national Estonian television (Eesti Rahvusringhääling). The interview in original language can be seen here

Over there he accused me of being a “Sweet figure of Great Russian chauvinism” for hosting a neutrally worded RFC regarding the mention of USSR in infoboxes of Estonians born 1944-1991, as well as my efforts to implement the conclusion.
He was tactful enough to not mention my username, yet he did mention some personal details from my page.

Hasn’t he just publicly violated the WP:GF and committed a WP:PA on me? I mean, this behaviour should be unacceptable for any Wiki representative. Should we do something as a community to attract the attention of WMF to this issue, or just let it slide? Gigman (talk) 09:19, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

This whole situation is absolutely inexcusable from the head of a Wikimedia chapter. A Wikimedia chapter head has zero business publicly advocating for nationalist editors to subvert the Wiki movement. An attack in this manner is an attack on English Wikipedia and the project as a whole. CoffeeCrumbs (talk) 12:40, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

“publicly advocating for nationalist editors to subvert the Wiki movement” He never said that. LordCollaboration (talk) 13:50, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Calling for specifically Estonian editors to resist “Russian propaganda sources” on English Wikipedia while denigrating the votes of people from being from Canada and Yemen sure as fuck is nationalist. CoffeeCrumbs (talk) 16:06, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

What you said before was very different, that he was calling on nationalist editors to subvert the Wiki movement, not that he called on Estonian editors to resist Russian propaganda sources (not that this is accurate either) and that his statements were nationalist. LordCollaboration (talk) 16:20, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Calling for nationalist editing is subverting the Wikipedia movement, as it undermines our core principles, both as an encyclopedia and as a community editing an encyclopedia. A chapter head should never be acting in this manner. And let’s not pretend that he’s talking about theoretical Russian propaganda; he’s charging specific editors, who he “shames” with their nationality, without a shred of evidence. CoffeeCrumbs (talk) 19:16, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

WM EE was supposed to help every newcomer in Estonia to build Wikimedia projects, not to instill fear on them. What a shame. Ahri Boy (talk) 19:36, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Wikimedia chapters are independent from the WMF [5], so realistically I’m not sure how much recourse there can be unfortunately. @Castellum: (which appears to be Treufeldt’s Wikipedia account, see this interview with him in which states that he created his account in 2008 (which matches, see [6]) and came to Wikipedia through the activities of his charity Castellum, and that (in google translation) Castellum has become my username), would you like to explain yourself? Hemiauchenia (talk) 13:44, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

this is something that can probably be brought up to m:U4C given the broadside swipe on a Wikimedian community member (allegedly, given I have not processed the video/audio) and a Wikimedia project (according to the translated article accompanying to the video) by another Wikimedian community member.

Is there a way to have the audio transcribed and translated into English though?

As for a response to this from the English Wikipedia project, probably an open letter may be an appropriate response for now, subjected to consensus of course. – robertsky (talk) 14:16, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

There’re some news articles and Reddit posts of partial translations that highlight the main details. I can link them here if they’re nescessary. Gigman (talk) 19:03, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Please do. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy’s edits 11:58, 15 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

There’s an English article that doesn’t look promising. Quotes include: “Unfortunately, if you look at who took part in that vote, there were no identifiable Estonian usernames. There was someone from Canada, someone from Yemen,” Treufeldt said. In other words, according to him, the decision was made by users who are not familiar with the history of the Baltic states or the Soviet Union. “Behind this rewriting of history are often users who express Russian chauvinistic views and act in alignment with Russian interests,” he said, adding that this can be determined from the profiles of users who edit articles. Then he seems to explicitly encourage nationalist editing, which is several steps more than something like “we need more Estonian editors”. For example, he also says: Estonia faces difficulties in monitoring Wikipedia because Russia’s state-backed resources far exceed the capabilities of local volunteers. “Who would take on the task of ensuring that the ‘Estonian version’ prevails globally? Competing with Russia in terms of resources is quite difficult”. It’s a tremendous assumption of bad faith to accuse an editor implementing the result of an RfC of pushing Russian propaganda. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 00:32, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Clovermoss And, why should the Estonian version “prevail globally”? That doesn’t sound balanced; it sounds like a battleground. Sadly, I don’t suppose that Estonian viewpoints and Russian viewpoints can “get along”. David10244 (talk) 23:22, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I haven’t had the opportunity to look into the full background of what’s happening, but it seems inappropriate and a clear conflict of interest to add your own issue to List of Wikipedia controversies. Legoktm (talk) 20:07, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that it’s inappropriate for the user directly in the controversy to do that, but other than that it’s an acceptable addition. I modified it to make the language clearer and also to explain why Estonians consider this offensive. Szmenderowiecki (talk · contribs) 21:13, 8 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I wasn’t expecting to find myself being involved in any Wiki controversies, so when I found out that theres a list for them, I added the scandal that I’ve basically started myself. It was purely out of excitement, but I agree it makes me look like I’m proud of that or seeking for attention here. I should’ve waited a bit for things to clear up before doing that at least. Gigman (talk) 20:08, 9 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Legoktm, and I highly advise Glebushko0703 to keep this issue confined to an appropriate discussion, location, and venue. The article space is absolutely not the place for this – especially considering that Glebushko0703 is directly involved with said issue. ~Oshwah~^{(talk) (contribs)} 21:35, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Send an email to u4cwikimedia.org and then post their response. Guz13 (talk) 21:23, 9 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The fact that this “community member” has not yet gotten a permanent block for massive NPOV and other violations is a clear disgrace to English Wikipedia. And I am not speaking about Robert in here. Attacking the messengers is not really a way to go (even as this seems to have been a standard approach towards Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and everyone else who has voiced any opposition to his actions). This topic has so far been covered at least in Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Belgian news sources, and more seem to be coming. Considering that there are numerous Wikipedia articles with detailed descriptions on the topic of occupation and good references, yet they have been ignored, it should come as no surprise what the prevailing theory is on the topic, as it is becoming increasingly difficult to assume ignorance. To provide an analogy, the current actions could be considered comparable to spreading holocaust denial claims. So again, it should be no surprise how that enrages a lot of people, and I should not need to explain how that violates Wikipedia’s core principles. The question is not if an occupation happened or not; obviously, it did. The question is how that is framed. And if academic and legal consensus is different from what is written on Wikipedia, then yeah, that raises questions. Ivo (talk) 18:24, 11 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Please provide WP:diffs for the claims that you make. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:26, 11 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like there was an RFC. The community member in question is merely implementing the result of the RFC, meaning that they simply follow wiki policy. Instead of attacking the user, it is the RFC that you should be challenging. See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Infoboxes#RFC: Baltic states birth infoboxes — the user in question actually asked the community how to go about the issue, and now they are simply implementing what the community told them to do. See also Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Baltic states-related articles#Consensus still needed? and Wikipedia:Administrators’ noticeboard#Baltic state (1939 – 1990) place of birth issue. Even if you’d get this particular user banned for NPOV or whatever, this still wouldn’t change anything about the RFC result and what the Manual of Style says. It would just mean that someone else would take on the task “NPOV pushing” (as you seem to perceive it). Nakonana (talk) 19:36, 11 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Side note: I doubt that there’s any academic or legal consensus (or even discourse) on how Wikipedia should be handling birthplaces in its infoboxes. If we’re going by official documents, i.e. primary source — the birth certificates of the people who were born in the Soviet period, then their official documents definitely say “Estonian / Lithuanian / Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic”, see for example the following Latvian birth certificate with the USSR coat of arms on its cover and the birth place being stated as Латв. ССР (i.e. Latv. SSR) (see second line from the bottom on the right side the entry for “republika”). If we’d be using primary sources on Wikipedia, then we’d be misrepresenting what the primary source says if we’d say that person was born in Latvia instead of Latvian SSR. Nakonana (talk) 19:59, 11 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

This is a naked unsubstantiated aspersion. — LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:23, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

If a user starts RFC and subsequently steers the discussion in a way that appears to favour a predetermined outcome, then summarising the result as merely “following wiki policy” does not, at least in my view, reflect the concerns raised during the discussion. Several editors have clearly questioned whether the close was appropriate, and that feedback should not be dismissed.

To clarify my own position: I am not arguing that the birthplace should be labelled simply as “Estonia”. It could, as it is short, simple, and correct, but alternatives such as Soviet-occupied Estonia or Estonian SSR^[a] could acknowledge the historical context more accurately (it just may not be relevant in all articles). However, using “Estonian SSR” presents a significant NPOV concern.

For Estonians, edits like this are experienced as deeply offensive because they appear to normalise or legitimise a period of occupation and repression and link people to it that were the ones being oppressed. The historical background is well documented in articles such as Occupation of the Baltic states. Estonia lost ca 1/5 of its population during WWII, mostly due to Russia, followed by killings and deportations, and half a century under Soviet occupation. Given this context, it should not be surprising that the topic is highly sensitive for Estonians (as well as Latvians and Lithuanians among others). One would not write “Nazi” into some Jews article, who lived under Nazi rule in a concentration camp. This is that kind of offensive.

When this sensitivity is combined with a pattern of editing by a user who has received multiple blocks and whose edit history contains repeated examples of similar issues (let me just take some examples from a single article: ex1, ex2, ex3, ex4, ex5… but there were also earlies edits like this, that later led to RFC), I do not think it is reasonable to expect individual editors to challenge every instance separately. The pattern is visible, longstanding, and has been raised by multiple contributors over time. In such circumstances, it would seem appropriate for administrators to take a broader view of the conduct involved.

Finally, it is concerning when a user whose editing pattern bears clear marks of consistent POV-pushing asserts that there is clear consensus while simultaneously accusing others of sockpuppetry and violations of Wikipedia rules. This does not help maintain a good-faith environment for resolving an already contentious issue and is partly the reason why this question has gotten so much out of hand. Ivo (talk) 23:50, 11 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

There were about 23 editors involved in that RfC, if I’m counting correctly. subsequently steers the discussion in a way that appears to favour a predetermined outcome — are you saying that participants have changed their votes or argumentation because of the things that editor said? The options which they provided in their opening statement did include variants that would not have mentioned the Soviet Union. Their opening statement appears neutral. Furthermore, the active off-wiki canvassing on Reddit and in other media can also be seen as “steering the discussion in a way that appears to favour a predetermined outcome”. Nakonana (talk) 00:15, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

RFCs should not be decided by a simple headcount, as popularity alone cannot override substantial policy concerns. While one position indeed may have attracted somewhat more support, it is not clear to me that this constituted a decisive majority, particularly given that significant NPOV objections were raised and do not appear to have been fully addressed.

Some aspects of the discussion process contribute to my concern. One user, who was even more active in the discussion, even has multiple bans that also point to topic bans and controversial edits on Eastern European topics. It does not invalidate his arguments, but suggests that there may be need for a bit closer scrutiny. And even you don’t seem to question that much on actions done by Glebushko0703. I am not an administrator on English Wikipedia nor is this my home wiki, so I am raising these concerns in the hope that some uninvolved local administrators will review the situation and the RFC process more broadly. This is a contentious topic area where extra care may be needed.

The fact that this issue has attracted substantial attention outside Wikipedia reflects how this change is perceived by many as a serious NPOV concern. While off-wiki discussions are not that relevent here, the level of public and community reaction clearly suggests that this is not a minor or purely technical matter and that a more careful examination of neutrality and historical context may be warranted. Ivo (talk) 04:50, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

And even you don’t seem to question that much on actions done by Glebushko0703. That was not related to this topic though? It was about them continuing to cast aspersions against another user, and me (seemingly successfully) advising them to stop their clearly problematic behavior. I don’t know how you’d use that against me.

One user, who was even more active in the discussion, even has multiple bans that also point to topic bans and controversial edits on Eastern European topics — that actually leads us back to what I said earlier: Instead of attacking [this one] user, it is the RFC that you should be challenging. and Even if you’d get this particular user banned for NPOV or whatever, this still wouldn’t change anything about the RFC result and what the Manual of Style says. It would just mean that someone else would take on the task [of] “NPOV pushing” (as you seem to perceive it). As long as the RFC is in place anyone could implement those changes without having to expect punishment over it. Nakonana (talk) 19:28, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I’ve looked into this situation quite extensively and I’m going to share a view from a Baltic native’s perspective as someone who understands Estonian. I’m taking into account both the article published on ERR and the one on Digigeenius.

First, accounts that strongly defend soviet SSR talking points have had extremely long Wikipedia editing sessions lately, often many days in a row without any proper breaks, which logically raises suspicions about possible coordinated or manipulated activity.

Second, almost every time someone challenges these accounts or even just expresses a differing opinion, the account holders respond immediately and start accusing others of all kinds of things sometimes in a somewhat degrading way.

Third, users GoodDay and Gigman (Glebushko0703) recently had a discussion where both of them wrote in a very malignant tone about how in retaliation for a series of articles published on Digigeenius they should create a Wikipedia page for the author and how his birthplace would definitely be marked as Estonian SSR and not Estonia. They also added that the journalist was just an attention seeker and working for yellow media which couldn’t be further from the truth. Complaining here about how one person is merely expressing concerns while at the same time attacking a journalist does not put Gigman (Glebushko0703) in a good light.

Fourth, some information that users GoodDay and Mellk spread and that Gigman (Glebushko0703) usually agrees with can be taken as direct russian propaganda. For example there’s a page about the Estonian War of Independence where Mellk among other things changed the aim of the war from defensive to offensive which is a blatant lie and serves a russian narrative. When this was corrected, only one minute later Mellk changed the page back to the historically incorrect version again. Suspiciously fast. Furthermore, later an Estonian Wiki editor RobertRSMN corrected the page yet again until GoodDay came and copied exactly what Mellk had done. After this Mellk started accusing the user of sockpuppetry based on only one comment “Russian troll factory in action” allegedly because some blocked users had used a similar sentence. When other users mentioned that this was ridiculous Gigman (Glebushko0703) defended Mellk fiercely by insisting “Estonians are quite famous for their IT sector and judging by their actions all those socks were most likely issued by their government.” Somehow all the opposing comments have suddenly disappeared from the page.

Fifth, in October Gigman (Glebushko0703) suddenly and without any good reason started changing birthplaces to Estonian SSR which was before the RFC post was even created by the user. He also changed the birthplace to the soviet union for people who were definitely born before the soviet occupation, like here. This can be taken by many as direct russian propaganda.

Sixth, the RFC consensus looks quite shady from a Baltic perspective especially when some anonymous users decide how Baltic history should be written while ignoring the official guidelines of the Baltic countries on how a person’s birthplace under Soviet occupation must be written: place of birth + Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania. Taking official guidelines into account is especially important now because AI is taking information straight from Wikipedia. The previous rules were completely adequate and had been in place for decades. Nobody had any problems until Gigman (Glebushko0703) started questioning them without any good reason. Therefore, I believe the old rules should be reinstated to calm the situation.

My suggestion is to stop considering how credible journalists and people who are expressing concerns under their real names are allegedly attacking one anonymous user. Before some start accusing me of sockpuppetry I would suggest to have a think first. Perhaps I’m simply a regular person who encountered false information and is expressing a personal view on an issue that matters to most local people. T1blaspotter (talk) 10:59, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

some anonymous users decide how Baltic history should be written while ignoring the official guidelines of the Baltic countries on how a person’s birthplace under Soviet occupation must be written. While it may be entirely acceptable to those from the Baltic states to defer to the ‘official guidelines’ of said states, I’d have to suggest that were you to look at the broader context, and in particular the pressure that the English-language Wikipedia is coming under from certain quarters, you might get a better understanding of why contributors here are reluctant to hand over editorial control to external powers. AndyTheGrump (talk) 11:11, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

If we look at the English-speaking world, then the USA (following Stimson Doctrine), among others, explicitly did not recognize the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states, either de jure or de facto. So it is not exactly something that only some non-English speaking countries in Europe state. And most countries (not just the western ones) did not recognize the Soviet annexation de jure but recognized the Soviet administration in the Baltics de facto. This topic has been covered many times, as can be seen in the article State continuity of the Baltic states. People are free to think what they want about it, but this is Wikipedia, and facts should matter more than opinions here. Ivo (talk) 18:55, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, but how did the US de facto not recognize the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states? Did they not include them in maps of Soviet in schoolbooks etc? Did they have ambassies in those countries wether Soviet liked it or not? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 19:00, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

official guidelines of the Baltic countries. Imagine that the government of Russia publishes official guidelines that the current events in Ukraine are not to be called “war” but “special operation”………

Wikipedia does not follow official state guidelines of whatever countries. Wikipedia has its own policies. If you want said change, you’ll have to argue based on those policies and not on official state guidelines. Nakonana (talk) 19:41, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, but “ignoring the official guidelines of the Baltic countries on how a person’s birthplace under Soviet occupation must be written: place of birth + Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania.” isn’t a problem. It’s called presenting facts. I get that the Baltic peoples hate that their countries were overrun by the Soviets. But they were. There simply was no Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania at the time. Regardless of what comforting lies or technical lack of recognition you might mention. So, yes, we will continue to do so. —User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 20:02, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

What is the point of arguing about the official positions on this, if what some people think is considered way more important? It has been clearly stated that things like “Tallinn, Estonia” are reasonably accurate (while it is indeed true that this lacks some nuances), but if that lack of accuraccy is a problem, then how is that not a problem, that “Estonian SSR” is just as inaccurate as “Estonia”? Solution could be to write Soviet-occupied Estonia. Or are there some people here, contrary to popular belief, who know the state continuity of the Baltic states to be a lie? Where are the proofs? And my birthplace in my passport is listed as Estonia. I understand that some people say this could not be true, but again, where are the proofs? Ivo (talk) 21:57, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

What is the difference between “Estonian SSR” and “Soviet-occupied Estonia”? Phil Bridger (talk) 22:18, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

At least for an average Estonian, the first is perceived as a massive NPOV violation, the second just reflects the reality. No Estonian would claim that there was no occupation. It is common to refer to that time period specifically as “occupation time”. That is just like German occupation of Norway, just lasted longer. What Estonians have a problem with is if that is communicated in a way that could leave an impression that there was no occupation and “Estonian SSR” does just that. Three Baltic states were an exception among all other republics of the Soviet Union, but if this keeps on being marked as they were just the same, that is exactly what Russia has tried to systematically promote everywhere (including telling things that Estonians joined voluntarily, life was good etc). That is what makes it an exceptionally contagious topic as people are fed up with lies. Ivo (talk) 23:04, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Are there WP:RS that state that Estonians were born in “Soviet-occupied Estonia” rather than “Estonian SSR”? Because, tbh, before stumbling upon this discussion I’ve never seen anyone anywhere render the Estonian SSR as “Soviet-occupied Estonia”. When I Google “Soviet-occupied Estonia” I only get 10.000 results, and on the first page of search results I’m only seeing Wikipedia, Reddit, and Quora. Nakonana (talk) 23:34, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

References? There is even Soviet-occupied Estonia. There are many ways to set the words here (like Estonians often just refer to that as “Russian occupation”), but that is clearly used.

Were people born in Norway during the German occupation born in Nazi Germany? Ivo (talk) 00:10, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Probably depends on your definition. Per the map I’m adding now, no. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 13:02, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Per Eva Joly, sort-of. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 13:07, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Would this story qualify for Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost, fwiw? GoodDay (talk) 19:09, 11 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

It’s in the next issue In the media, at least atm. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 19:12, 11 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

There are many comments on this page dicussing the editing on Wikipedia. That isn’t the problem. It’s the incident of the WMF official who attacked on editor on TV who needs to be looked at. I have no idea if that is allowed or not. Guz13 (talk) 18:47, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Robert is not a WMF official, and most of what has been stated about what he did is misleading or an outright lie. And those accusations fall into the same pattern where all people who say anything against those changes or voice any concerns get attacked, and often by multiple editors. Ivo (talk) 19:07, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I don’t know the cirumustances of the accusation. But he appears to be a WMF official based on this page: https://et.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Eesti Guz13 (talk) 19:29, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Guz13 Wikimedia Estonia and the Wikimedia Foundation are different organisations. Thryduulf (talk) 19:53, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

According to that page, “Wikimedia Eesti on Wikimedia Foundationi (WMF) ametlikult tunnustatud haruorganisatsioon Eestis (inglise chapter). Wikimedia Eesti on iseseisev ühendus ega kuulu ametlikult Wikimedia Foundationi koosseisu, kuid saab oma tegevusteks WMF-lt raha taotleda”. I don’t read Estonian, alas, but Google Translate gives, “Wikimedia Estonia is an officially recognized branch organization of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) in Estonia. Wikimedia Estonia is an independent association and is not officially part of the Wikimedia Foundation, but can apply for funding from the WMF for its activities”. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:48, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Don’t speak Estonian either, but that seems to be a reasonably accurate description of a m:Wikimedia movement affiliates. * Pppery * _{it has begun…} 21:53, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Editors opposed to this change would do better if they stop making aspersions and challenged the RFC that decided the matter. It wasn’t decided by one editor, nor russian agents, but by consensus of that RFC. — LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:27, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I think Glebushko0703, you have three three venues where you could pursue this further, should you choose to do so.

All that said, you should carefully consider the responses here. While you’ll probably feel attacked by some of what’s said here, it’s important to stop and consider what people have said about your actions. It’s hard when you feel unfairly criticised, but it’s important if you want to learn from what was said and find a good resolution. Guettarda (talk) 23:53, 12 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Glebushko0703 actions have been to implement the results of a RFC, that they didn’t start, where multiple other editors agreed with them. Those opposed to them have made multiple unsubstantiated aspersions about them in this very thread. So I could understand if they felt unjustly criticised. The suggestion of taking this to UCOC or Arbcom or a good one, but as they’ve resolved the content matter by RFC DRN is an odd suggestion. As to taking it to etwiki, many of those casting aspersions in this thread are from etwiki, so I suspect that their request to stop being attacked would fall on deaf ears.

Whether anyone thinks the RFC results were right or wrong, those who opposed the result are going about resolving it the wrong way. — LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 01:09, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Glebushko0703 did start the RFC. Jähmefyysikko (talk) 02:35, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

There are plenty of examples provided here and elsewhere (that keep on getting ignored). The user in question got his first ban in October for edits like this. More bans followed for personal attacks and disruptive editing. There is a pretty clear pattern of POV pushing starting from edits like this (that predates birthplace infobox question) and later getting to article content question (like). (And this doesn’t just involve Estonia, an early example) This user was not even that active, until he discovered this topic. Ivo (talk) 02:59, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

None of that changes that the RFC decided the change to how birth places would be listed, not Glebushko0703. That they implemented those changes inline with consensus is not an offence. If you think an editor is engaged in disruptive editing you should take them to an appropriate forum, possibly WP:ANI. — LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 03:07, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

He has been a recurring visitor there. Maybe the earliest instances is this. Ivo (talk) 03:35, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

OK, again if you think they are still editing disruptively it’s probably the best pace to discuss it. — LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 03:49, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry I stand corrected, but that doesn’t change anything. Glebushko0703 didn’t have control over the RFC or decide it’s consensus. — LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 02:59, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

There was no clear consensus and WP:NOTDEMOCRACY. Same arguments have been ignored here as well. Ivo (talk) 03:35, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry that’s a ridiculous statement. The RFC close was clear, and there was even a secondary discussion about that point in which the closer clarified their close[7]. If you don’t like how the RFC was closed challenge it, see WP:Closing discussions#Challenging other closures, otherwise it stands. — LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 03:46, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Even that closer wrote there that “In my opinion, an explanatory footnote would be helpful in flagging for readers the complexity of nationality in these circumstances.” And that is exactly what has been missing and what Glebushko0703 has been fighting against. So you’re slowly getting to the point why this approach has been so much contested: the plain “Estonian SSR” is viewed as misleading (and by many people also as very insulting… thus the NPOV issue). There was only an option of Estonia vs the Estonian SSR, but both of them could be considered equally misleading. Ivo (talk) 04:18, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

So they tried to change the birth place to Estonia SSR and where reverted, discussions were had and a RFC held. The RFC result was discussed and implemented. A explanatory note was added, it was reverted, so has there been a discussion or any attempt at WP:Dispute resolution? Because it appears one was done the right way, and the other has been met with aspersions. — LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 12:48, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Also whether people are insulted or upset is not part of the WP:NPOV policy. I think you’re mistaking editors having a POV, which is true of all people regardless of where they come from or who they are, with the result of a discussion to resolve what the consensus was on a dispute matter. — LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 12:58, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

An affiliate chapter head actively going on national television to attack a Wikipedia editor for involvement in an RfC (no matter what the involvement is and no matter what the RfC is about) is completely and utterly inappropriate. Robert Treufeldt should be removed as chairman of the Wikimedia Estonia board. And if the board refuses to take such an action, then Wikimedia Estonia should be removed from inclusion as a Wikimedia affiliate entirely. Silverseren^C 03:59, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Absolutely none of that is, or should be, within the purview of editors on the English Wikipedia. If you think the Wikimedia Estonia board should take some action then you need to contact the board of Wikimedia Estonia (links to their contact details have been posted in this discussion). If you think Wikimedia Estonia should be removed as a Wikimedia affiliate then you need to contact the m:Affiliations committee. Thryduulf (talk) 04:08, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I also recommend reading the discussion first, or at least getting to know what was actually in the interview, as what has been written here about that is massively misleading. Ivo (talk) 04:22, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Then explain it, Kruusamägi. Did the head of Wikimedia Estonia go on national television and accuse a Wikipedia editor (of literally anything really, it doesn’t even matter what the accusation was about) of some claim of malfeasance over an RfC on a Wikipedia talk page? Silverseren^C 04:32, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Short answer: no he did not. This is also not about some user implementing the RFC decision, but about an obvious pattern of POV pushing that started well before the RFC was even made, and what has gone lot further than that. More context is provided by previous comments, and it may not be reasonable for me to repeat that. Blaming a fellow Wikipedian, who explained on television how Wikipedia works, is not nice. So please let’s stop that. Ivo (talk) 04:54, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Unless we are suggesting the reporter made up the “Tegu on, võime öelda, suurvene šovinismi maigulise tegelasega” quote, then we should probably assume it was said by the individual interviewed. I find “explained on television how Wikipedia works” to be a deeply euphemistic description of that interview, at best. CMD (talk) 05:12, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

What actually happened? Maybe explain both sides of this issue so that English speaking audiences can understand. Guz13 (talk) 16:49, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Estonian volunteers struggling to protect Wikipedia from Russian propaganda. That’s probably not “both sides” though. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 17:08, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I don’t think that its helpful to think of this issue in terms of “sides”. Yes, the occupation of Estonia by the Soviet Union, and its incorporation into that country were illegal, but they happened. We should not attempt to right great wrongs by denying that it happened and that the world was largely indifferent. Phil Bridger (talk) 13:40, 15 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I am asking specifically about the incident. What does the editor say happened and what does the chairman of Wikimedia Estonia say happened? Guz13 (talk) 21:16, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

If the chairman’s statement lead to canvassing issues on enwiki then it does become an enwiki issue. Nakonana (talk) 17:17, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

As I understand the timeline, the statement came not only after the RfC was closed but also after post-close discussion had concluded. Thryduulf (talk) 17:38, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I would say the correct value to complain is WMF T&S. This venue is not public; any public discussions of the issue very quickly turn counterproductive as we can see here.–Ymblanter (talk) 23:46, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Correct me if I’m wrong, but anecdotally speaking I feel like wikis inlanguages spoken in only one country as the national language tend to suffer from nationalism-related issues for very obvious reasons. English is the most cosmopolitan language on the planet so it doesn’t really have this problem. —Dronebogus (talk) 11:18, 14 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Less, anyway. But you have a point: “Haaretz journalist Omer Benjakob said in 2023 in relation to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that “Unlike many Wikipedias in languages with a global span, like English, Spanish or Arabic, Hebrew Wikipedia resembles its Polish or Hungarian counterparts in being more of an “Israeli Wikipedia.” It can be seen as having an implicit pro-Israeli bias.”^[1]” Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:23, 14 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that is certainly true. Technically Wikimedia Estonia has nothing to do with the Estonian Wikipedia (one pertains to the country; the other the language) but it in fact very nearly owns it. Phil Bridger (talk) 14:17, 14 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW – Before the RFC was even held, there were/are already hundreds of Baltic bios with “city, xSSR, Soviet Union” in their infoboxes. So the RFC basically re-affirmed something already established. GoodDay (talk) 13:49, 14 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

As a heads up, a follow-up discussion at Kaja Kallas is now live about footnotes of people born in the Baltic states under Soviet rule. Szmenderowiecki (talk · contribs) 20:30, 14 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

At Friday’s meeting, representatives of the Government Office and the non-profit organisation Wikimedia Estonia will map the possibilities of protecting Estonian history from the counterfeits contained in Wikipedia.

In the English Wikipedia, the cyber villain has changed the birthplaces of many well-known Estonians by writing to: Tallinn, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union.

Link

I would just like to ask if this is the sort of thing the WMF allows and endorses? And by “this thing” I mean foreign governments removing/changing what they consider “counterfeits” (machine translation) from Wikipedia.
If this is allowed to happen, Wikipedia can no longer claim editorial independence, and it becomes a mouthpiece of various governments. I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 09:37, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Please don’t make everyone guess what the point is. Yes, you gave a link but also outline who/what made the quoted statement and in what context. Johnuniq (talk) 09:52, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

This seems to be linked to Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF)#The Chairman of Wikimedia Estonia commited a personal attack against me on national television above. Phil Bridger (talk) 10:14, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

There are also a couple of ongoing RfCs that followed on from the one that prompted the interview on national television, on roughly the similar topic. CMD (talk) 10:24, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The point is that the Government Office in Estonia (presumably at the direction of Kaja Kallas) had a meeting with a WMF affiliate (Wikimedia Estonia), where they discussed ways to influence Wikipedia content (presumably circumventing the normal editorial processes). Is there a way for WMF to ask for the minutes of that meeting from their affiliate? Which “possibilites”, if any, have they “mapped” at this meeting? Are there going to be further meetings?

Why is the government of Estonia trying to influnce the English Wikipedia via an intermediary (Wikimedia Estonia)? To me, these seem like reasonabke questions to ask. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 11:27, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Why is the government of Estonia trying to influnce the English Wikipedia via an intermediary (Wikimedia Estonia)? Probably one or both of (1) they think Wikimedia Estonia is a branch of the WMF rather than an affiliate or (2) they think they can more easily coerce Wikimedia Estonia as it’s in-country. You also seem to be assuming that the WMF will go along with the Estonian government’s demands; if they do at all, it would likely only be in connection to pursuing the matter in relevant courts (cf. the ANI case). Anomie⚔ 14:53, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

While this may be true in some situations, it seems very high-level and doesn’t grapple with potential second order effects. The government may be trying to do it because it may work. You can stir up enough people in a niche area to result in consensuses more to your liking, even if the WMF does nothing. CMD (talk) 16:06, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

At that point you’re getting pretty far away from Wikipedia can no longer claim editorial independence, and it becomes a mouthpiece of various governments though. And in such a situation WP:LOCALCONSENSUS may be applied where it couldn’t in response to an WP:Office action. Anomie⚔ 16:29, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I don’t disagree with that point on specific wording, but it might not be as far away as we’d like. The development of a localconsensus could reward an influence campaign as it could impede it, it is a tool within our system with its benefits and flaws. CMD (talk) 16:43, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Don’t stress over it. GoodDay (talk) 15:33, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I’ll stress over whatever the hell I want. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 15:51, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

But have you got any evidence that any of this will happen? So far we have one newspaper saying that the Estonian government and Wikimedia Estonia will “map the possibilities”. It’s possible that they will decide to do nothing. Phil Bridger (talk) 16:24, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

There has been some speculation in this discussion that merits clarification. Over the past few months, a number of disputed changes have been made on the English Wikipedia, and they are not limited to birthplace wording alone, and several of these changes closely mirror well-known Russian state narratives. Some relevant diffs have already been provided in this thread. In that context, it is reasonable to raise concerns about whether Wikipedia may be vulnerable to organized narrative-pushing or disinformation efforts. This would not be unprecedented (see, for example, the Croatian case). These concerns help explain why the issue has attracted attention from the media, the general public, and Wikipedians from the affected countries.

The position expressed by the local chapter has been that the matter would be resolved within Wikipedia’s existing processes and that there is no reason to get involved. While Estonian Wikipedians and chapter representatives are clearly dissatisfied with the underlying issues, the situation has also prompted broader public discussion about the edit histories and the transparency they provide. Ivo (talk) 22:41, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

it is reasonable to raise concerns about whether Wikipedia may be vulnerable to organized narrative-pushing

Indeed! Now is a good time to ask. Were you, as managing director of Wikimedia Estonia, present at the meeting with the Estonian Government Office on Friday, January 9th? [8] What was discussed at the meeting? TurboSuperA+_[talk] 22:54, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I did not attend the meeting in person, but participated virtually. From the state side, the main question was whether there are signs of coordinated narrative-pushing, and what responses would be appropriate if such activities were to be identified. From the chapter, the focus was on explaining how Wikipedia works in practice and how it could be supported more effectively, particularly concerning the Estonian Wikipedia, where, due to the small population of Estonia, it is difficult to cover all topics needed. Some state support could go a long way to increase the quality in areas that otherwise lack editors, and allow more training for people who could make meaningful contributions in the future.

One plan is a broader review of how Estonia-related topics are covered across different language editions, as smaller Wikipedias are even more vulnerable to capacity constraints and systemic issues than the English Wikipedia. We could also try to involve some specialists who could help to review content quality on more complex topics. And there is increased interest in general Wikipedia monitoring and anti-vandalism work, as there are concerns that current capacity in Wikipedia might be stretched too thin, especially while acknowledging that development in LLMs has made it easier to generate seemingly believable text that could make it harder to notice content manipulations and easier to vandalize on scale. Ivo (talk) 23:48, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your response. I hope you can see how it can be worrying that a State’s government is taking interest in how Wikipedia’s topics are covered. There is no such thing as a “neutral narrative” and every POV is subjective, which is why we have WP:NPOV. I’m sure you would raise an eyebrow if the government of Russia had meetings with Wikimedia Foundation affiliates asking how edits that they consider to be “counterfeit” can be fixed.

Re: Croatian Wikipedia, the report doesn’t mention “coordinated editing”, but The evaluation concluded that Hr.WP had been dominated by ideologically driven users who are misaligned with Wikipedia’s five pillars The Croatian case was what put Wikipedia on my radar beyond the common understanding of “oh that site where you can look up info quickly”, as I mainly used en-wiki and never hr-wiki. The ideologically driven users were fascists who did things like writing that Ante Pavelić was merely a “statesman” (rather than a Nazi collaborator), and sanitising articles like Jasenovac, while adding negative epipthets to communist subjects of articles. One doesn’t need to coordinate with others to make those kind of edits, editors who follow the same ideology and subscribe to the same narrative about Croatia in WWII will make those kinds of edits.

What you call possible coordinated editing could just be users who also subscribe to the same narrative re: Baltic SSRs. Age could also be a factor, older editors would stick to what they learned in school, while the Soviet Union still existed, while younger editors born after the dissolution of the SU would not have learned the same things. Same is true for the opposite case. I would venture a guess and say that every Estonian editor voted the same in the aforementioned RfC. That doesn’t mean they are coordinated and receiving instructions from a single source, it is just a reflection of the dominant narrative in Estonia.

It is important to be aware of our own biases and not think my narrative is neutral, while their narrative is biased. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 08:09, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Why should the Estonian government have any influence over the Estonian Wikipedia? The former governs a territory, whereas the latter is based on language. The are plenty of people living in Estonia who don’t speak Estonian (mainly the dreaded Russian speakers) and plenty of Estonian speakers living outside Estonia. Phil Bridger (talk) 10:15, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Historically, Russian state-sponsored disinformation campaigns have been rather common. And to people not familiar with Wikipedia, “someone making hundreds of edits” sounds very different than to a Wikipedian. This is also why we have tried to explain to the media that this does not mean there is some Russian state hand behind that (even while the edits themselves are clearly problematic… just that there are other explanations, as there is no lack of people holding that kind of worldview in Russia… and this also explains where this “cyber villains” comes from… even as “küberpahalane” means more like “cyber vandal” or “cyber baddy”).

It would also be important to distinguish between different points of view and clear BS. Just like with this Croatian case, some kind of edits would be clearly problematic and could not be whitewashed with claims that neutrality requires those other claims to be just as prominent. When we would write about the shape of the Earth (to give a very banal example), it might be necessary to mention that there have been some people who have believed in a flat Earth, but there is no sane way to justify that this worldview needs to get the same level of attention as the dominant scientific worldview.

In here, it might also be necessary to explain that in most of Europe, people trust the state. This is not the USA or Russia, where some crazy despot is running the show. For that same reason, “cooperating with the government” has a very different meaning. Like, we are not talking about giving the Estonian government influence over the Estonian Wikipedia or sth. That would be utter nonsense. Ivo (talk) 22:59, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I suggest treating like any other POV push whether that’s from Russia, India, the US, the UK, or any other country. Be aware but otherwise ignore them. People shouting, screaming, and otherwise having a hissy fit is no way to go about changing the encyclopedia. If they want to talk part in discussion and present their views and sources there are many ways they can do so. — LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 19:44, 20 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

They are, there are at least two open RfCs springing from this. CMD (talk) 02:36, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I’m aware, my point was generic. It doesn’t matter what they do, things should be handled by process not on national television. — LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 13:41, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The national media is handling this because the process failed spectacularly on the Wikipedia side. Considering that even in this discussion, a lot of people have failed to notice what the POV push was actually about, it is difficult to be optimistic. Recommendation would be to avoid writing comments about what one does not know anything about. Assumptions are not a good guide, and here we can see a lot of them. Ivo (talk) 17:17, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Failed spectacularly ≡ those nasty Wikipedia editors failed to roll over and agree with everything. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:27, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

More like “those nasty Wikipedia editors failed to check sources or even look at what the discussion was actually about, and due to that, messed up really badly”. But yeah, you just proved my point by totally missing what this has actually been about and failing to check any facts. There is no point in telling how Wikipedia is all about sources and neutrality and stuff, when in reality it is just about what someone thinks who does not even bother do any basic background checks. Ivo (talk) 20:28, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Or they did all that and just don’t agree with you, you know assuming good faith. — LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 11:48, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Has anyone contacted WMF to see if they’ve been influenced by the Estonian government? Guz13 (talk) 23:24, 20 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I doubt they have been influenced, either way. GoodDay (talk) 20:48, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

MediaWiki message delivery 00:30, 14 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Hiyas, a reminder about Event:Wikipedia 25 Virtual Celebration happening online on January 15 at 16:00 UTC. We’ll have musical performances, games, prizes, special appearances, trivia, and it will be interpreted into Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Best, RAdimer-WMF (talk) 08:18, 15 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Reported in TechCrunch earlier today: https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/15/wikimedia-foundation-announces-new-ai-partnerships-with-amazon-meta-microsoft-perplexity-and-others/. – Shearonink (talk) 19:00, 15 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

On a first read very few details of the partnerships seem to be given. I just hope that it has been remembered that the WMF does not own the copyright to Wikipedia, so doesn’t have the right to give it away or sell it. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:40, 15 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

It can’t sell the copyright, but it can sell the content. Anyone can. Our license allows for commercial use and that is a feature of this great project. That’s not really what Enterprise is doing, though. It’s simply providing a more efficient way for these companies to access the content they’re using anyways. Toadspike [Talk] 20:25, 15 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I mean, for $500 I will sell you a piece of paper saying I authorize you to say the word “the”. jp×g🗯️ 09:04, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, don’t listen to jp. You can buy it from me for half that price. Levivich (talk) 16:34, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

From what I understand, these partnerships concern Wikimedia Enterprise, which provides AI companies with large-scale API access. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 20:06, 15 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Has the Foundation thought about the optics of this from an ethical standpoint? As the “hot” Gaza war is slowing I would expect to see more being uncovered about the partnerships tech companies have undertook with the IDF, giving them AI technology and possibly making them complicit in a genocide. Its not a good look if the WMF is happy to give those companies tools to supercharge their AI, especially if its used for any future military purposes — which, given the current state of the US on foreign policy, may drastically expand. ✨ΩmegaMantis✨^(they/them) ❦blather | ☞spy on me 23:58, 15 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Those companies, whatever you think of them, are taking Wikipedia’s content anyway (and can’t be stopped from doing so). As far as I can tell this is simply a way to persuade them to pay for what they are already taking by giving them access to more efficient tools. Mike Christie (talk – contribs – library) 00:15, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Definitely, and I agree that the strategy’s goal is to turn this taking of content into an opportunity to fund our projects. I just wonder if the Foundation has thought about how they are now active clients in large technology companies for the purpose of AI construction, which is used for military purposes, as opposed to a general font of knowledge agnostic to use. ✨ΩmegaMantis✨^(they/them) ❦blather | ☞spy on me 00:21, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I don’t think you can really separate the two out. Every AI company would love a lucrative defense contract. voorts (talk/contributions) 00:34, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

That sounds like a capitalism problem more than an AI-specific problem. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 01:23, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

We’re on the front page of apnews.com now too: https://apnews.com/article/wikipedia-internet-jimmy-wales-50e796d70152d79a2e0708846f84f6d7

I’m not sure “Wikipedia inks AI deals with Microsoft, Meta and Perplexity as it marks 25th birthday” is a very good headline for us. I don’t really want the public to associate us with either AI or big tech, nor to associate our 25th birthday with these things. –Novem Linguae (talk) 05:54, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I don’t really want the public to associate us with either AI or big tech — Wikipedia has been preferred by Google in search results for many years now, that’s why Wikipedia is the encyclopedia and not Everipedia or Citizendium or any of the others. That’s why the others can’t compete. Also, Wikipedia is preferred by Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon), and all the LLMs. “Big tech” has donated hundreds of millions of dollars and given us the monopoly on search results in almost every search platform in use. I’m sorry to break the news: Wikipedia is part of big tech, it only exists because of big tech, and it would not exist without big tech’s support. And why do you think big tech supported Wikipedia all these years? Because they use it to make money. LLM is just the latest iteration of that, but they used Wikipedia to make Google search, Siri, and Alexa better, too. We are volunteering to write content that is sold by big tech to the world. That’s what we’ve been doing for 25 years, FYI. Levivich (talk) 16:51, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

…Oh, and if we want to change that, we should change the license from WP:CC-BY-SA to CC-BY-SA-NC, but the community so far has been against doing that. Perhaps because the community realizes that Wikipedia wouldn’t survive if big tech couldn’t sell our content for profit. Levivich (talk) 16:55, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Agree with some others above that while the core idea behind Enterprise is reasonable, the timing is very odd, especially given the importance that brand management seems to have. CMD (talk) 06:06, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Also fully agree with that. Not ideal, and perplexed about the choice of announcing it for the 25th birthday. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 09:22, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Shall I state the obvious as say this should have been discussed with the community? Not that I expected the WMF to, of course… Cremastra (talk · contribs) 18:32, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The timing of this is terrible. With all the terrible decisions the WMF has been making recently, I’m nearly convinced they’re either trying to kill wikipedia or are being run by people who see us and our work as free labor for their big tech buddies. Is there any way for a wikipedia to break ties with the WMF? I think it’s clear they don’t have our best interests in mind mgjertson (talk) (contribs) 15:25, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

This misrepresentation of our values to the public is frustrating, but certainly does not rise to the level of breaking ties over. Let’s turn down the temperature a bit. –Novem Linguae (talk) 16:25, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Fully agree. We may not always see eye to eye, but more communication is always preferable to breaking ties. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 17:46, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

well it’s either that the WMF sells them API access and makes a couple of bucks or they scrape all of Wikipedia manually and cost the WMF a bunch of money

in both cases, they end up with their content but in the current case, the WMF profits from it Laura240406 (talk) 23:36, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Very, very bad timing to make this announcement now. The message on W25 should have been the human aspect of Wikipedia, not “AI!!!”. Some very worrying statements in that AP article as well.

• “While AI isn’t good enough to write Wikipedia entries from scratch, it could, for example, be used to update dead links by scanning the surrounding text and then searching online to find other sources.” Please no! At worst post such things to the talk page, but don’t let AI loose on articles to add sources. There is no guarantee at all that these would be good sources for the content and not unreliable ones, citogenesis ones, or hallucinated ones. Fram (talk) 09:58, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Best explainer I’ve read is this https://www.citationneeded.news/free-and-open-access-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/. Nthep (talk) 10:00, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

On second and third reads I still can’t see any details of the partnership agreements. If the WMF wants to avoid wild speculation about what may be in them then it should be transparent and publish the agreements. If “commercial confidentiality” prevents that then they shouldn’t have been signed. Phil Bridger (talk) 11:48, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Phil Bridger. I’ve got an response in the FAQ page about “what’s in the contracts?”, if you’re interested. Short answer is quite practical things like duration, jurisdiction, uptime/SLA obligations. Many of the things which normally go in such contracts like copyright or content-quality guarantees are not there becuase WMF doesn’t own the copyright or have editorial control over the content. This is just part of why it’s not a content license but a service contract for access to a high-speed pipeline of data.

In terms of financial transparency, you might also like to read the most recent annual financial report of the project – covering the USA fiscal year 2024-25.

I hope that helps. For further questions/details, I suggest you come over to the talkpage on Meta. LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 18:44, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Hello all,
Here on Meta wiki at the talkpage for the Enterprise API project is where this announcement is discussed. With links to technical documentation, financial reports, operating principles, etc.

Significantly, is the fact that the mainstream media frequently misrepresent and simplify this to being a “licensing” deal. It is not.

As mentioned by many – the content is already licensed freely, and as a consequence WP content is used to train LLMs already (as we all know). This announcement refers to these companies now being customers of the high-speed/volume API service – where they can obtain the same Wikipedia (and sister projects) content, but in a metadata structure more tailored for repurposing (and with Service-level agreements about uptime etc). The API is open source, and the feed is also available for free, for anyone, as per our culture and principles. Moving high-speed/volume users over to this “enterprise grade” service helps address the issue of heavy-impacts on the public infrastructure by crawlers bots. So, now major AI companies can pay for their own heavy usage, rather than being subsidised by our donors. The water’s the same, but they’re paying for a dedicated pipe – freeing up space for the general public who want to draw water from the well.

Moreover, having these formalised relationships now also means we can have a more proactive conversation with major external reusers of content about such issues as consistent attribution.

If you’ve any questions after having read the documentation at the link I provided above, please contact me via the project’s talkpage on Meta! LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 14:21, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

And whose idea was it to make this the big announcement for the 25th birthday? It feels disrespectful to your editors and like bad PR to your readers. Fram (talk) 14:26, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The “announcement” of this list of new customers was one paragraph within a much longer press-release about all the things that Wikimedians/WMF are doing as part of this Birthday. Many people are – rightly interested in “who” is a partner of this project and so this announcement is also an important display of transparency. LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 14:35, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

“one paragraph within a much longer press-release”, one of the three subtitles, and one of the two things highlighted by the WMF right at the top (“New video docuseries celebrates the humans who make knowledge on Wikipedia possible; new tech partnerships highlight Wikipedia’s value in age of AI.”

But I see you also did this: “In honor of this milestone, we interviewed a few volunteer editors from around the world about what moves them to contribute to Wikipedia’s pages. ” Surprise, the co-founder, who hasn’t done any “volunteer editing” worth mentioning in the last decade or so (in a positive way at least) is one of the 8. Again, quite a show of respect for actual editors. Fram (talk) 14:46, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I’ve responded on the Meta talkpage, thank you very much! Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 14:36, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Not trying to be aggressive with this point, but it would be helpful for communication to get less boilerplate responses on this noticeboard. No concerns were raised above about this being a “licensing deal”. The only mention of licensing was that this action was explicitly permitted by our licence. Meanwhile, an issue that was raised multiple times was not addressed before a follow up question. This gives off the impression, whether true or not, that the existing discussion has not been read or engaged with. CMD (talk) 15:35, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Chipmunkdavis. I didn’t mean to come across as “boilerplate” – especially since I wrote that response specifically in the edit window on this page (not copy-pasted from some pre-prepared list of replies) so it is literally the opposite – a bespoke response! And yeah – I’ve seen a lot of media (and subsequently people reading about the project via that media reporting) referring to this as a ‘licensing’ deal, so I’m predisposed to notice and react to that critique!

If you’re noting that the core concern raised in this comment thread is one of timing rather than content of this announcement… Well:

The reason for the timing is that – as per the naming of customers policy of the WMF – We WANT to name all customers (transparency) but cannot always do so (privacy). The fact of this birthday milestone meant there was an opportunity for all of these organisations also wanted to be able to show their long-term support for Wikimedia – both to financially support it, and technicaly to ingest the content in an ethical/official way. So, this was an excellent moment for them them all to do so, simultaneously.

It is not the ‘only’ or ‘biggest’ part of the press-release, nor the most important part of the birthday celebrations – but it is the thing that some (not all) journalists chose to highlight. I’ve been collecting a list of the news articles that focus on this story over on the ‘enterprise’ talkpage, but there are many other news stories which discuss other aspects of the 25th birthday celebrations. LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 18:38, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Apologies if I’m mistaken, but it sounds that the reason was ‘free’ advertising for those companies? Kowal2701 (talk) 23:13, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

It was a single paragraph in a press release. That would be a pretty bad form of advertising if that was the intent. voorts (talk/contributions) 01:02, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Lotta headlines though, idk what else “show their long-term support for Wikimedia” could mean other than brand management Kowal2701 (talk) 01:06, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

It’s big news. Although, as has been clarified, this isn’t a licensing deal, who and for what AI companies are paying is being heavily litigated and closely watched. voorts (talk/contributions) 01:26, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

If these are simply purchases of the WMF’s Enterprise package then that’s fine. The word “partnership” confused me, but it seems that any deal that was done in the last year or two is a “partnership” and somehow linked to our 25th anniversary. This is just marketing hype. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:44, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, “partnership” is just common vocab for this kind of thing. But moreover it’s actually an attempt to point out that this isn’t a question of a one-time payment for a product (merely a temporary and transactional thing). It’s actually building long-term relationships where external organisations have contractually engaged in the development and use of this infrastructure. This is more than just revenue – this means that we can now talk on a regular basis with their engineering teams about, for example, how attribution could be improved. This is about moving from our historical basis of agnosticism of reusers – knowing that big-tech use our content but not overtly assisting them to do it “well” – to being proactive in getting them to [financially and technically] invest in doing so in a sustainable manner. This helps their customers to get access to attributed Wikimedia content accurately. Ultimately, it is in their interest that our content is diverse, up-to-date, cited, accurate, and available in their user’s native language.

So… although “partnership” is a wolly word, it is indeed more accurate than merely calling them “customers” – even if that nuance doesn’t come across in a press-release or news-story. LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 18:24, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Do you really think that the owners of these companies see us in any more than transactional terms? When I was working for various software companies I spewed the party line that deals were partnerships, as you have to, but I knew that they weren’t. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:50, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

In more concrete terms, it could be amazing if we were now able to get concrete reassurances regarding issues like attribution. We do see them as partners, but we want guarantees that this goes both ways and that they’re actually willing to negotiate something there, rather than just saying that for the sake of signing a contract. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 00:03, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

They don’t do attribution for clearly copyrighted work, nothing indicates that they will do any attribution for Wikipedia. They pay to get easy access without bringing down our servers, that’s about it, and in return they get major headlines on what should have been a celebration of 25 years of volunteer-driven content dissemination (Wikipedia, Commons, …), and give many people outside Wikipedia the wrong impression that Wikipedia has capitulated for AI as well. Fram (talk) 10:12, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I think it’s a good thing these deals were made. If they’re going to be using our content anyways, might as well have them pay for it. I am a bit curious as to how much these companies are paying for access however, though I suppose that would be revealed in the next financial report. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 07:57, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The comments I’ve seen online from Wikipedia’s user-base and donors?…they are really really not happy. There is a lot of anger about this partnership or whatever you want to call it. And maybe it looks great and is great and yes all these companies are taking the WP content anyway (that we all create and have created), but people feel betrayed and oh MAN the optics sure do suck. – Shearonink (talk) 02:09, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Shearonink, This is less optics, more survival. The alternative to the partnership (which as mentioned above is just a Wikimedia Enterprise subscription where they give Wikimedia money to offset the load caused on our servers at a high level) in this context is to have significantly degraded experience as these AI companies scrape Wikipedia’s content for profit anyway while decimating our bandwidth to serve actual humans. Atleast this way, we can tell me “dude, if you scrape anything on Toolforge.org, we are kicking you out of the subscription”. Sohom (talk) 00:36, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I think WMF needs to be careful with its PR strategy. The kind of messaging that will generate Wikimedia Enterprise clients may not be the same kind of messaging that will present our values correctly to the general public. Headlines such as “Wikipedia inks AI deals with Microsoft, Meta and Perplexity as it marks 25th birthday” plant a seed in the public’s mind that we are all about inking deals with big tech and embracing AI, which I would argue are probably the opposite of our values. –Novem Linguae (talk) 02:15, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. – Shearonink (talk) 03:16, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Yes and no. I see better where you are and can agree that the PR should have been handled better and WMF should take this as a bit of a learning experience, but we also need to keep in mind that TechCrunch in particular (and many journalists in this industry) are “AI-pilled” and have a interest in reading text to be more favorable towards big-tech/AI. Misrepresentation/over simplification is not uncommon even amongst the best RS in the tech industry (I say this as somebody who has written articles about tech, even on a best day, I’ve found blogposts that are often more factually accurate than what Tech RS churns out). Sohom (talk) 11:04, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Why do you suppose journalists are “AI-pilled”? And can you give an example? –Novem Linguae (talk) 18:43, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

TechCrunch (which operates in the startup space) is not known for being AI-critical at all. The first article I can see on their site is [9] which needs to be much much more critical of AI, similarly, the journalist that wrote the Wikipedia piece has also written [10] which hides Alexa’s AI agent’s failing in one small sentence at the end that is immediately followed by a Amazon statement that the complaints are overrepresented. Sohom (talk) 22:51, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Fully agree here. There is a big difference between the partnership (which is necessary) and the communication around it (which can be controlled). Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 02:30, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. – Shearonink (talk) 03:16, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I get all that, but the optics, the PR, are bad. Go read some of the general public’s comments, like at the TechCrunch article and elsewhere and take them all in. People are upset. Wikipedia’s supporters are upset. Our donors are upset. – Shearonink (talk) 03:16, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• The timing is just awful and shouldn’t have been included in the 25th anniversary event at all. It’s causing a large amount of the public to consider Wikipedia to now be taken by AI companies. Even when that’s not true, the optics are as such. Whatever marketing person decided this should be at all done now is terrible at their job. Silverseren^C 18:58, 19 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  Hi Silver,

  As I wrote above, the fact of this birthday milestone meant there was a positive opportunity for all of these organisations who wanted to be able to show their long-term support for Wikimedia – both to financially support it, and technically to ingest the content in an ethical/official way – to do so. So, this was an excellent moment for these companies to do so. As per the naming of customers policy of the WMF, transparency of these names is something we consistently push for (and is a frequent [and very valid!] request from the community), so getting their simultaneous consent to be named publicly was great. It is my professional opinion that it would not have been possible to get permission for naming most of these new names outside of the context of the birthday. Believe me, we tried.

  It is not the ‘only’ or ‘biggest’ part of the birthday press-release, nor the most important part of the birthday celebrations, but it is the thing that some (not all) journalists chose to fixate on. Which is – as people have pointed out here – not desirable because the focus should have been on the knowledge itself, and the volunteers who curate it. In the end I feel we have a bit of a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation where two ideals partially conflicted: transparency (of the finances) and clarity (of the message).

  But more fundamentally, while it is understandable that the general public might not grasp the nuances of free-licensing (which meant that all Wikimedia content was already being used in AI/LLM training for commercial purposes without needing further permission), some of the articles I’ve seen misrepresented the fact of this API service with the outright falsehoods of this being a licensing deal. WMF Comms team have done a valiant effort in successfully request some of the worst-offending and highest-visibility news stories be fixed. Much like the work that goes on at WP:Redirects for discussion, the results of that tiring work is often invisible to the end-user.^[11]

  I hope this comment helps explain how/why this announcement occurred at this specific time, and that overall you feel that the benefits outweigh that concern: We can now say to the world that big-tech is indeed “paying their own way” for their heavy infrastructure cost and investing (financially and technically) in our long term existence (and improved attribution, improved information-integrity of downstream reuse), rather than Wikimedia’s donors subsidising their business model.

  If you’ve any specific questions or would like to discuss further, I encourage you to come over to the project talkpage on meta wiki. LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 14:53, 20 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  So these companies wanted to show their long-term support and their interest to get our data in an ethical way, but only if they were included in the press releases for the 25th birthday? What an incredible way to show how ethical you are and how long-term that support is! Fram (talk) 15:32, 20 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  @Fram In this context, I think It is my professional opinion that it would not have been possible to get permission for naming most of these new names outside of the context of the birthday. Believe me, we tried. means that they would not have allowed disclosure outside of a press release and WMF in this context, prioritized disclosure over having shadowy backers that were unknown to the community. “Leaked Records Reveal Wikimedia Foundation Quietly Funded by Major AI Firms” is probably a worse PR problem to have in this scenario. Sohom (talk) 16:12, 20 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  My issue is not with having a press release about this, but that this apparently had to be included in the 25th birthday celebrations or they wouldn’t have agreed to it. Which is basically blackmailing WMF into “we want to get attention during the 25th birthday celebrations” (which worked perfectly for these companies). Calling this “long-term support” and doing things in an ethical way (or calling them “partners” in official communications) when it looks more like getting cheap exposure on the reporting of the otherwise ad-free Wikipedia, is dubious. Your “worse PR problem” is a false dilemma. Fram (talk) 16:20, 20 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  Wouldn’t have agreed to disclosure without the press release, they would still have paid for it (which is the long-term support part if that makes sense) (or at-least that’s how I read what was written but I might be wrong?) Sohom (talk) 16:38, 20 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  Your insinuation that the disclosure of the companies’ names was contingent on tying it to the anniversary, if true, is less reassuring than is unsettling. Nardog (talk) 01:19, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• I think that this just demonstrates that the role WMF sees itself as having (as large as possible) conflicts with the role many editors here wish it to have (as small as possible). I don’t think we’ll get very far by talking in this thread. Personally I give some of my time to Wikipedia, not to brand Wikipedia, or any brand for that matter. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:06, 20 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Soon we will able to breathe the word “realistic medieval world” and an AI will be able to comb all the Wikipedia articles and sources related to this topic and generate an entire reconstructed reality of the past and it wouldn’t be possible if Wikipedia hadn’t thoroughly maintained and built up the knowledge over 25 years, especially the link to (archived) sources so the AI creation tools can simulate an entire reality as realistically as possible while sticking to history and TRUE facts.
Slyceth (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 01:24, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I hope that that day will come when I’m no longer here to experience it. Even so, can’t we do better than the actual medieval world? Phil Bridger (talk) 10:33, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

And I hope a day will come when people learn to write posts online that use sufficient punctuation. Cremastra (talk · contribs) 16:25, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

AI can help with that, too. Levivich (talk) 16:42, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Folks at the Wikimedia Foundation are proposing a new iteration of the Product and Technology Advisory Council for 2026 and are seeking community feedback on the same until February 28th. Sohom (talk) 03:57, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a lot! Replied on the talk page. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 05:15, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Product and Technology department (the part that develops features and works on code changes) is starting it’s Annual planning process (APP) where it decides what it will be allocating resources to/prioritizing over the next fiscal year. To inform WMF’s decision making on what to prioritize, they are requesting community members to answer a few questions/provide feedback on what should be considered at this meta wiki page until Feb 10. — Sohom (talk) 16:51, 20 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks @Sohom Datta, I was coming here to post this message and you beat me to it! I’ll just highlight for everyone here that the annual planning questions are ones Wikimedia Foundation staff are thinking a lot about these days and deal with some of the toughest challenges facing the Wikimedia projects, including editor support, attracting and retaining readers, and testing features more quickly and effectively. We are really curious how all of you would answer these questions, so thanks in advance to anyone who shares their thoughts! KStineRowe (WMF) (talk) 22:49, 20 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a lot to both of you for this (and for putting it on WP:CENT)! I’ll share my thoughts there! Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 23:31, 20 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Do we not already have the community wishlist? CMD (talk) 02:38, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The community wishlist is very underattended. Last I checked, it consisted mostly of ~5 editors from enwiki. That is the consequence of turning an annual event with all its fanfare into an ongoing one with zero advertising and zero community awareness. Toadspike [Talk] 08:58, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

What Toadspike said, I think this is the best opportunity at the moment we (the community) have of influencing what the WMF works on. Sohom (talk) 12:25, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose, but a new process with the same purpose as an existing process ignoring that existing process doesn’t give me much hope for the new process. CMD (talk) 12:48, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The two processes have existed side by side for a long time. I think the wmf seeking community feedback on annual planning is a good thing. We should encourage and reward the wmf whenever they solicit community feedback (i.e. give volunteers a seat at the table). –Novem Linguae (talk) 16:30, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

That, the annual planning process has been around for a while running alongside the Community Wishlist but has typically been a opaque process from the volunteers POV. Last year, besides PTAC’s “focus on mobile editing” recommendation, there wasn’t community input. This time around, after receiving feedback about it’s opaqueness, they are trying to open it up further (to my understanding). Sohom (talk) 17:53, 21 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The wishlist is underattended because there are no followups. Whatever the participation is, the developed routinely say they are not interested / do not have resources working on the projects community voted for. After the top voted proposal was turned down a few years back, I lost any interest in voting for new proposals. Ymblanter (talk) 16:34, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The leadership has changed significantly since then. The current status quo is that stuff on the wishlist do get worked on, but there isn’t too much engagement with the process from the community (not the communities fault though) — this is something I have been wanting to change, but progress has been slow. Sohom (talk) 11:52, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I still care about m:2025 WMF Board reform petition, and when I start something, I try my best to see it through. I can be very persistent in a good way. I’ve had several conversations behind the scenes, two of which was with our former CEO and current CFO. The main thing I’ve learned from these conversations is that the WMF does not like generalized statements of discontent but wants us to be more specific. I think it’d be useful to have something to point to in that capacity while I continue to try and improve WMF-community relationships when I have free time in the gaps of my busy life. I don’t want to speak for everyone and I have a handful of very specific examples myself, but it’d be good to have more voices that I can point to to demonstrate things are more systemic. So, for people who have opinions about the current status quo, I’m asking:

• When did you first feel this way? Was there an inciting incident that caused you to feel this way? Or was it a combination of different ones that eventually resulted in this opinion? If there are different incidents, can you be specific about as many as you can remember?
• Did you feel like your feedback was valued? If you felt like it wasn’t, why? Did you feel like you had any way to contact people who might be in a position to change whatever was upsetting you?
• What are some long term technical issues that have bothered you or have not been prioritized?
• Anything else you think may be helpful, whether it’s positive or negative. I think it’s important to have these conversations and address the elephant in the room.

I’ll go first. I generally had a very favourable impression of the WMF as a new editor because they’re a non-profit that hosts the project and I thought that was pretty awesome. I also had some naive ideas about how fundraising worked: [12]. I also thought the WMF were more involved than they are when it comes to content at first. I follow a lot of wikipedia related content online and I’ve noticed that this is fairly common. For example, some people misconstrue their donations as more directly supporting volunteer editors, akin to a Patreon-like process. Others are worried that we’re in a more precarious financial situation than our fundraising campaigns let on. I also didn’t know anyone from the WMF back when I was new. I was not involved in an affiliate. I was just me, focusing on my own projects within the community. Teen me was skeptical of people in authority as I had a background of seeing people abuse it for their own benefit. I was still somewhat new when the whole WP:FRAM thing happened, and that was what made me aware that there was some long standing tension between the WMF and the community. People were very vocally upset there and it was clear to me that recent events were just a microcosm of the whole thing.

Eventually, I met MMiller (WMF) while he was still on the growth team. I’m not entirely sure how this introduction happened, but I do know that somewhere around this time I was starting to get more active in discussions regarding NPP, where many editors felt frustrated by the lack of technical support. A couple of years later, I had a conversation with Levivich about helping new editors and WYSIWYG, which eventually led to me being inspired to experiment with mobile editing. I had heard of WP:THEYCANTHEARYOU and I was curious what I would observe as an experienced editor. I noticed a lot. I remembered Marshall as the only WMF employee I knew by name and pinged him on my talk page. He introduced me to JTanner (WMF) and I started to know a handful more WMF employees through the process of me messing around for hundreds of hours and giving feedback. I was happy that it wasn’t just going into a void and that I could directly voice my concerns to someone who was able to address them, but I have a pretty strong suspicion that my experience here is the exception rather than the norm. The main thing that surprised me about this experience is just how obvious most of my feedback felt. It was odd to be treated like I had some extraordinary insights when I felt like I was giving feedback that would be immediately obvious to any experienced editor. I remember being disappointed to the response to this phabricator ticket, but in general, I felt like the blatant technical issues I was observing were getting fixed, like how the app would crash if I tried to edit the end of a page.

Becoming the 2024 Wikimedian of the Year changed things even more drastically. Suddenly I was someone who was important and people were actively seeking my advice. I was in the spotlight when it came to being a very visible mobile editor, and I remember feeling incredibly betrayed when I learned about this at the closing party. My conscience screamed at me to not just ignore this and do my best to stop it. I felt a sense of moral obligation as a community member, especially since I knew that not a lot of people paid attention to what was going on behind the scenes with the app. And I knew how bad the community reception to this could be if it was actually implemented. Thankfully, it wasn’t. I’ve brought this up a few times since and people tend to be confused about why I care when I got the outcome I wanted. The reason is because I feel like there is a fundamental disconnect between the community and the WMF for people to think that this is a good idea in the first place and not realize that this is the sort of thing that would make people incredibly angry. I’ve sometimes used to metaphor of a Venn diagram to make this comparison.

After that, I took a break from anything involving the WMF. I’d participate in any research calls that came my way, and I’m glad there seems to be more interest in doing these things, like the research that was done regarding people’s interest in being administrators. I know there’s been a push from the foundation side when it comes to learning more about what they call “users with extended rights” across various communities. I think that’s a step in the right direction, but it’s only a step. I think there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to repair the relationship between the community and the WMF. The response I usually get to this is something along the lines of how some people won’t be happy no matter what. But there’s a big difference between that situation and the way things stand now, in my opinion.

One of the things I was asked to give feedback on was the anti-vandalism tool for the app. I remember being confused about why this was being developed. Apparently it is of value to smaller wikis and to areas where more people are reliant on smartphones. I don’t have that background, so I can’t speak to the truthfulness of that. But I do remember that while I was giving my feedback about this feature wondering why this new thing would be created when the app still doesn’t have VisualEditor and it isn’t considered a priority anytime soon. It’s unclear to me how things become “priorities”. I know of countless editors frustrated by certain technical issues that have been afflicting them for years, or sometimes even a decade, who are similarly confused about such pritories. So when I hear people talk about how the foundation is doing work to address technical debt, I wonder how much is getting missed or dismissed. I know there’s an incredible reliance on the goodwill and time of many volunteers to maintain certain things.

And of course, there’s the matter of the recent board elections. I learned a lot by talking to people before creating my petition. I came across Molly White’s timeline of a different scandal. It made reading m:Talk:Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard/October 2025 update even more upsetting. I was warned by someone that I’d be “burning my bridges” with the foundation if I created a petition, but I felt like it was the only way to really get across that I was upset and I was not the only one who was tremendously concerned by recent events. I had some hope that being a voice in the room at WCNA might prove useful. m:Talk:2025 WMF Board reform petition#WCNA shows how my initial attempt at that went. It was incredibly discouraging to have the literal CEO treat me like that, but I will state for the record that she has apologized to me, and I appreciate that. But I also recognize that not everyone would feel comfortable calling that behaviour out, and there are probably very few that could expect to receive any type of response. I know it terrifies even me to do such things, but I’ve been making a lot of progress the past year in being true to myself and speaking up when people would prefer to leave things unsaid.

Something else that disappoints me about WCNA is how hexatekin never got a good response to her question about the board’s media checks. I remember physically shaking my head when the question was side-stepped with a response that was incredibly vague and insisted that whatever they checked for was normal for non-profit organizations. It was also incredibly frustrating to hear her insist that they are “listening” when that’s not even happening in the same conversation.

And while there’s a part of me that feels vindicated by the applause I got in my lightning talk where I said that the projects have succeeded despite the board and not because of it, there’s another part of me that feels incredibly sad that people cheer for such a message. I don’t think things have to be that way. I hope that more people being open about their experiences might do what my petition did not (as someone recently told me, it “accomplished nothing”), if being specific is what is required to make a difference. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 01:36, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Clovermoss asked me to comment. My engagement with and respect for the WMF has declined steadily over the years. They seem to be very good at raising and squandering money. I have repeatedly offered my assessments of the shortcomings in how editors working on smartphones are treated and in my opinion, things are still bad and actually getting worse. I wrote My essay on the importance of smartphone editing and its challenges over ten years ago and things are no better. I no longer have any hope that the WMF will make any substantive improvements. Cullen328 (talk) 08:36, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The day after my initial remark, I want to add that that I have had a very cordial relationship for many years with one senior WMF staffer and one longtime WMF board member. I also want to say that I am in general agreement with most of the comments below. I am not denying that there have been incremental software improvements here and there. but editing with a phone is still much more awkward than it ought to be. As a matter of principle, I still do 99% of my editing including administrative work on my phone. That’s overwhelmingly how ordinary people access the internet these days. Cullen328 (talk) 20:52, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I have cordial relationships with a handful of people from the WMF, as well. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the case for a lot of editors, and it’s hard for them to feel like the WMF is more than a faceless monolith that doesn’t seem to listen to their needs. One positive step that I liked was Vermont’s project to have the WMF buy people books to use as sources. But I agree with you that there’s so so much that is neglected and we need to do something more than small incremental steps. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 20:57, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Pretty much the only thing I agree with in Schiste’s recent essay is that Wikipedia was based upon desktop editing. Mobile views make up 75% of traffic in 2025. If the mobile editing interface is catastrophically tedious (which it is) then why would any sane reader start doing it for fun? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 13:55, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• The message to the WMF needs to be really simple.

(1) Stop funding influence and politics and outreach using money that was donated because you said you needed it to keep the lights on and the servers running.

(2) Stop hiring people to do influence and politics and outreach. Start to reduce the workforce in that area (but not by firing people who’re doing the job they were hired for—only by not renewing contracts and not replacing people who leave).

(3) Use the money you’ve saved to hire tech staff to work on the community wishlist and fix bugs. There should be a specific team that works on the oldest bugs.

(4) Just as a contingency, make sure there’s a fully backed up version of Wikipedia that’s shielded from US presidential executive orders by being legally and physically situated in another jurisdiction.

(5) Hire more lawyers. Do meaningful things to protect the editors affected by Asian News International vs Wikimedia Foundation. Tell the community what you’ve done.

Don’t make it more complicated than that.—S Marshall T/C 11:40, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

ANI vs WMF and Caesar DePaço, which was arguably handled even worse. During Jimbo’s interview spree while advertising his book, he declared that the WMF would never compromise editors in the exact way that it had just done. I brought this up at User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 253#The PoliticsHome article. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 19:30, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

“The hell of Wikipedia is the WMF, not the fact that the WMF has a boss.”

The WMF should really be a bunch of sysadmins running the servers, and developers improving the software, writing add-ons and apps. Anything else is literally a waste of money. I guess the thinking is that the donations and grants have to be justified with new ways of spending it. I didn’t begin editing because the WMF ran an outreach program near me. Wikipedia editing attracts certain kinds of people, such collaborative endeavours always have. Alchemy doesn’t work. There’s no banner, meetup or animated mascot the WMF can come up with that will turn the people who otherwise wouldn’t have edited into editors.

“Engagement drives donations!“

I recently installed the Wikipedia mobile app and I didn’t hate it, but I’m not sure I like it either. For one, I don’t like the flat, material design (give us buttons!) But the thing that stood out to me the most is that the people who designed the app don’t understand what Wikipedia readers and editors want. Reading Wikipedia is not like listening to music. Why should one care about “Time spent reading”? We don’t need an algorithm to suggest us the next article based on previous reading activity. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what Wikipedia’s utility is. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but Wikipedia should not be an infinitely-scrolling engagement machine.

“Do One Thing and Do It Well“

Wikipedia provides a service to millions of people who want to quickly look up information, or want to kill a few minutes by learning about something that has crossed their mind, and to pupils and students looking for a starting point for research for a paper they are writing. Wikipedia doesn’t need to be anything more than that and shouldn’t aspire to be more than that.

“This town ain’t big enough for both of us.“

Wikipedia’s purpose is at odds with the WMF. Wikipedia is a website that provides a free and indispensible service to millions of people around the world, while the WMF can best be described as a benign tumour trying to justify its continued existence. Looking at editing statistics over on Wikiscan, the User edits/day graph shows that editing has been more or less even since it peaked in 2006/2007, I’m convinced that is despite WMF’s actions, not because of them. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 12:48, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@TurboSuperA+ Genuine question: “Why is recommending a next article bad?” I feel like people like Depths of Wikipedia have talked at length about how people fall into “wikirabbitholes” and I feel like encouraging that is a good thing, not a bad one? Sohom (talk) 12:57, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Falling into “rabbit holes” on Wikipedia has to do with following Wikilinks on the page. You’re reading about something, an unusual or unfamiliar term is Wikilinked and you click on it. Then you find yourself reading that article and you come across another Wikilinked term, you click on that, and so on. Having a recommendation queue removes the reading part and the discovery part: I no longer have to read an article to find interesting Wikilinks, articles will be served to me; I can no longer choose which Wikilinks to follow, I wait for the algorithm to give me an article. The other downside is that since it bases the recommendations on your reading history, it is unlikely to suggest something unrelated to your interests or something “out there”, but falling into Wikipedia rabbit holes has to do with exploring topics outside of your interests. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 13:26, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that rabbit holes are interesting, there’s a reason I have 1000 tabs open right now. I do think the “time spent reading” metric on the app is fairly harmless and I happen to know that several people who read Wikipedia instead of editing it really like it. But I mainly know people who are obsessed with statistics. They like their Spotify Wrapped etc. That said, Wikipedia is not just another service. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 17:53, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I came across this website the other day: https://www.wikiboard.org/ It looks like a good way to visualise and keep track of Wiki rabbit holes (the logo is actually a rabbit hole). TurboSuperA+_[talk] 18:02, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Fully backed up version of Wikipedia is technically a WP:FORK. WP:NPOV of a proposed backed up data might be 99.9% volunteer input. I would Support any attempt to help serve the Global South. That means we need a new set of sysadmins to operate. Ahri Boy (talk) 01:07, 25 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• I’m flattered that I was the first of only four editors that Clovermoss asked directly to comment after posting this, before she posted on the centralized discussion noticeboard. I’m feeling much more concerned about my US federal government’s responsiveness to the needs and desires of the American community at this moment. In comparison with that, I’m feeling sanguine about the Wikimedia Foundation.

Regarding a more specific idea for Board reform, I suggest having geographically-based community seats. North America, one seat. South America, one seat. Europe, one seat. Africa, one seat. Australasia, one seat. Following the model of sports leagues’ “wild cards”, a few at-large seats which allow the second-most popular candidate in a particular region to get elected, as they may be more qualified than the top candidate in other regions. Time the elections for soon after the annual regional conferences, so that, for example, North Americans have an opportunity to see and talk with the candidates for their seat, and may have forums with their sitting community member, and not just appointed members, at Wikiconference North America. This will give the community more direct contact, as fewer people from our region attend Wikimania each year. Stagger the elections so that not all regions are electing candidates each year. Some years you vote for your regional candidate and an at-large candidate, other years only an at-large candidate. If the Board votes not to seat an elected candidate, then a special election should be promptly held to fill the open position. Rinse and repeat until the community sends the Board someone they can accept.

Whoever produced this deserves a promotion. Best production from WMF I’ve ever seen. Though I’ve been so busy, I didn’t notice it until 3 days after it aired. I want to see more of that. Fundraising idea. Create an online game show, similar to Jeopardy! or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Rather than gathering contestants in a studio, have them on remotely from their home. Just need a way to make sure they aren’t cheating by using ChatGPT to “ask a friend”. WMF could even raise money by airing real advertisements between rounds of the competition. – wbm1058 (talk) 13:17, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I’m also here at Clovermoss’s request. I’ve been around a while, long enough to remember when the WMF was less concerned about user conduct than the community was. I took part in the 2009 strategy process and attended five Wikimanias between 2009 and 2015. So I’ve met quite a few WMF employees, enough to know that they are not a complete monolith. For me one of my most salutary lessons was taking part in the user testing of the visual editor, seeing it get deployed before all the bugs we’d reported were fixed, and then seeing the WMF blame the volunteers who’d agreed to test the software despite us having reported the bugs that gave it such a rocky start. But a more telling and less widely known story was over a handout that the WMF were giving out about fifteen years ago, one of the most jarring stats on it was the claim that 30% of our most active editors had started as vandals. Now my bullshit detector went off the scale as soon as I read this and I knew both how offensive this was to the volunteer community, and how unlikely it was to be true. So I did some digging and found out that it was sourced from a combination of two facts, almost all of the blocks we had issued were for vandalism, and 30% of the thousand editors who then had the highest edit counts had been blocked at some point. Pretty much any Wikipedian would instantly spot the disconnect, most blocks are indefinite blocks of vandals who have made a handful of edits, and when we have the drama of a regular being blocked it is usually for something like edit warring or a compromised account. So I reached out to people I’d met in the WMF and discreetly pointed out that this was both offensive and obviously wrong. To my surprise I met incomprehension, what was obviously wrong and offensive to our volunteers was neither to those staff. So I consulted Kudpung who probably remembers this incident more accurately than me and who was able to persuade Scottywong to do some stats on those thousand, and especially the 300 who’d been blocked. To my surprise it wasn’t mostly editwarring and compromised accounts. Half of those blocks were accidentally being blocked by someone else and a quarter were accidentally blocking yourself. Few or none were for vandalism. Eventually the three of us succeeded in convincing the WMF to drop the claim, though I’m not convinced they understood how offensive it was and how it illustrated the contempt that some staff displayed to volunteers. One thing that annoyed me about the whole episode was the nagging feeling that if one of us had simply ridiculed the WMF on a certain off wiki anti Wikipedia site, we’d have had a much faster response from the WMF for much less effort. Much has changed since then, and I’m not naming the WMF people involved as the individual staffers have probably all changed. But I have a strong suspicion that the WMF philosophy is still more “move fast and break things” and mushroom farming than Kaizen, and that the WMF is still more interested in recruiting a different less awkward editing community than in cherishing and working with the volunteers they already have.

Software does incrementally improve, some things do get fixed even if buried on phabricator. I’ve not yet accidentally blocked myself and perhaps something has changed to make that more difficult to do. I’ve not yet accidentally been blocked by someone else, and when that eventually does happen I’ll bore them with this story and reinforce my own prejudice that the higher your edit count the greater the chance of being accidentally blocked.

More broadly, the WMF would do well to understand and emulate the importance of honesty and accuracy to the volunteer community and our reputation. I get that as marketing statements go, some of the fundraising messages are not unusually hyperbolic. But when your brand is integrity some of our fundraising messages are as damaging as firesale “everything must go” messages would be for a luxury brand.

As I’ve said elsewhere, structurally the governance side of the movement is in a mess. We haven’t made the transition from a US not for profit to a global one. We need to split the WMF into a WikimediaUSA and an international body, and we need to decentralise. Any national chapter capable of getting tax exempt status in their country and a having a board with a majority of active wikimedia volunteers should be able to take over fundraising in their country.

For years we have had a WMF that is too pally by far with silicon valley, and as a result we now find our contents being mirrored by tech companies who know that the WMF won’t protect the movement by enforcing the BY and SA parts of CC-BY-SA. The incident on the 25th birthday just illustrates how the WMF doesn’t understand the volunteer community or the real long term needs of the movement. ϢereSpielChequers 13:23, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• There are a couple of structural issues that seem to have naturally emerged. The way that the WMF and en.wiki editors see the systems are different, if you’re a WMF staffer working in say technical development (and especially if you were hired with no editing experience) then en.wiki is just one of many projects whose software you are looking at, not only other language Wikipedias but likely also the many sister projects, which again often come in different languages. Editors on en.wiki naturally are focusing on en.wiki. This can build into significant tension because while in some structural way en.wiki may be just one of many projects, it is by other metrics a huge project, arguably the face of what is externally perceived as what WMF works on as a whole. (There are possibly ways to argue Commons and Wikidata are larger than en.wiki in some ways, but they are not the public face.) To look for an analogy, this sort of structural imbalance is the sort of issue that destroys political federations. There is probably also a significant qualitative difference, in that projects with smaller user bases are likely much more integrated into the WMF and its affiliate system than en.wiki, which has sufficient bulk to self-regulate in many ways. A WMF staffer who has to work with all sorts of different projects is going to face difficulties in navigating that different cultural situation. CMD (talk) 13:55, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  I’m sorry but how can you write something like this on a village pump page literally dedicated to communication between WMF & enwiki? Such a page doesn’t exist on any other Wikipedia language version. WMF staff is well aware of the fact the enwiki is special in many ways and treats this community with a level of attention literally no other project ever receives. Johannnes89 (talk) 14:15, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  This pump was created because there was a huge communications gap. CMD (talk) 14:30, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  My understanding from my brief conversations with people active in other projects is that they have a massive communications gap, too, and feel like we get a lot of the limited attention that there is. From my perspective, the solution to that is everyone being heard more, instead of trying to fight over who gets heard in the first place. I do actively try to have conversations and understand the needs of other communities when I can (for example, I know the recent vector update really caused a lot of issues for the Wikivoyage community and they had a hard time getting anyone to care). I’d like to do more of that sort of thing, but I only have so much free time. I live and breathe Wikipedia but unfortunately that does not pay the bills. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:33, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  Vector2022 rollout was an instance where en.wiki was aligned with many other communities, rather than a difference in who was being heard. Perhaps if other projects also have a similar communications gap our board might be replicated, but ultimately such boards are only as good as their integration into WMF workflow. CMD (talk) 06:43, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  Well, we had Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Rollback of Vector 2022/Discussion. Which pointed out that the WMF oversold support for the new skin. For example, 60 responses saying that the old skin was better for usability versus 37 responses saying that the new skin was better got turned into “The majority of respondents reported that the new experience is easier to use or that the new and old experience are equally easy to use” when they added the 49 responses that were fine with either to get 60 to 86. In addition, they threw out 72.3% of the votes that had been cast. (With so many discarded votes, it is a surprise they didn’t check the survey system for bugs and re-run it.) —Super Goku V (talk) 12:55, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  There was general opposition to Vector2022 here, as with WikiVoyage. Iirc Swahili WikiPedia voted unanimously to revert the change and was ignored. I’m sure there were other instances. Nonetheless, this is an area where the WMF clearly wanted to push some changes through, I would prefer they make that argument honestly rather than overselling support. CMD (talk) 04:31, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  Ah, I seem to have misinterpreted Vector2022 rollout was an instance where en.wiki was aligned with many other communities as en.wiki supporting the Vector2022 rollout. Sorry for misunderstanding. —Super Goku V (talk) 06:15, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  Indeed. Enwiki is unique in a couple ways that can put it at odds with other wikis and the WMF.

  • Enwiki is perhaps the farthest along on its wiki journey (the oldest), so it is no longer in a growth phase (write and approve lots of articles aka “inclusionism”) and is instead in a quality control phase (enforce strict notability aka “deletionism”, we can see this from notability guidelines such as WP:NSPORT getting stricter).
  • Enwiki editors tend towards minimalistic spending. You’re more likely to find editors here that just want the WMF to spend money on software and servers and keeping the lights on. On the 999 other wikis, in my opinion, editors are much more likely to want the WMF to focus on the charity component, things like funding affiliates, knowledge equity, etc.

  There’s probably more, but those two spring to mind. I think having self-awareness of these issues can be helpful for working with the WMF and seeing how the wider movement views us. Things like “the WMF should only spend money on servers” may seem like an “obvious” position to us, but I think a lot of folks in the wider movement might disagree. –Novem Linguae (talk) 14:24, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  Thanks, point 2 puts into words a specific example (effect?) of the “significant qualitative difference” I was trying to convey. CMD (talk) 14:34, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  I don’t know the other communities well enough to judge how many there support minimalist spending. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was such a pattern, but if so is this a response to spending patterns? My perception is that EN wiki is the cash cow where a disproportionate share of funding is raised but relatively little is spent. Part of that is down to need, a hundred small wikis likely need more IT support between them than one big wiki, and if the start point is an English language project, any adaptation for right to left languages, different character sets etc is extra expenditure. Part is that if you are mainly on the English language Wikipedia your chances of getting a grant to Wikimania are allegedly much lower than if you are the only applicant from one of our smaller wiki communities. It would be interesting if the WMF surveyed our volunteers and asked about such attitudes, and in particular what sort of things we should be funding. I’m confident that some of us will be surprised by the results, if only because without a survey we don’t really know how many think we should spend more on fixing our IT problems or getting different parts of the community to meet each other and talk. ϢereSpielChequers 15:44, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  projects with smaller user bases are likely much more integrated into the WMF and its affiliate system: at least this statement is wrong for enwikisource (where I am a regular). We’ve faced the same issues, and perhaps more: any time a change is made for enwiki or wikipedias and it doesn’t suit another wiki, the wmf reply tends to be of the essence of either *wall of silence* or “sucks for you”. — Alien  3
  3 3 18:34, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• I haven’t been here for long, but it appears the fundamental issue is diverging interests. But one of the main issues is that far too many people in the WMF just don’t understand the site and the community, and only see it from the corporate point of view. All WMFers should be strongly encouraged to have some experience editing (however small). Basically the WMF should be part of the community, not completely separate from it. Either that, or community representatives need to be in positions of actual authority (though I’d rather the former). Though the WMF’s primary purpose seems to be to aimlessly accrue as much money as possible, and the community-WMF dichotomy seems more akin to conflict between capitalist and socialist ideologies. I really like WereSpielChequers‘s idea above to turn this into a proper international movement, rather than an Anglo-movement with some less-important franchises, which I’m sorry to say (through no fault or ill intentions) has neocolonial overtones Kowal2701 (talk) 16:09, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder if its a good idea to split WMF into an outreach organization and a development organization, similar to how Wiki Education was split out of WMF previously. Perhaps Wikimedia Outreach Foundation would have its primary goal to be encouraging the growth of the Wikimedia movement and Wikimedia Foundation would still exist to host the projects and manage the development of MediaWiki.

I also like WSC’s idea to hand outreach over to local chapters instead of a centralized outreach organization. These could fundraise and manage outreach in their country/region and would benefit from their knowledge of the local community and what would work best in their area. WMF could maintain control over hosting and development of the projects while also overseeing local chapters and enforcing the UCoC. IsCat (talk) 16:29, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I like this idea of spinning off outreach into a separate organization (with less funding than is currently being spent on it), keeping WMF focused on technology and legal (legally owning the assets, legally protecting those itself and its users, etc.). Levivich (talk) 17:25, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• The WMF spends a lot of time forming committees to issue reports to recommend forming committees to issue reports. These spend a lot of time saying very little, and are squirreled away somewhere on Meta where they will be promptly read by almost no one out of the already tiny minority of contributors who know they exist in the first place. The Foundation would be more of a problem if they were actually effective. GMG^talk 17:18, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I’ve been here 7 years now. The WMF has improved over that time. The fundraising banners are better now, Discussion Tools is a significant improvement (albeit it’s like moving from 1995 to 2000, but still, that’s better than before), V22 was an improvement, Enterprise is profitable, the outgoing administration was the best one so far: there have been demonstrable and significant advances.

And yet. The other day I wanted to add a citation to the New York Times and Washington Post, and the “cite” button in Visual Editor consistently failed to automatically populate the citation template. It’s 2026, and I still have to manually type out first name, last name, etc., from sources as ubiquitous as NYT and WaPo. What the heck?

And that’s just one of the many defects in Visual Editor. It’s been over a decade and VE still doesn’t handle ref names (“:0”, “:1″… very helpful). It handles templates horribly, much worse than, say, the way WordPress or any of its competitors handles templates. The syntax highlighter crashes on any moderately-sized page, even on the latest browsers. There is almost no error checking/correction: if I forget to close a {}, it’ll still let me publish without an alert; if I’m careful, I’ll notice it on preview, but even then, I sometimes have to guess why the formatting isn’t displaying properly. VE isn’t even where Google Docs was when it came out 20 years ago. And that’s on desktop… it’s almost unusable on mobile, even though the entire rest of the web adopted mobile-first design over a decade ago.

And that’s just VE. Discussion Tools is better than what we had before but still the worst communication technology on the web. phpBB is 25-year-old open-source software, and it was better 25 years ago than Discussion Tools is today. Nevermind any actual modern website where people communicate, like Reddit or Twitter or take your pick: the thing I’m using to write this message is worse than all of them. We could go on with ancillaries: the graphs debacle (how many years has it been?), the ridiculous system we use to archive talk pages, the rudimentary 1990s-style functions we use for page layout and design (am I |right?), it’s all feels like writing an encyclopedia with a typewriter.

Yes, we know: Wikipedia has unique challenges. Orders of magnitude more traffic, pages that change three times a second, everything has to live inside a web browser with minimal cookies and no registration required for readers. Yes, it’s harder for Wikipedia to be Google Docs than it is for Google Docs to be Google Docs. And yet: give me 25 years and almost $2 billion dollars (that’s how much the WMF has spent all-time!), and I will give you the greatest WYSIWYG Visual Editor you have ever seen. Give me $100 million a year and I’ll have it ready for you in less than 2 years and you won’t even have to pay me, just let me keep the money I don’t spend (WMF: it’s a standing offer, call me!). There is ample money available to fix these problems, they just need to dedicate serious money to the effort, like tens of millions of dollars just on remaking Visual Editor. If they have to rewrite all of MediaWiki from the ground up to modernize the website, well they have $200 million/year available to do it, it should have been done already. People make blockbuster software for less.

Even now, they’re soliciting input for the annual plan over on Meta, and the web pages they’re using for it are all but unusable. Go ahead, click the link to m:Talk:Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2026-2027, and see how long it takes you before you figure out where to write and how to write. Now try doing it on mobile, which is what most people are using these days to browse the web. Even a simple thing like signing the question prompts with ~~~~, which would generate a “reply” link from Discussion Tools, isn’t done, meaning you have to open up that crappy Visual Editor (or an even crappier, older editor) in order to submit your feedback. It’s a little thing, but it just screams “we are out of touch and have no idea how this website works and we don’t care to make it better! we’re not trying to make it easy for you to give feedback.” In 2026, we should be way beyond that. We should be push-polling editors, we should have one-click voting, and so on–things that have actually been done in the past, but for some reason aren’t consistently done.

So about the Board of Trustees… they’re really who’s at fault here. They should be doing far more than just selecting the next CEO and then kind of rubber stamping everything else. For one thing, they should be setting budget requirements that require the WMF to spend the vast majority of it’s money on technology development. Like 70% tech, 20% community, 10% fundraising/administration, should be the split. Currently, it’s about 45% tech, 30% community, 25% fundraising/administration… less than half the money is spent on tech when it should be like two-thirds or more.

And the reason the Board is weak is because it’s set up to be weak. First of all, WMF and its affiliates (who receive money from the WMF) have way too much influence over the choice of Trustees–we just saw that starkly in this last election.

Second, there are too many Board-selected seats (including the founder seat, which should be abolished) and not enough community-selected seats. No wonder the WMF spends so much money on itself and “building community”: half the Trustees are selected by people who rely on that money. All of the Trustees should be 100% elected by the community: one editor, one vote, should be the principle. Let the elected Trustees get their professional advice from a Board of Advisers, which they can select–the Trustees themselves should all be elected in regular, direct elections.

Third, we, the electorate, should start holding candidates to platforms and election promises (just like in the real world). Candidates should be transparent about what reforms they support, and Trustees should be judged based on how well they effectuated their election promises. In the next election, I would like to vote for an entire slate of reform-minded candidates, based on the reforms they’re proposing, such as recalibrating the budget to spend most of the money on technology improvement.

Sorry this was so long and if you read it, thanks for reading it. Levivich (talk) 18:03, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The other day I wanted to add a citation to the New York Times and Washington Post, and the “cite” button in Visual Editor consistently failed to automatically populate the citation template. It’s 2026, and I still have to manually type out first name, last name, etc., from sources as ubiquitous as NYT and WaPo. What the heck?

I thought that had to do with how the news websites store and transmit metadata, rather than the issues with the Wikipedia scraper. For Reuters links the fields can never be automatically populated either.

one editor, one vote,

The obvious problem there is sockpuppet accounts. What’s stopping someone from voting a hundred times for their preferred candidate? They’d have to institute some sort of proof of identity system where you’re given a unique key to use in voting. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 18:08, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

“They’d have to institute some sort of proof of identity system where you’re given a unique key to use in voting” – there are standard checkuser tools; no need for identity verification (which is even not possible with Wikipedia’s model). sapphaline (talk) 18:16, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Right, we already have elections without proof-of-identity, using m:SecurePoll. It’s not perfect — despite CU, socking is ubiquitous — and, personally, I’ve always suspected that election scrutineers are not finding the socks and all of our SecurePoll elections are basically rigged. I can’t prove it, but it’s the only way I can explain the election results in election after election. We could keep using the election system we have, or we could go to a two-class editor system, where “voting editors” have to submit proof of identity. That system has its pro’s and con’s as well, the biggest con being that it would disenfranchise voters who would be unable to prove their identity, which would be many voters in the developing world. Levivich (talk) 18:29, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

we could go to a two-class editor system, where “voting editors” have to submit proof of identity.

WMF would have to convert to a membership organisation. I don’t know if that sort of thing exists in the US. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 18:35, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, exactly, and yes, it does. This was considered when WMF was initially set up, and has been discussed several times since. It’s something we can do, but we’ve chosen not to (again, there are good reasons not to). Levivich (talk) 18:36, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

“have to submit proof of identity” – what can you suggest as a mean of proof? Please don’t mention blockchain, please don’t mention blockchain, please… sapphaline (talk) 18:42, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The typical ways. In the US, that usually means taking a picture of yourself and taking a picture of your ID (driver’s license, passport, etc.) with your mobile phone, and then having secure login (with 2FA or passkey or whatever the standard tech of the day is). Like what you’d do when you open an online banking account. As you can see, this structure would privilege Westerners (who have gov’t-issue IDs and mobile phones) over non-Westerners (many of whom don’t have those things). Levivich (talk) 18:54, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

There’s also the very real privacy implications of doing something like that, even if that data isn’t saved. But my understanding is generally speaking, that’s not information the WMF likes to be anywhere near. I haven’t looked into whatever was done for temporary accounts, but theoretically that might be some kind of solution? Or I don’t know enough about tech to realize how nonsensical that suggestion sounds. My skills are more people-related, even if I want to understand the technical side of things better. So I try really hard to give people who actually understand those things a chance to speak their minds. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 19:07, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly; I’m an example of someone who wouldn’t join the voting class because I don’t want to out myself to the WMF, even though I live in the US, a country where until recently I had freedom of speech rights. Few in China or Russia or Venezuela would likely register with the WMF. The problem is, if you want to make sure it’s “one person, one vote,” you have to definitively identify the person.

There are some other possibilities to cut down on the threat of sock-voting, like increasing enfranchisement requirements, e.g. must have 10,000 edits to vote. It’s harder to run a sock-farm if every sock has to make 10,000 edits. But also, that would disenfranchise the vast majority of editors. The lower the barriers to entry, the more enfranchisement, but the easier it is to game the system. So, a balance must be struck. Right now, that balance heavily favors openness. Maybe it should be rebalanced, perhaps with some kind of super-extended-confirmed status at like 1,000 or 5,000 edits? Idk where to draw the line exactly. Levivich (talk) 19:18, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The two main things that concern me from a mobile editing perspective is that doesn’t have the “basics”. As I said in my long preamble, the app does not have visual editor at all, which is a pretty glaring omission. The app also forces you to edit in source code and memorize the parameters for every template you want to use. I’ve been using mobile web a lot lately and while VE is technically an option (which it should be!), the source editor also requires people to memorize the markup for the code they want to use. So I’m not just manually typing out titles and website names when I cite something, I’m literally typing up <ref>{{cite web|title=Title|last1=Clover|first1=Hannah|website=Wikipedia|url=Somethingfancy.com|date=January 22, 2026|access-date=January 22, 2026}}</ref> every time. Other things about mobile web I’ve noticed is that it’s impossible to mark an edit as minor, you have to switch to desktop mode if you want to create a redirect, the option to create red linked pages don’t show up in search, etc. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:21, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

“the source editor also requires people to memorize the markup for the code they want to use” – does opening template’s documentation in a separate tab not work? sapphaline (talk) 18:23, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Templates don’t really work well on the app. This is one phab ticket related to that: [13]. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:49, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

while VE is technically an option (which it should be!), the source editor also requires people to memorize the markup for the code they want to use.

I use the source editor because the VE doesn’t work well for me. The VE often inserts <br /> tags and other weird formatting that I can’t immediately see. The source editor could be improved as well. Right now when you start typing a template with {{ and a letter, the source editor will give you a dropdown menu of matches, so it is easy to select the right name for the template; but that’s all it does. There should be a way for it to also give you a list of valid parameters for that template. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 18:33, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it has to do with how news websites store their metadata. What I’d expect from the WMF is that, after 25 years and $2 billion, somebody would have called up the New York Times by now and said “hey let’s put some of our people together to figure out this metadata problem.” It’s not like the NYT doesn’t want to be cited on Wikipedia. This could be done with every major news organization on the planet, we have the money and time, we just aren’t trying hard enough. We rely on volunteers and third-party software like Zotero to do it instead. With the money and time they’ve had, the WMF should have led the development of an industry-standard Request for Comments protocol for website metadata that would allow for a no-fail Zotero system that could be integrated into VisualEditor. Levivich (talk) 18:27, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

“somebody would have called up the New York Times by now” – developing a scraper would be cheaper and easier. sapphaline (talk) 18:29, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I’m not sure I entirely agree with that. Have you ever tried to write a scraper that handles a lot of different websites? They’re not that easy to write; formatting varies wildly, even within a single website, plus formatting changes regularly over time as websites are redesigned. Partnerships with the other websites, or development of a standard RFC protocol, might actually be cheaper/easier. But regardless of which method is cheaper/easier, I don’t disagree that they have had enough time and money to develop a scraper, and keep it updated, at least for the NYT website, and probably for many more. We should be able to one-click cite any NYT URL (and WaPo and CNN and BBC etc. etc.). Levivich (talk) 18:33, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

“Have you ever tried to write a scraper that handles a lot of different websites?” – Wayback Machine-style scraper should be sufficient for 99.9% of our online sources as these are not too complex websites. If parsing JS-heavy websites correctly is really needed, archive.today-style scraper (running real, non-headless browsers) would cover even this niche (in context of Wikipedia) use case. sapphaline (talk) 18:43, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Those aren’t web scrapers, those are web archivers. They don’t pull out data like “author first name,” “author last name,” “title,” etc., they just save a local copy of the webpage. Levivich (talk) 18:50, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Those are web archivers using web scrapers. How else would they archive the web? sapphaline (talk) 18:52, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

They’re using web crawlers, not web scrapers. Typically, when you save a copy of the entire web page, that’s not called “scraping.” Scraping means extracting data from the webpage, not just saving a copy of the whole thing. That’s just semantics, though. Levivich (talk) 18:56, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Building a web scraper that is able to retrieve meaningful is non-trivial amount of work, especially given the context of Cloudflare being actively adverserial towards web scrapers due to the proliferation of AI scrapers. [14] This is not something that WMF is at fault at, it’s just a very hard problem to solve because many of the well known bot detection services will not listen to anyone who is SEO-relevant (read: is a search engine). Sohom (talk) 18:55, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The other day I wanted to add a citation to the New York Times and Washington Post, and the “cite” button in Visual Editor consistently failed to automatically populate the citation template. It’s 2026, and I still have to manually type out first name, last name, etc., from sources as ubiquitous as NYT and WaPo. What the heck? Those websites are probably blocking the visual editor generate citation thing because they think we’re bots. Here’s some past tickets where this has been a problem and been fixed: phab:T403799, phab:T362379. But if it’s still happening then maybe NYT and WaPo changed their anti-bot algorithm again. Please feel free to file a ticket on Phab and tag it Citoid to get the attention of the correct WMF software engineers. –Novem Linguae (talk) 17:58, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I reopened phab:T323169, which has tracked this recurring problem since 2022 (during which time the WMF has spent over $500 million; not sure how much of it was spent on fixing the citation tool). Levivich (talk) 01:22, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

In my experience on English Wikipedia, the community in general is very good at aligning itself with the common goal of building the encyclopedia, which is the first of five pillars. From the pillars, through policies and guidelines, the community has made and keeps improving the process that helps build the encyclopedia. The process is arduous, but volunteer editors believe (either explicitly or implicitly) that the goal is worth it, that building Wikipedia is a Good Thing. Part of the process is community continuously demonstrating the alignment by constantly referencing the policies and guidelines in discussions and edit summaries.Couple of arguments to illustrate my next point (feel free to collapse this stream of consciousness to make my post shorter):

• Norway, with its vast fossil fuel reserves has an ethical council which tries to make The Petroleum Fund more ethical. Norwegians, indirectly through their government, try to make sure that this wealth is amassed in some ethical framework.
• In the fictional Starfleet, the only person on a ship, who can give orders to the ship’s captain is the ship’s senior medical officer, who can deem the captain not fit for duty. This usually happens when the captain’s judgement is somehow compromised and their orders no longer align with the Starfleet’s principles.
• Iron law of bureaucracy: “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”

I’ve encountered a number of controversies related to relations between community and WMF, and resolutions sometimes include the wording along the lines of “here’s how we’re changing our processes to make sure that <insert bad thing> doesn’t happen in the future” (if not interpreted graciously, sounds like damage control), but I don’t remember such resolutions ever having “here’s how we’re changing <insert process here> to make sure it helps build Wikipedia”.All of this is to say, that WMF is not good at demonstrating that its actions are aligned with the goals of the community (see also Kowal2701’s comment about “diverging interests”). Kudpung below asked for organization charts, but what I would like to see is a dependency graph of incentives and motivations. As an example, if someone in a middle-management position at WMF gets a key performance indicator filled with buzzwords and corporatese, then it should have a clear chain of cause and effect explaining how it helps build a better encyclopedia, with translation to plain buzzword-less language along the way. In general, such sources of information should help outside observes understand and verify that WMF’s actions are aligned with the goal of the community.Perhaps it is infeasible at the scale of WMF, I don’t know. However, in the absence of a clear display of the alignment, having more members of the board be selected and trusted by the community is what should help steer WMF towards the goal.For a more concrete example, the most visible to me misalignment between WMF and the community of English Wikipedia is the development of tools. The most important of them (of the top of my head: Visual editor, NPP) have perennial issues. I agree with Levivich’s comment above that more money should be spent on tech. In particular, I think that there should be more time spent on less glamorous parts of software development such as bug fixing and refactoring, which should hopefully enable further features. Balancing time between these aspects is definitely not a solved problem in software development in general, but WMF could do a better job of being more like other healthy long-lasting software projects (e.g. the Linux kernel).Here’s a thing that caught my attention recently. On the surface, including the number of resolved community-submitted tasks in each issue of Tech News seems like demonstration of the alignment with the community. However, if the prioritization of these tasks isn’t aligned (example – sarcastic comment by Izno) then this number in Tech News looks like some WMF’s employee’s metric that fell victim to the Goodhart’s law and thus should not be a metric.I’m sorry this got so long, I hope I managed to get my points accross. —⁠andrybak (talk) 03:18, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Andrybak For note, current KPI’s for the WMF are available on the Annual plan (it is filled with corpo-speak but it’s there). To give a rough overview, WMF currently has a two pronged approach, one to develop new features (and improve existing ones) to reverse the downward trend of contributor growth, and two to fix and maintain old software as and when required to keep the encyclopedia moving.

Regarding the “community-submitted tasks”, I doubt most WMF employees/engineers/product managers are aware of the “community resolved task” metric (evidenced by the fact that I have tickets on my current notification list that are resolved by staff that are subsequently assigned to volunteers/staff volunteer accounts). That isn’t a metric folks aim to maximize. @Izno comment in that context of the Tech News update is a (well-deserved imo) dig at the current state of the wishlist system. — Sohom (talk) 13:30, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I’ve heard word that sorting out the wishlist function is on the list of things to work on soon, coincidentally. Izno (talk) 16:51, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I keep wanting to misread “corpo-speak” as “copro-speak”. 😀 Anomie⚔ 20:44, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

In regards to that isn’t a metric folks aim to maximize, I hope you don’t mean relying on volunteers for technical maintenance more than we already do. If anything, we should be offloading people’s volunteer workload onto the plate of someone who is actually paid to deal with it. Having people be assigned to work that’s already done is somewhat confusing and seems to indicate some lack of communication somewhere, but I think it also hints to how long some of this stuff can take that people feel obligated to fulfil the need themselves. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 20:48, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Clovermoss, To my knowledge the metric that we are talking about somewhat under-counts the actual thing it is supposed to count. Multiple employees (TheresNoTime, MusikAnimal, Samwilson, Taavi, Ladsgroup, among other people) use volunteer accounts to work on tasks in WMF capacity. There are also cases like T404910 and T404909 which came from conversations I had with the ModTools team but are not marked as “community submitted”. Additionally, the metric as it is currently calculated also does not include the time folks spend reviewing volunteer patches and so on. This patterns of undercounting is not one I would expect of a metric that has been Goodhart’s lawed. The metric is purely there (to my understanding) to be a rough indicator to non-tech folks that commmunity-submitted tasks are being worked on. While WMF C-level staff (read: Selena) care about distributing WMF resources to improve software where the community wants them, this is not a/the metric that they optimize for to my knowledge.

Regarding “assigning vs resolving”. In Phabricator, when a task gets resolved, the person who closes the task gets assigned the task by default (I assume this is a holdover from Phabricator’s Facebook roots). Wikimedia tech volunteers typically do not care too much about this functionality and so sometimes the person assigned on resolving might not even be the person who worked on it. However, looking at the script, it uses the last assigned owner to figure out whether a WMF staff member resolved a bug, which is inherently buggy. Sohom (talk) 00:50, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Getting back on track with Community-WMF relations: To condense the main issues, it suffices to highlight the salient points made by others rather than responding with the same things in my own words. The times when we could sit down with the people right at the top and get things done (like Page Curation) are long since gone. There were only 7 paid employees. Nowadays there are 700 and with the lack of transparency in the form of a genuine hierarchical organigramme, no one really knows who is in charge. Sure, there is a CEO, but their positions have become ones that are possibly more that of a roving ambassador than having an essential overview of what the different audiences require and a hands-on approach to what is needed on the factory floor.

• The WMF should really be a bunch of sysadmins running the servers, and developers improving the software, writing add-ons and apps. Anything else is literally a waste of money. I guess the thinking is that the donations and grants have to be justified with new ways of spending it. — TurboSuperA+

• They [The WMF] seem to be very good at raising and squandering money. — Cullen328

• ‘really simple message to the WMF’ by S Marshall in 5 no-nonsense points.

• From WereSpielChequers: [But] I have a strong suspicion that the WMF philosophy is still more “move fast and break things” and mushroom farming than Kaizen, and that the WMF is still more interested in recruiting a different less awkward editing community than in cherishing and working with the volunteers they already have. and More broadly, the WMF would do well to understand and emulate the importance of honesty and accuracy to the volunteer community and our reputation.

and …the WMF doesn’t understand the volunteer community or the real long term needs of the movement.

From another current thread on the VP ‘The Wikipedia sign up page disclaimer idea’: Realistically, non-trivial software development requires a budget allocation and then time to actually do the work. It’s January now, so the best-case scenario would be to join the annual budget planning process (which is starting now), and to have a team assigned to begin work in July (beginning of the new fiscal year) and then maybe to have something to test next calendar year. But “years” is more likely. – WhatamIdoing
and my response:

This is the fundamental problem when WMF intervention is needed for a just few lines of code on something critically important but because it was a community idea and not their own, they find any excuse not to entertain it. They also appear to have a strong opinion that because they are paid for what they do, nobody among the tens of thousands of volunteers has any technical clue even though some of us have done MediaWiki installations or built extensions ourselves. This comes down to even throwing a simple switch on one of the default prefs on a MedWiki package. AFAIK, the registration page has jealously guarded WMF access only.

These WMF efforts at Questions to the community in preparation for WMF Annual Plan inviting the volunteer community/ies to offer suggestions are possibly symbolic. The Foundation’s mind is probably already made up what they will work on and how they will spend the money. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 19:26, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate your initiative to try and summarize things, but the details of what exactly has been the source of frustration for people (and where the conversation has been heading) is exactly what I’ve been told is needed to make any type of difference. In one of the conversations I had behind the scenes, someone pretty much said that they could do something if I handed them a 10 year plan, but that they can’t do anything with a bunch of people saying they’re upset and just want things to change. It’s also really good to have something to point to when someone who doesn’t have that background wants to understand the reason behind people’s anger (people aren’t just doing it to be haters or because they don’t want to help build something up instead of tear it down). I’m hoping having a really solid concrete list of examples to point to will be helpful as I continue to pursue these conversations with people within the WMF. I think you make a good point about how it’s difficult to know who is even doing anything. It’s a maze, and I’ve said as much before. I think it’d really help if we had some centralized list of this is how many departments there are, product teams, etc somewhere, along with a list of every affiliate or hub and everything in one place. It’s hard to have these discussions when you don’t know who to contact. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 19:43, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

On a related note, someone does need to make Wikipedia:Anti-WMF sentiment blue (btw I could’ve sworn a page that described community views on the WMF existed, after searching for a while I asked ChatGPT and it gave me a non-existent page at “Wikipedia:Wikimedia Foundation issues” which it claimed was that :/ ) Kowal2701 (talk) 20:30, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

btw I could’ve sworn a page that described community views on the WMF existed Were you possibly thinking of the open letters or the Community Response to the foundation’s ban of Fram pages? –BlueEleephant (talk) 21:47, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I think they were probably thinking of User:Novem Linguae/Essays/Community tension with the WMF instead of FRAM. The page was unfortunately deleted by its creator. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 22:26, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Ngl I think I made it up, but thanks for the links Kowal2701 (talk) 22:40, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

It is now here: User:TurboSuperA+/What is Eating Wikipedians TurboSuperA+_[talk] 18:33, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I just came across this essay: Wikipedia has cancer by @Guy Macon. Essay’s alt title: Just because you have some money, that doesn’t mean that you have to spend it. It’s a good essay, worth the read. TurboSuperA+_[talk] 22:05, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Try this: Ask the WMF to pick a Wikimania — any Wikimania — and tell us how much it cost with at least a vague indication on what the money was spent on. Go ahead. Try. You will receive a stonewall of silence. You won’t even get a response saying that they can’t or won’t answer the question. —Guy Macon (talk) 00:33, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I’ve had similar questions about various technology projects, like how much they spend on VE v. V22 v. Discussion Tools, etc. Not sure why being transparent about project-level funding is a problem. How do we know if they’re spending enough on this or too much on that, if they don’t disclose how much they’re spending on this and that (just broad level categories like “infrastructure” or “personnel”)? I’d like a Board that provides that project-level-spending oversight, but I don’t believe the current Board does. I’ve heard Trustees say that it’s not the Board’s job to tell the WMF how to spend its money, that that’s the CEO’s job and the Board’s job is to pick a good CEO, but I disagree with that viewpoint. Levivich (talk) 01:46, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

It’s a shame Lane never had a chance to get elected and propose implementing m:Right to Information/FAQ. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 02:17, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Every so often someone (never anyone from the WMF; along with the usual WMF silence comes an angry mob of regular editors insisting that you shouldn’t question the WMF) claims that my financial transparency proposals are way too much work for the WMF. I then ask a much smaller question that should be easy to answer. Here is how that went last time: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-03-18/Op-ed#Computer equipment and office_furniture. The reader should feel free to ask the same question and see if they can get an answer. —Guy Macon (talk) 17:29, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Letting employees sit on anything but brand new Wegner Swivel Chairs would be considered abusive.^{[just kidding]} TurboSuperA+_[talk] 18:05, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Well, that does seem like it should have been a relatively straightforward query. It’s probably difficult to get answers about that now that it’s been a decade (unless records for such things are retained permanently) but that’s exactly the sort of concrete example that is useful. Something I’ve learned is that the WMF and board seem to have a different version of transparency than we do. When I brought up a desire for more transparency regarding board elections, people kept thinking I was asking them to give confidential information. I understand there will always be some degree of confidentiality, but we’re nowhere near the level of basic transparency I would expect from an organization that pats itself on the back for it. Maybe that information is accessible in some obscure way, but beyond very generalized details, there doesn’t seem to be that much to go off of. And it’s concerning how concerning the limited information we do tend to get is. For example, Victoria’s depiction of Lane’s aspirations here. I don’t think trying to work within a system to change it is a problem and I’m also sad that the lesson learned from this seems to be that Victoria should have never said anything at all. If giving reasons makes things worse, the problem wasn’t the transparency, and doesn’t inspire faith that the other confidential reasons are any better. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:07, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Also, I was wondering if anyone has ever literally told you not to question the WMF? There’s been a few times where I think that might have been implied when it comes to my own experiences, but no one has clearly said so. I do think there were a few people who were slightly taken aback by my candor at Wikimania. But I always took that more as surprise regarding my tendency to be unconventional rather than the questions I was asking themselves. I tend to be very sincerely direct. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:14, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

This sort of nickle and diming probably costs more money than it purports to save. I used to work at WMF back in 2013. This was a long time ago, but from what I remember there was a lot of waste that boiled down to, we are going to do things the expensive way because the cheap way looks more expensive from the outside and its more important to look like we are spending money responsibly than to actually spend money responsibly. Ask yourself, why does WMF never have any meetings/offsites/etc in Los Vegas despite it being one of the cheapest places in the US to do such things? Bawolff (talk) 04:21, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I don’t think everything needs to be nickel and dimed, but it makes sense to question expenditures when they seem outside the realm of what you would expect (which the original thread about furniture actually elaborated a bit on when Guy said he’d make allowances if something was categorized where one might not initially expect it). I also don’t think it’s unreasonable to just have a number for how much certain initiatives/programs cost. I get the point you’re trying to make here about how added bureaucracy and avoiding the appearance of impropriety can factor into things, but I don’t think the foundation is as great at the latter as they hope to be or that this has to be an either/or situation. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 05:43, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I would agree they are very opaque, and high level numbers – spent $X on mobile, spent $x on WDQS, etc would probably be welcome [For that matter, I often thought it would be interesting to try and compile guesses ourselves]. I don’t think its all that helpful to get fixated though on how much they spent on furniture a decade ago. Especially without a comparison point of how much your average tech company of WMF’s size, in that location, in 2013 would have spent on furniture. Naively that number doesn’t actually seem that high to me, but i don’t know what is normal. Furniture can be an investment, when you’re paying people >100K a year, small increases in productivity due to better office equipment can add up to a very large amount of money very quickly.

I think the biggest problem with WMF is most of the criticism of WMF ends up being a little silly. Sometimes people go, look at google’s budget, WMF is a pittance comparatively, clearly they can do no wrong. Or they go to the other extreme and suggest basically everyone should be fired and that no software development or server maintenance is required at all (or even the people to plug in the servers). Other times people focus on the tiny things because its something we actually have data for and can talk about, but it really doesn’t matter. None of these are really good criticism in my opinion. WMF’s budget should be evaluated in terms of if WMF is actually doing the things we want it to do, and what a reasonable cost is to do those things. Bawolff (talk) 06:27, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• Mr. Marshall has it pretty right above, but to reinterate: 1. Stop lying during fundraising. #BOYWHOCRIEDWOLF; 2. Limit fundraising to two concrete and limited periods during the year. Begging is pathetic, especially when WMF is holding a 9-figure stack of chips. 3. Stop trying to make the WMF millions into a social project to Right Great Wrongs. That’s not your role; 4. Bolster legal support of good-faith Wikipedians who are subjected to legal harassment; 5. Stop with the junkets. There is no reason Wikimedia conventions need to be a vacation club for the bureaucracy and their acolytes. Use something called THE INTERNET with a view to actual inclusivity rather than tokenism through travel vouchers. I could go on. That’s enough. Carrite (talk) 21:04, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  I don’t think I’d go quite so far as some of the people in this thread who want to abolish outreach/events entirely, but I do think more transparency to donors is crucial. I’ve pitched this idea in the past because many non-profits actually let you direct your fundraising to where you want it to go. If we had different buckets for technical support and community outreach, I have a feeling more people would prefer to prioritize the former rather than the latter when they specified a preference. There’s probably a better dropdown menu of options someone could come up with that would cover all the bases yet not too specialized. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 05:50, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  From what i understand (although I don’t know specifics) WMF’s track record with restricted grants is pretty bad. From what I’ve been told, it often resulted in building software that doesn’t exactly meet needs or is half finished, because the grant required them to do something that didn’t fully make sense or the grant only included provisions for half the project. What you’re talking about is probably a bit more high level then that, but there is risk here, for (a perhaps extreme) example if all the money has to be spent on programmers and no money spent on asking users what they want, the programmers will probably end up wasting a lot of time building something useless. Bawolff (talk) 06:02, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  The WMF historically used to ask for donations in a way that implied the servers might go down if people didn’t cough up. We, and notably editors active in this discussion, successfully campaigned to make their donation banners more honest. There’s still substantial room for improvement, though. Donation banners appear on a rendered Wikipedia page. Therefore they must present the full facts accurately and without bias.The WMF must be scrupulously neutral. It should not be a politically active organisation. It exists to support websites that it requires to be politically neutral, and it really ought to eat the dinner it serves. Our reputation for neutrality, such as it is, was hard won and will be easy to lose, and I don’t want the WMF to lose it for us.—S Marshall T/C 10:30, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  I’ve seen a few people bring up politics, and I genuinely have no idea what they mean. I’ve never seen the WMF endorse political candidates or get involved in anything that doesn’t directly impact them like Section 230. If we’re talking about individual employee opinions, I feel like they should be able to express themselves like anyone else. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 13:11, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  I believe Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-08-15/News and notes is the most controversial example. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 15:16, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  I think they refer to some of the spending on social justice advocacy that significantly increased during Katherine’s time as ED. Sometimes the justification was reasonable (“support this org documenting oral history of some group, which will produce reliable sources about that oral history”), sometimes tangential (“support this org that teaches kids in some minority group to code in the hope they’ll grow up to contribute to MediaWiki”), and sometimes completely unrelated (IIRC something along the lines of “a free encyclopedia is inherently a radical social project” was actually used at some point to justify something). m:Knowledge Equity Fund got a lot of such criticism, as in the Signpost article Thebiguglyalien linked just above. Internal WMF culture took a similar turn around that time; really, I think the culture still hasn’t recovered from Lila. Anomie⚔ 15:34, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  Not sure why we’ve got a CEO with such a partisan background, at the very least the optics aren’t great for a self-described neutral project and risks dragging us further into the American political psychodrama Kowal2701 (talk) 15:44, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  I don’t really care if someone supports human rights, free culture, etc. I’d be a hypocrite if I did have a problem with that. That said, wow I understand why people are concerned about 2023 spending. That hasn’t come across my radar before. We’re not a philanthropy project, spending donor money to support other projects that are not directly related to Wikimedia projects is incredibly concerning. I’d suggest anyone bringing that up in the future not phrase it a “political” matter. Whenever I hear stuff like that, I think people are skirting around how they don’t like projects meant to address content disparities. I think it’s perfectly fine to question how such things are done (I know that contests sprung upon us can sometimes have a lot of quality issues and involve a lot of volunteer effort to clean up and that just shouldn’t be happening), but I don’t think the ideas themselves are bad. They just need to properly managed and have people who know the community being involved in them. To get back to what I was saying as donation buckets, something like that could fall under the umbrella of “content”. I do think there are people who genuinely want to support that and already think their money goes directly to volunteers or to keep the servers running, based off what I see across social media. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 17:21, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  And just to be clear, I think the organizations described in the Signpost article sound great on paper, and I don’t have a problem with people working towards those causes. I get the general concern that it’s hard to cover topics that don’t have enough sourcing due to being historically underrepresented. The death or failure for local media to thrive is something that matters, too. But that’s something society in general should work to change. But there’s a difference between trying to address our own content gaps and directly handing a bunch of money to organizations without strings. At the very least something like that should be more direct (e.g. we’re funding a Wikimedian in Residence position at Black Cultural Archives is something I’d personally be okay with). Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 17:40, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  I feel like there’s a lot that can be done if someone donates to “technology”. Given all the technical debt, I doubt we’d have to worry about running out of things to allocate it to anytime soon. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 13:08, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• I watched this unfold with Framgate 6 years ago and now again with the BoT elections, but I think it’s fairly consistent every time there is a WMF “controversy”, you see the same recurring themes: The WMF makes a decision behind closed doors without consultation. They announce the decision late or not at all before implementation. When the community pushes back, they act like they’re the ones being blindsided. They claim confidentiality and make general statements without addressing the community’s core concerns. They say they are listening and request questions and feedback from the community, to which they have no intention of responding. They sometimes go as far as to issue a non-apology without accountability or any specific commitments. They claim to want to be more responsive and transparent, but it’s just part of the charade. This is their strategy of crisis management: waiting it out, saying as little as possible, making empty promises, taking no direct action, and sequestering the last hardliners in some farce of a listening committee, where their complaints can be ignored more directly. That’s the step we’re all on now, by the way. The only thing that scared them before was irreplacable veteran wikipedians hanging it up and walking away. —Rutebega (talk) 07:21, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  This is why I think it’s important for me to be persistent and not give up. But yeah, there’s a pattern here, and I’m not just going to accept the status quo is the way things have to be. We deserve better than that. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 13:18, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  This is my general impression; the handling of the Simple Summaries debacle also comes to mind.

  I also am not thrilled about what seems to be a trend toward a growth-at-all-costs, optimizing-engagement strategy. Gnomingstuff (talk) 13:20, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• I am not a power user here, but I would like to chip in. I didn’t know much, so I would just say simple things. First of all, Wikipedia should be run more as a tech company rather than some giant non-profit company. It is understandable that WMF is a non-profit, but the main offering of WMF is Wikipedia – essentially a technology product. We are not Samaritan’s Purse, Salvation Army, or Feeding America where the “work” is tangible and seen. The main product of WMF is Wikipedia, which is not seen physically. Our way of working should be similar to Electronic Frontier Foundation or Tor Project. This means that the main effort of the board (or whoever controlled WMF right now, the structure is too confusing) should be focusing on improving the main offering of WMF, which is the Wikipedia. The energy, resources, and the thought should be focused to improve Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not the “secondary” offering of the non-profit, but the primary offering of the non-profit. For example, while Goodwill Industries have trainings, their main offering is the job at their stores. That didn’t mean that Goodwill have to abandon the job training they gave, but their main effort should be about their stores and job creations there, not the job training. I think the principle applies to WMF: Wikipedia as a product should be the main thought of the WMF. As for now, I would see that WMF is focusing more on the “activism” side and projects outside Wikipedia rather than the Wikipedia itself. Secondly, Wikipedia should be run as a professional tech company. This means that WMF have to identify further competitors such as Grokipedia or ChatGPT. As for now, the only one that seems to be concerned with these two are the editors. But a CEO/CTO of a professional tech company should be the one most concerned with competitors. The rise of AI, the use of Gemini in Google search, the speed of Grokipedia, how @grok can be cited in X, etc. should be the concern of the CEO/CTO/whoever in charge right now. I am not saying activism is bad, but if Wikipedia leadership failed to plan for the future, the whole project can be doomed to failure. I didn’t see Wikipedia failing in the future, but long-term identification of threats and opportunities should be the CEO/CTO’s responsibility. As of now the editors are the one who care more about Wikipedia’s future, this is wrong. Third, Wikipedia have tons of money. We didn’t need to beg for donation. We need to cut costs. $185 million per year for a tech company is huge. The money should be spent on “technology”, not projects to correct some perceived Great Wrongs. Projects such as that must be limited in scope and funding. This goes again with #1 and #2, the priority should lie on the main product – the Wikipedia itself. Money should be spent on hiring more engineers, hiring more coders, more servers, etc. Final point: Legal activism. This is the only activism WMF should care a lot about. WMF should be litigious and vehement in defending Wikipedia and its editors. I would say that WMF should be as vigorous as ACLU (which only receives $50 million annually!) to defend Wikipedia and its editors. I would say that WMF has been quite weak in defending our editors. WMF somehow prefers an editor getting outed (where they can face further problems) than losing the market. I would expect a non-profit like Wikipedia to be blocked by a country rather than letting one of the their editors to be sent into prison. That’s activism and non-profit actions, where the value of “free information” given by the editors is more valuable than presence in a market. As of now WMF did provide legal assistance, but I feel like once the chips are down WMF would gladly hand out the PID. There are lots of nuances on this matter that can’t be described, but this is what I feel WMF should be focusing on. If Google – a large “evil” for-profit corporation is willing to not enter China market (which will be VERY profitable for them, China is a MASSIVE market!) because of Chinese censorship laws, surely WMF should have more guts as a non-profit company? As of now, I see WMF leadership legal approach is like a giant Wall Street company – protecting the company first. WMF as a non-profit should not be afraid to sue and get sued. It’s already too long, but hopefully someone can catch what I am saying. Have a good weekend, people! ✠ SunDawn ✠ Contact me! 14:14, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  I would say the rise of LLM generated text does actually seem to be a strong priority on the WMF’s radar. The only time I heard anyone suggest we should be trying to “compete” with ChatGPT was Sue Gardner (who hasn’t been with the foundation for awhile) in her 2023 WCNA talk, but I remember hearing both Maryana and Selena at different points talk about how more people are staying outside of the “Wikimedia ecosystem” and what that might mean for long term contributor trends (if people are asking chatgpt questions and never go to wikipedia articles directly, they’re not going to edit them or make donations). If I’m being cynical, there seems to be more emphasis on the latter, but at least I have heard the former. I have to agree with you when it comes to PII. There’s been two very high profile cases that left a lot of people feeling betrayed when it comes to the values the movement is supposed to espouse. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 14:51, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  I disagree strongly – Wikipedia should not be operating like a tech company, and there’s a direct line from doing that to enshittifying the product. Gnomingstuff (talk) 19:50, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• I don’t know that a long, diffuse airing of grievances is going to help move relations forward, and probably more likely to intensify the beliefs of those who have the grievances in the way putting a bunch of people who don’t like a particular politician serves to intensify beliefs. The framing is about relations, but [almost] none of this thread looks at the other half — our end. Here’s my advice: start there, in a separate thread that focuses exclusively on what’s fully under our own control. Come to a consensus about where we could’ve done better, list some common pitfalls that lead to counterproductive tangents and distractions or otherwise complicate these relations, and set forth some best practices for communicating with the WMF. It might be useful to structure discussions, to avoid counterproductive tangents, etc., not to mention providing some structure for the WMF to go by (which is one of the common problems with these threads). My sense is that the “we always do everything right” perspective is a minority one, and that such a thread might bear fruit if it doesn’t turn into another airing of grievances. Find consensus about our end, and use that consensus and any guidelines it lays out as a good faith starting point when we ask for changes from the WMF. Give them a clearer idea of what to expect and what to look for. There’s no shortage of complaints for them to navigate as-is, but we never try it the other way — maybe it’s time. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 18:26, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  I’ve been repeatedly asked to be more specific, by more than one person, in these conversations. So it seems pretty clear to me that this is genuinely what they want, a list of problems and possible solutions. It doesn’t have to be confrontational, but it’s hard to work on problems that are scattered across a million different venues. I’m not saying the community always treats staff all that well (the warnings about civility on this very page exist for a reason), but I think there does need to be stronger action when it comes to WMF side in a systemic way. I don’t think most people in this thread hate individual employees or anything. I also don’t think criticism means you have to be anti-WMF. This is all being done in good faith. I think it’s important to be up front and direct to actually get somewhere, especially since I’ve been explicitly told that vagueness is not helpful. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:35, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  I’m not saying I’m going to go point towards this thread every time I have these conversations, but this thread has been tremendously helpful in trying to figure out “pain points”, and I hope people keep contributing to it. When people are frustrated, that doesn’t just go away because the controversy itself has sort of fizzled out. I intend to write a more concise outline of different patterns and issues over time, and things that don’t seem to get addressed. I’ve been told repeatedly that people are willing to listen. If that’s sincere, I think it makes sense to actually show why so many people don’t feel like they have been listened to. I had a long conversation with a staff member at WCNA that seemed genuinely confused that large portions of the community have this pent up distrust. I do think I could write a “communicating with the community” page sometime to help people avoid obvious pitfalls (e.g. ask people what they need or what do you think we could do better instead of just saying we’re listening without changing anything). Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:50, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  @Rhododendrites, @Clovermoss There is the PTAC doc on it which summarizes kinda community concerns and WMF folks concerns for the P&T department. For what it’s worth, I see good progress on the general recommendations from the WMF with discord calls, VPT discussions and the recent call for comments for the annual plan (we are slightly lacking on the community side of things, but I hope to recruit more people who are able to do championing of specific features slowly). No idea about the rest of the movement (or even non-P&T entities like Wikimedia Enterprise). Sohom (talk) 19:01, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  I’ve noticed the increased reliance on discord. I think it’s great that certain staffers can feel more approachable in that way, but I worry about all the stuff that only gets brought up in these sort of inner circles. I was really bothered by the fact that the WCNA board of trustees conversation only recorded the initial information part and not the “breakout sessions” where people asked questions and answers. It makes it difficult for people who are not physically present to engage in those conversations. It also looks bad from a transparency angle. I noticed this trend again with the recent meeting OwenBlacker and I attended. I think we were the main two community members there to my recollection. But none of the Q&A stuff was recorded. I have no idea if the concerns I brought up about how it looks from the outside looking in about getting rid of the Community Affairs Committee is in the minutes or whatever. So, so much important stuff gets relegated to mailing lists which is how I was even aware that this meeting was going on in the first place. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 19:51, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  Can’t necessarily comment too much on the BoT stuff, but I think it’s been a standard practice (in all orgs) to not record meetings where folks are expected to talk more freely with individual members. Recording discussions/transcripting meetings is akin to being on-the-record.

  Wrt to the Product and Technology side, from what I’ve seen, almost every discord discussion is followed up with a onwiki discussion where a lot of similar points get reiterated (based on the ones that I’ve been a part of). I don’t think discord is being used as a mechanism to evade accountability in the context of P&T but to see if a more younger demographic brings up other points/blind spots. Sohom (talk) 20:18, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  Standard practice doesn’t make it right. We got the “this is standard practice for other organizations” comment when a board member was asked about media checks, which side-stepped the issue. Keeping these things obscure gives the community almost no power when it comes to follow-through. Open public relations like this should not have to be treated as if it’s strictly confidential information. And to be quite frank, I feel like if what Maryana had said to me had been livestreamed, there would’ve been a ton of community pushback and rightly so. People shouldn’t have to work their own schedules around being at the right places at the right time to feel like they have a chance to have a say. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 20:35, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  Our end of what? The complaints here revolve around things the WMF does unilaterally without considering the community’s involvement or input. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 18:40, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• our end of “community-wmf relations”, which is a different subject from “what has the wmf done wrong over the years”. Maybe people want the latter – I just wouldn’t expect it to improve relations if that’s the intent. If the goal is a todo list, that’s worth doing, too. I’ve advocated for a centralized list with strong consensus in the past, but it’s also a different (though obviously related) task than improving relations. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 18:50, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

  I think a lot of this tends to be a sense of not really having anywhere to go factor to it, if that makes sense? People will say things on noticeboards and what not but not often get a chance to have meaningful conversations unless they have some way to get their foot in the door or have connections. Stuff like the Conversation with the Board of Trustees only happen so often and aren’t well publicized. I attended the last one and someone brought up that more participation wouldn’t nessecarily be a good thing because there’s only so much time for questions. A lot of where someone might go for help beyond trying to figure out how to file a phab ticket can be a bit like walking through a maze, and not everyone is nessecarily technically inclined in the first place. I get the sense that the foundation feels like it’s approachable and in a sense, it is, if you know where to go. But even I struggle with that and I’m more immersed than most. I’ve thrown the idea out of a “community advocate” before because someone really could be having these conversations full time. If people want to repair the relationship between the WMF and various communities, it’s not just going to happen on its own. It’s going to take time and work to repair those relationships. I’m not saying they’re not trying. There has been more attempts to ask for people’s feedback in recent years. But it seems somewhat half-hearted to me. There needs to be more on an active push in that direction, from my perspective. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:59, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• I think this gives a lot of insight in the communication problem. From the community side, I feel like there’s frustration with the WMF’s reluctance to engage with discussions on-wiki: now obviously, there is engagement, in the form of various staffers with (WMF) in their usernames. But it generally feels like we’re not really having a discussion, because the people sent here to talk to us don’t really have decision-making power for the WMF, they’re usually just messengers. Which, incidentally, is a literal definition of discussing in bad faith (at least in contract negotiation contexts). WMF staffers have a vanishingly low footprint within the actual editing community, and frankly that’s baffling, both by virtue of the amount of resources they have and the ideals that this project and WMF jointly profess. I would expect a much larger contingent of WMF staffers and leaders to at least casually participate in the community, as the community, but in general, they don’t. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 19:16, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]
• I feel that way too sometimes, about the lessening overlap. I think that WMF of 15 years ago had a greater proportion of editors on staff, but also, would anyone argue the WMF was more in touch with community attitudes back then? Perhaps it was less formal, with fewer rounds of review for anything posted on-wiki, but given how much scrutiny and how little leeway staff get for their on-wiki comms, it’s also hard to blame them for that. I hope that they would recruit from the community of active editors as much as possible, but for anyone who wasn’t already an editor, I do get why starting to do so would be intimidating. The hard-line anti-WMF camp is a minority, I think, but a very loud and very vigilant minority. For anyone who thinks it can be intimidating to be a newbie in general here, imagine being a newbie while (a) having your volunteer edits reflect on your job, and (b) your job causing increased scrutiny of your edits. Not so appealing. It’s one of those areas where we should actually figure out if there’s consensus that we want WMF staffers to edit more, and then to create the conditions for them to do so safely, without holding their job against them when they make mistakes. One of those “best practices” we should figure out on our end that I was alluding to above. YMMV. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 19:53, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I feel like there’s frustration with the WMF’s reluctance to engage with discussions on-wiki: I will echo what in a stronger manner what @Rhododendrites said. “We, the community” are the reason WMF employees do not engage with the community. The community has a longstanding (and currently ongoing) history of being uncivil to WMF staffers. To quote what I wrote to @Chaotic Enby at some point after Simple Summaries on discord, the problem is that onwiki, WMF feature announcements are effectively feel like a CT but none of the admins treat it as such (and often even turn a blind eye to what would otherwise be blatant aspersions) Sohom (talk) 20:01, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict)I strongly disagree. I have been stonewalled on multiple issues ranging from the WMF spending decades breaking the laws against discriminating against the handicapped to asking for transparency regarding the least important and easiest to document spending I could think of to asking the WMF to justify ignoring the clear wishes of the community regarding user privacy. Again and again I have been told that it’s my fault. If I was only nice enough or asked the right way I would have gotten an answer. So I have repeatedly recruited editors who are incredibly nice and unfailingly polite to ask, and they got stonewalled as well. It is not even remotely plausible that every WMF employee has independently decided to completely ignore and not respond to very gentle and reasonable questions by super nice editors because someone else was mean to another WMF employee in a completely different discussion. You wouldn’t like it if I stonewalled you because of the actions of someone who has nothing to do with you.

I invite you to confirm this for yourself. Pick a Wikimania and ask how much it cost, total, and for any information, no matter how vague, on what the money was spent on. Or pick something else — anything, really — that you think would be easy to answer. Show us how it is done. Try to get any answer on anything from anybody that works for the WMF. I predict that you too will only get silence and answers from people who are not part of the WMF. —Guy Macon (talk) 20:32, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I’d say “I repeatedly called them cancer in many different venues and then they didn’t do what I wanted them to do” is a good example of what Sohom and I are talking about in this subthread. Before we go off on a tangent, I support more transparency, and agree that should come even when not phrased nicely; what you’re disagreeing with here, however, is the idea that we make it hard for them to participate by creating a hostile atmosphere (by, for example, phrasing financial criticism as “you are a cancer”). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 22:38, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I categorically deny the above accusation. “You have cancer” is not the same thing as “You are a cancer”. I say this as a cancer survivor. Also, I find it to be completely implausible that every single WMF employee that gets asked a question — often by other editors who never mention me — has read my essay, has never spoken up about disagreeing with it, and yet has decided that the appropriate response is to stonewall the entire Wikipedia editor community no matter how nice and polite they are. It’s a theory that goes against everything we know about human nature. —Guy Macon (talk) 03:24, 25 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Show me how it is done. Pick anything the WMF has ever spent money on. Big or small, recent or ancient, important or trivial — your choice. Ask them how much they spent and what they spent it on. Don’t just be polite. Grovel. See if you and you alone are able to get any answer other than silence. Then any only then come back and tell me that it is my fault and that I asked the wrong question, asked it at the wrong place, or asked it the right way. —Guy Macon (talk) 03:36, 25 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

You’re on that tangent I was trying to avoid. The point being made in the comment you replied to is just that we make things needlessly hostile, so should not be surprised that the WMF is not excited to engage casually on-wiki. You disagreed strongly, but it’s not clear why. As for the cancer framing, when I read More concerning is the fact that since 2005 the WMF has hired hundreds of extra employees and is now spending 1,250 times as much overall, which seems rather excessive considering that the actual amount of work they have to do is pretty much the same. WMF’s spending has gone up by 85% over the past three years. Sounds a lot like cancer, doesn’t it? – That wording sure sounds like the staff are the cancer. Elsewhere the chapters are [part of/symptom of] the cancer, etc. Regardless of whether it’s the people or the organization that’s made of people, or merely the way the organization spends money [such as money spent on people], the framing is openly hostile (which is not news – you have been dismissing those objections for the better part of a decade now). That doesn’t mean it’s a bad essay or that you shouldn’t be allowed to write it/host it, or even that I disagree with some underlying points — just, like, don’t be shocked that the cancer doesn’t love hanging out in a place where they’re being called cancer, you know? — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 04:32, 25 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I don’t know why you think as a member of a public, grovelling to random staff is going to get you answers. I would welcome more transparency, but that should go through official channels. I’m pretty sure that if a random staff member told you confidential financial data simply because you grovelled, they would at the very least be fired if not facing legal troubles.

In many ways, i think much of your criticism is not very hard hitting because it would still apply even if WMF was actually doing everything right.

To give a literal answer to your question though, I think we do know that the structured data on commons project cost WMF $5,115,000 USD over 6 years, because it was grant funded and the grants are public [15] [16] [I can’t prove that WMF didn’t chip in additional money outside the grant, but my impression is they didn’t]. Sadly this does seem a waste to me as the project seems to have failed, largely due to usability issues making it not fit with the needs of commons and still only being half done by the end of the second grant. Bawolff (talk) 07:08, 25 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Re: “grovelling to random staff” and “going through official channels”, I have asked my questions at every place and to every person anyone suggested and received silence. Give my specifics as to what you believe these “official channels” are and I will do it again and get the same result.

Re: those sloan grant documents, are you seriously claiming that $2,100,000 “To support the extension of structured data from Wikimedia Commons across all Wikimedia content, improving the search function and making it easier to read, edit, and access knowledge” and $3,015,000 “To transform Wikipedia Commons’ media files from free text into machine-readable, structured data, enabling new uses for millions of media files on Wikipedia and across the web” is an example of revealing how much was spent on something and what was bought with that money? Show me the proof. How many media files were transformed from free text into machine-readable, structured data? Where can I access the free text versions and the machine-readable, structured data and spot check a few to see how well the conversion went?

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2017/01/09/sloan-foundation-structured-data/ shows the start of the three year project in 2017. Where is the page from 2020 that documents the end of the project, what got accomplished, and whether they went over or under the budget? —Guy Macon (talk) 08:07, 25 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I think it’s less the engagement when it’s a big “community and the WMF” discussion that I’m thinking of here though–I agree that those get contentious and can totally see why the WMF engages with them the way that they do. I wish I saw WMF staffers doing normal editing and governance things, demonstrating that they understand and care about editing–not as the monolithic WMF but as individuals. That’s what I meant by “as the community”. I think this sort of engagement would aid communication when it is time to do big “community and the WMF” discussions. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 20:04, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I was talking about both. Would be nice, but we could make it less hard. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 20:08, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

As someone who was actually present for the Simple Summaries discussion: what was the “incivility” there, specifically? Be specific. Name names and quote it. Gnomingstuff (talk) 20:11, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Gnomingstuff When I say “after Simple Summaries”, I don’t mean immediately after it or necessarily causally linked to it. I mean “at some point in time after that”. But sure, lets see:

• WMF staffers looking to pad their resumes with AI-related projects need to be looking for new employers – 1
• I think we should start thinking seriously about forking, and hosting the project in a more transparent and hands-off way (and possibly not in the US). The WMF has been showing hostility and disregard towards the community for many years, and it’s only a matter of time before the community loses control of the project completely. – 2
• I suggest revoking all donation banner permissions until such time as everyone employed by or elected to WMF and affiliate roles with generative AI COI or positive views towards the same are terminated and prohibited from holding elected office. – 3
• Are y’all (by that, I mean WMF) trying to kill Wikipedia? – 4
• Anybody on the team who thought this was a good idea for even a second should step down. Absolutely braindead. – 5
• Now now… are y’all planning on replacing your volunteer editors with AI 🙄? – 6

This was based on a initial scan. I typically shy away from calling specific people out but I think the fact that non of these comments received any pushback illustrates my point. In literally any other situation these would be considered aspersions breaking WP:CIVIL.

For what it’s worth, to expand a bit on why I said what I said, anecdotally, a lot of onwiki discussions involving WMF staff take a very adversarial tone which makes it really hard for folks on the WMF side to engage further. (To give a example of one of your comments in the recent semantic search discussion, it becomes really hard to engage with you in a back and forth when you make a remark like (But I guess these are just “Internet pundits” and the feature isn’t for them.) which while not explicitly against the WP:CIVILITY policy is definitely less than ideal for starting a fruitful conversation and leads to people not wanting to engage. This is not to say you should not pushback against obvious problems (and I do appreciate you showing up to identify the Google AI-like mockups), but rather the tone and way the pushback is given matters a lot! Sohom (talk) 21:22, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

And here we just have a fundamental disagreement, I think. Behavior matters as much as words, and usually matters more. Not to relitigate the issue, but acknowledging out loud in public that the community and the press are not going to like or want a feature, and then moving forward with it anyway, is fundamentally uncivil behavior. (Like, even using the phrase “internet pundits” is dismissive from the start! How is this still unclear?) The comments quoted above are a proportionate response; some of them are rather polite given that the inciting event was essentially “we already know you won’t like this, but we don’t care.”Gnomingstuff (talk) 23:23, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

acknowledging out loud in public that the community and the press are not going to like or want a feature, and then moving forward with it anyway, is fundamentally uncivil behavior not in itself (imo). There are situations where tough technical decisions need to be made (case to the point, Temporary Accounts (privacy over community) or Vector22 (technical UI debt/readers over community) ). As a volunteer dev, I myself had to take a few of these decisions in (including one over Christmas, prioritizing security over community “liking it”, check back in mid 2026 to figure out how I did). It is something that comes up in basically every non-trivial community-facing tool. In the case of Simple Summaries, we can say with hindsight the decision made was wrong, and done in a vacuum that saw very little community feedback (and thus created a propensity to assume the community was “generally fine with it”). But that does not make it uncivil and does not excuse those comments.

Wrt to “internet pundit”, keep in mind that the person who wrote the ill-worded essay was not any of the people who are interfacing with volunteers. Is it fair for the people interfacing with the community to endure remarks regarding it months afterwards? Sohom (talk) 00:03, 25 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

While i agree there are times that tough technical decisions need to be made, I don’t think most disputes resolve around them. Most (not all) security, performance or legal concerns have work arounds, although they may be expensive or not worth it. In my experience the community is relatively accepting of blockers preventing doing something provided it is clearly explained. Big disputes usually concern product direction and not implementation decisions. Bawolff (talk) 00:38, 25 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I would not disagree to be honest! Sohom (talk) 01:12, 25 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) I’m very confused about what the problem with example #2 is. I genuinely don’t see how you can even say the tone of it is off. We have a right to fork. I find it concerning that you would find that comment specifically uncivil. The internet pundit one seems like someone who is frustrated and genuinely feels like they don’t matter. I can agree with you that the others are rude and are not ideal. That said, I personally give a lot more leeway when people question me about my actual actions because I see it as part of WP:ADMINACCT. We may not agree, but people should be able to voice their concerns. Compared to what a lot of admins and even non-admins deal with on an everyday basis from vandals, these comments are very mild in comparison. Admins can see [17], which is a side effect of being a visibly female admin.

The worst example I can think of when it comes to a community member treating a staff member absolutely horrifically was this. I can understand critiquing a lack of being willing to engage with the community, but blaming the cause of all that on the fact that she’s a woman is not acceptable. I’m glad that he’s no longer on the project.

If the problem is that staff members feel like they’re putting themselves in the line of fire, I feel like that speaks to need for some person people feel comfortable going to to act as some in-between. I know I occasionally have had staff tell me things in private because they’re afraid that saying so publically will have implications for their career, and that’s concerning too. I also don’t think it’s fair to the individual employees in question who may be trying their best but don’t really have any power when it comes to the decision making process because people might wrongly take it out on them simply because they’re there. I have a lot of experience with food service jobs and I understand what it’s like to stay calm in the face of that, even if it’s not fair. If the WMF wanted to tell me absolutely everything that is going on that is affecting every wiki, I’d do my best to get to talk to every community involved, actively solicit feedback, and be a go-between. I don’t think that the person in question has to be me, but if the foundation is willing to give me a job for that crazy amount of work, I’d be willing to do it. Regardless of who does it, I think it’s something that would be a tremendous step forwards. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 00:04, 25 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Compared to what a lot of admins and even non-admins deal with on an everyday basis from vandals, these comments are very mild in comparison. If your comparison metric is vandals, then we are obviously better. If the comparison metric is “civil discussion on a talk page” we are in the red. Not every discussion with the WMF needs to feel like a WP:ADMINACCT tennis match. (the fact that it does is kinda the problem)

If the problem is that staff members feel like they’re putting themselves in the line of fire, You’ve hit the nail on the head.

I feel like that speaks to need for some person people feel comfortable going to to act as some in-between. I feel like I do a lot of this at the moment (atleast on the P&T side). Sohom (talk) 00:58, 25 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I’m not saying it’s good, but I’d say it’s at least a sign people are trying to be deferential if normal talk page discussions can have a bit more edge and you take into consideration that what admins consider improper in regards to civility is typically at a higher threshold. The fact that things are so tense is a waving red flag that steps need to be taken to make people feel like something is actually being done, because that’s the only “real” way to address the root of that problem. I’m glad you’re trying to be an in-between for PTAC specifically, I try my best to be that kind of person myself. But I think it’s something that is a lot of work and not something we should feel morally obligated to take on, especially as unpaid labour. I spent about 40 hours talking to people total in the general timeframe around writing my petition on Meta because I genuinely wanted to understand what upset people about the board. There’s so much history that’s reliant on word of mouth because no one is keeping track of it in a centralized place. There’s more than enough existing tension regarding communication for several projects that this could easily be a full time role. I think having an identifiable person to make grievances to would help smooth some of the rough edges out. It’d also help with institutional knowledge. I know one of the first things I’d want someone like that to do is make the maze less of a maze and help create a paper trail akin to Bulletin newsletter. I also think it would be a meaningful gesture that the WMF cares about maintaining a healthy relationship with the projects by actively doing something like this. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 01:15, 25 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

While community incivility does play a part, from what I’ve heard there’s also the fact that WMF management has increasingly been telling people that publicly disagreeing with the WMF company line, even with a clear volunteer hat on, is not compatible with continued employment. That’s not a good environment for getting staff to contribute to the projects. Anomie⚔ 04:26, 25 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I’ve heard that too. It’s what I was implying with I know I occasionally have had staff tell me things in private because they’re afraid that saying so publically will have implications for their career, and that’s concerning too. I mentioned that some people feel afraid to openly voice criticism when I had my conversation with Maryana (although mostly in an affiliate context) and she said it was hard to talk about fear and what exactly causes people to think bad things will happen. When I brought up this concern when I had my conversation with Selena, she told me that she would investigate such behaviour if people came forward to her with concerns. I’m not the type to want to break people’s confidence, but I wanted to say that at least on paper there seems to be some support for that to not be what should be going on. But I admit there’s a part of me that’s wary of accepting that’s the case no questions asked. I’ve dealt with work environments IRL that are totally against a bunch of stuff on paper when things that are clearly against that were happening out in the open at the same time. When I was at WCNA, Lane told me that he was asked by the WMF not to say anything about the elections. I’ve brought this up to a few people who seem to think that the board not disclosing things is all about confidentiality, but if that’s the case, why was Lane under the impression that he wasn’t supposed to talk? He clearly did so before something happened to make him change his mind and I worry about what that might mean when it comes to people’s behaviour behind the scenes. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 04:41, 25 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

See User:Guy Macon/Wikimedia referrer policy, where the WMF rejected the clear consensus of the community. —Guy Macon (talk) 04:58, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Personally, I think the part that bothers me the most about this, is not that WMF rejected it, but that the justification is extremely misleading. It bothers me a lot when WMF misconstrues technical issues to justify a policy decision. For background – there are two potential privacy risks with referrers. (a) [The main one] that external sites can see which website you are coming from, and maybe link together that information with other information it knows about you. (b) [The one nobody really cares about] An on-path attacker might be able to determine what website you were visiting over https by looking at the referrer in requests to non-https websites. In the RFC WMF says that (b) is basically not a practical attack as there are much easier ways to do it. Which is literally true, but the concern is about attack (a) not attack (b), and the way the response was phrased makes it sound like the analysis also applies to attack (a) even though it doesn’t. The average Wikipedian is not a technical person, so I think its really important to be honest about the pros and cons of decisions so that folks can be properly informed. I know its years ago at this point, but it is disappointing to see how WMF justfied its response to this RFC [To be clear, it might not be the person who wrote the comment’s fault. It may very well be due to a game of telephone between different people in WMF]. Bawolff (talk) 05:44, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

That’s not what I get from the response linked. What I see there is them suggesting that people concerned about your (a) should really be looking into disabling referrer sending in their browser so as to protect themselves on every site, not just Wikipedia. The mention of your (b) wasn’t to dismiss (b) itself (they don’t actually dismiss it as far as I can tell), it was to point out that concerns about your (a) related to “safety” (versus “privacy”) relate to powerful actors who would likely be capable of your (b) as well, so the requested change would provide little protection in that respect. Anomie⚔ 16:19, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

In other words, “the clear consensus was wrong, and we at the WMF choose to ignore it.” —Guy Macon (talk) 20:35, 24 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]