Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-05-29/Opinion

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• This lack of transparency questions the correctness of the administrators. Cantons-de-l'Est (talk) 23:08, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

• This lack of transparency looks almost like a deliberate attempt to avoid informing the tens of thousands of volunteers what actually gets done with the funds their work generates. But it's probably just very poor management with nobody wanting to accept the responsibility of being in charge. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:19, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

• I have personally pledged 10 rolls of toilet paper to the endowment, and am excited to announce that I have amassed double that quantity, and am currently working to secure transportation of said donation to the Endowment offices. (I jest. I'm sure something will come of this. Money always confounds everything, eh?) ASUKITE 03:18, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

• I might catch a lot of flak by saying this, but I disagreed wholeheartedly on how Tides worked with Wikipedia. The revelation that WMF "moved the goalpost" from $33 million, and to $100 million, and then still not transferring to a 501(c)(3) organization really concerned me. That fact alone is showing that WMF does not have good intentions with the funds. You made a promise, you must keep it. There is no valid reason to keep moving the goalpost, moving to a separate independent 501(c)(3) is not that complicated or difficult to do. Secondly, as a conservative in politics, I have concerns as Tides is a clearly progressive organization. I am not saying that WMF has to support conservative organization, but I expect WMF to work with organizations that are more neutral. There are lots of organizations that are apolitical, WMF should be working with those instead of working with Tides, an organization that clearly has a progressive bias. While I never donated a single penny to WMF, this opinion only reinforced my thinking - that my money won't be used for "good" purposes. ✠ SunDawn ✠ (contact) 06:10, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

  @SunDawn: The Tides Foundation is not just an organization clearly allied to the Democratic Party, it is also one that specialises in obscuring money flows. See, for example, "Dark Money Judicial Influence Examined in Senate" (courthousenews.com), which quotes a Democrat Senator describing the Tides Foundation as a "dark money" nonprofit much like those on the Republican side: "[Democratic Senator Sheldon] Whitehouse [of Rhode Island] was willing to admit that, while the influence for years was largely Republican, Democratic dark money had also caught up — with groups like Arabella Advisors and the Tides Foundation playing a mirroring role with some Democratic Party members."

  So there are two aspects here: one is that this is an explicitly political organisation, just like any Republican donor-advised fund; the other is that it is an organisation specifically designed to reduce transparency. There may well be a legitimate role in society for anonymised giving – I don't want to debate that (not least because there is much I still have to learn about US politics ...) – but for an organisation that used to pride itself both on its transparency and its neutrality, it seems like an odd choice of partner. Andreas JN466 18:31, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

  @Jayen466: The way I see it, Tides has some legitimate use - like what is used by Humble Bundle. Humble Bundle may not have time to set up 501(c)(3) for their donation giving, but that does not apply to WMF. Humble Bundle is a for-profit company, not WMF. But I agree with your assessment that the use of Tides to hide what charities WMF is giving to is at odds with neutrality. I iterated again that my problem with WMF-Tides close relationship is that Tides has a known bias, and WMF shouldn't have chosen an organization that has clear bias. ✠ SunDawn ✠ (contact) 01:31, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

• Poor communication about the reasons (if any exist) for the delay is particularly concerning. Thanks for brining this issue to the attention of a wider audience. —Ganesha811 (talk) 11:47, 30 May 2022 (UTC)
• Full transparency and accountability should be required. The Foundation was set up to support Wikipedia, not the other way around. Maybe one of the 550 employees can spare a few minutes to unlock the secrecy vault. Randy Kryn (talk) 13:30, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

  The only thing WMF should be doing is to keep Wikipedia online - this means server management, coding, maintenance, and IT-related tasks. The fact that WMF has a hands off policy on keeping the quality of the product, relying on unpaid editors who improve their product quality daily and keeping the quality, shows that WMF does not need many employees. WMF has expanded to 500 staffs, and I honestly don't know why WMF has to expand that way. WMF had done many things that shouldn't be done. ✠ SunDawn ✠ (contact) 04:56, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

• Currently on Hacker News. --Andreas JN466 15:15, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

• I would love to read a reply from the WMF to these serious allegations. Something for the new editing team to sink their teeth in? Dutchy45 (talk) 15:22, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

• Investigative journalism? Is that even a thing? Unheard of in the real world, go back to Second Life or wherever you got such a silly idea. Randy Kryn (talk 21:44, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

• I stopped editing in mainspace awhile ago. I don't revert vandalism in the main namespace nor do I create content anymore. Let this encyclopedia crumble and starve out the cancer. If you write or improve articles you are part of the problem. Chris Troutman (talk) 21:37, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

Sorry to hear that you feel this way, and thank you for your great work here. Wikipedia, and the Wikipedian volunteers who create it, have the intention to inform (and in some cases misinform by omission) and share information with readers spanning the globe, and do not edit for the benefit of foundation personnel even though as the quality of the encyclopedia grows the foundation gains in acquired-value and respect as well. Within this symbiotic relationship WMF should certainly fund all of the conventions, bot expenses, and many other existing and new projects of Wikipedians (such as a well-reasoned research travel program for long-time creators) in order to further include the community into its monetary process. Randy Kryn (talk) 01:08, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

@Chris troutman: If I may ask, then why are you here? -Indy beetle (talk) 07:43, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

To hasten the day, I guess. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:37, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

If nothing else, a pretty blatant and explicit self-declaration of WP:NOTHERE. More or less to the letter of the definition, actually. Seriously Chris, you're not the only one with concerns about the direction and future of this enterprise, but your way of confronting that problem feels to me childish and tediously self-oriented/soapboxy at best, while also arguably disruptive at worse. If what you just said truly reflects your view of the project, I'd suggest you just disengage entirely, rather than hang on and contribute nothing but scornful commentary and grave dancing. Those of us with concerns (and even growing doubts about the future of the project) but who also still have the basic collegiate decency to try to frame any continued contributions constructively (or else bow out), will thank you very much, I think--particularly if the alternative is just having you stand around intentionally doing nothing of benefit for the encyclopedia and describing things as 'cancer'. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 12:08, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

Kind of reminds me of User:Yngvadottir, who adds "This edit is not an endorsement of the WMF" to every one of her edit summaries. Same problem, different solution. Andreas JN466 11:21, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

• Look, I'm not saying that there's no reasonable concerns expressed here: I'm particularly concerned about the close ties that the WMF's general counsel has with the WMF's main contractor-administrator of its largest endowment fund. That is a not insignificant conflict of interest--to the point where I actually think there is many an attorney who would have been concerned about taking that job, considering the relationship is too important to the remit of the office of the general counsel to hand off to a disinterested associate member of the office. She certainly has to work constantly in making decisions on how to best serve the interests of her client/employer (the WMF) in dealings with the Tide Foundation, while under the influence of her close connections to said party. She certainly must have gotten the WMF (and probably the Tide Foundation) to sign off on this (this would almost certainly be required by the rules of professional conduct of whichever state(s) she is licensed in), but even then, it's a bit of ethical quagmire. I mean, it's the type of thing that does happen from time to time, but I'm not sure I would greenlight it as a member of the board of any organization. In the nonprofit world, boards are bound by their bylaws and conflict of interests policies when it comes to individual members taking actions in their fiduciary roles in relation to transactions involving parties they have close relationships with. But the general counsel can have a huge influence over how a board views certain issues, and boy does that present a bad look (deserved or not) when suddenly it seems like the outside party is benefiting from foot dragging in changing to another administrative model for an endowment.

But, that lengthy little introductory caveat made, I think that there are places where this story also leans a little towards the histrionic as well--and some of the comments above leap straight over that threshold. I'm not seeking to personalize the issue, but it has to be bluntly said that comments like "moving to a separate independent 501(c)(3) is not that complicated or difficult to do" are not just laughably misinformed, but clearly could not have come from anybody whose been within a mile of that process, for even a small organization, let alone one that is going to hold nine figure sums in trust for one of the world's most organizationally complex legal entities... Creating a nonprofit with any degree of large financial backing at the outset is a deeply complex administrative and legal process, and the Wikimedia context presents special complications. One legitimate reason for taking this process particularly slow is that once the new 501(c)(3) org is established, it's board members will be fiduciaries of that organization, with legal and institutional duties to respect it's mission statement, bylaws, governance norms, and organizational priorities--which will in turn govern how they decide to utilize and invest endowment funds once they are donated to them. If you do not harmonize such organizations with extremely well-considered documents and agreements, while also structuring things in a fashion consistent with administrative and fiduciary law, you can be begging for drama and choppy organizational (and even legal) waters, down the line.

Should five years be more than enough time to get that process ironed out, even considering the complications? Well, arguably yes. But we really aren't swimming in information here about the WMF Board's thinking is, nor the facts informing it. And I do appreciate that the very thrust of this article is that we need transparency on exactly those very questions (among others), and fair enough. But there seems to be an implication (in the subtext of the article and picked up on and amplified in some comments above) that the most likely explanation is something either outright dodgy or at least implying questionable competency and respect for the volunteer community. And frankly, that's a stretch as the likely explanation. There are plenty of reasons why the WMF might be hesitant to pull the trigger and is taking a slow approach on this matter. Look at it in these terms: right now, the WMF is sitting right on top of that $100m+ endowment, held directly in trust by it, presumably. It has a partner that it apparently trusts administering it, and possibly making very sound investment returns from the corpus. Why would they want to rush to hand that sum directly to a new institution before they have made sure that it has formed in exactly the fashion they need it to in order to provide the best chance that it's organizational culture will allow it to integrate with the needs of the foundation, the projects, and the movement? Honestly, dragging their feet is much better than having rushed in this situation, trust me.

Now, does any of that mean I feel comfortable saying that there aren't some shenanigans going on here that I would disapprove of, if I knew the details? No, not really. Like I opened with, there are details here that I think we can say don't make for a good look, at a minimum. But I also think we're a long way off from assuming malfeasance or incompetence based on where we are now and what we know. That said, it will be interesting to see where we are (or are not) in a year's time. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 12:08, 31 May 2022 (UTC)