[wombatmobile]

What was the work culture like inside of wmf?

Gender balanced?

Cooperative?

I'm curious because my experience of editing, and that of other people I heard from at an editor meet up, was that the culture is heavily male dominated, and unnecessarily adversarial in a bullying way. That said, the CEO at the time (2007 - 2014), Sue Gardner, seemed enlightened, progressive, smart and highly capable.

[bawolff]

> Gender balanced?

Fwiw, when i was there, engineering teams generally had more men than woman. No tech teams and management tended to have more equal representation. However i would say the gender demographics of eng teams were fairly on-par for the industry at large. I never saw any sexism, but as a man, if it was present it probably would not be directed at me, so i may just not have noticed.

[toomuchtodo]

<This sentence removed and more context in a reply below because it was not accurate enough to stand on its own>. Is the non profit to gate people from editing if arbitrary diversity requirements aren't met?

The best part about Wikipedia is that anyone can edit it, anyone can run it, and nobody can lock up its content (for whatever reason). Look no further to Mozilla to see what happens when a non profit fails to meet it's mandate and is stuck with "peacocks" (folks who prioritize status or signaling > substance) instead of practitioners.

[geofft]

> The best part about Wikipedia is that anyone can edit it, anyone can run it, and nobody can lock up its content (for whatever reason).

This is true in the same sense that anyone can track down and fix bugs in the Linux kernel.

Now, I have certainly done so, but I've done it as an employee for a big and profitable company who had plenty of time to spend on it. Wikipedia is similar - it is superficially open to everyone, and sure, you can probably add some detail to an article about William of Normandy's first cousin once removed just fine, but if you're trying to document, say, whether or not there was a death camp in Warsaw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...), you're up against people who have more time and resources than you do.

[bawolff]

I think OPs point is if you don't like the rules on wikipedia, you can download a dump of articles run a mediawiki instance, and make your own wikipedia.

Which in practise also requires skill and effort. Even importing the xml dump file into a mysql database in reasonable time requires special skill when we are talking data in the 100 gb range before decompressing.

https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20200920/

[bawolff]

Sue was the ceo (executive director) before lila. Lila was the ceo where things went south.

[toomuchtodo]

Excuse my sloppy comment. Lila did a terrible job, but Sue was running Wikimedia while there was a slow decline in editors since the mid 00s. Having donated to Wikimedia previously, I no longer do, because senior leadership (across "administrations") is more concerned with issues completely disconnected from their core role ("To unlock the world's knowledge"). Those dollars go to the Internet Archive now (which stores copies of Wikipedia distinct from Wikimedia's control).

Non profit dollars are hard to come by, and the greater issue and frustration is watching orgs like Mozilla and Wikimedia incinerate them on causes that are not their mission (in stark contrast to efficient, nimble orgs like Let's Encrypt and the Free Law Project).

[bawolff]

There is some research to suggest that (en) wikipedia's growth pattern (a peak followed by slow decline as beurocracy becomes ossified) is common in similar projects. So maybe they didn't do anything wrong they just failed to fix it. That said i dont think anyone really knows what to do about the editor decline.

[wombatmobile]

> i dont think anyone really knows what to do about the editor decline.

How was this problem presented and discussed inside of WMF?

As an editor, I had an opportunity to discuss it with Sue Gardner at a meet up with other editors. The feedback from other editors was so strong, I'm baffled that WMF couldn't address it.

Although, I understood from Sue that WMF's role was only as a software company that made tools. She said quite clearly that the editor community ran itself.

But if dwindling editor participation is an existential threat, surely that's a core WMF problem? I'm curious what this looked like from inside WMF.

[toomuchtodo]

> That said i dont think anyone really knows what to do about the editor decline.

Pay them? Tens of millions of dollars in donations, what's the excuse not to?

[bawolff]

So there are roughly 150,000 active editors ( hard to get good numbers cross language/project https://wikistats.wmcloud.org/wikimedias_html.php?s=ausers_d... but if you sum you double count people active in multiple which is common).

WMF had 104 million in revenue in 2018. Even if you could give all of that to contributors, no administrative fees, no money to buy servers, no developers, no bank fees, etc (highly unrealistic), you would only be able to give rmeach person $690. That hardly seems like enough to actually get people to edit wikipedia as a job.

There's also plenty of articles on the internet about how introducing money into volunteer projects can very easily cause the project to collapse and have unexpected side effects.

[wombatmobile]

"Gardner was instrumental in raising Wikipedia's warchest and WMF's staffing. In 2011/12 - the last year for which figures are available - the Foundation raised $38.4m, up from $5m in 2007/08"

Wikipedia Foundation exec: Yes, we've been wasting your money Editors should get dosh, bureaucrats get too much, says outgoing fundraising chief

https://www.theregister.com/2013/10/08/wikipedia_foundation_...

[TheNorthman]

> Is the non profit to gate people from editing if arbitrary diversity requirements aren't met?

Notice how you're the one suggesting `diversity requirements' and then proceed by going on a tirade about it. There are many things to be done about diversity and not all of them requires coercion.

[toomuchtodo]

The comment I replied to mentioned gender about a cohort of participants ("I'm curious because my experience of editing, and that of other people I heard from at an editor meet up, was that the culture is heavily male dominated"), hence where my statement comes from. I want to see quality work regardless of who is doing it, and the folks doing this are uncompensated volunteers.

EDIT: @TheNorthman I cannot reply to your comment as I'm throttled by HN. Put bluntly, the gender of contributors does not matter and shouldn't even be considered. Let contributions stand on their own merit.

[wombatmobile]

You are right, toomuchtodo, that anyone can edit Wikipedia. If you want to see "quality work regardless of who is doing it" then it would pay to look deeper into the dynamics of gender.

Why?

Male editing culture tends to work differently to female editing culture.

How?

One tends to be hierarchical. The other tends to be cooperative.

It's possible to develop a system that uses both of these modes to sharpen the editorial process, but that doesn't happen through self organisation when the starting point is a large gender imbalance.

Resolving this conflict is one of the biggest challenges faced by Wikipedia.

The difficulty is, however, that WMF isn't directly involved with Wikipedia content, which comes from the community. WMF is just a software company responsible for the tools the community uses for publishing.

[TheNorthman]

Sure. I'm not disputing them bringing up gender diversity, I'm simply stating that nobody but you were talking about requirements and keeping people out to meet certain `diversity requirements'. You were, simply put, attacking your own straw-man.