User talk:FeralOink/sandbox
Sand comments[edit]
Wow, there's a lot here FeralOink -- I appreciate your writing out your thoughts. A few comments and clarifications:
- SJ said
It's a reasonable conceit and Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Collaboration of the Week is a long-standing and important WP idea. one can propose better ways to do it or better ratios of investment, but a 20:1 ratio of community grants to this sort of (out-of-community / potential-future-community) grant is a plausible start. Cool concept, deserves more integration and more & better proposals.
- SJ, most of the Wikipedians who are aware of these "out-of-community" grants (and have shared their thoughts on talk pages) do NOT view them as a reasonable conceit [sic]. The decision to spend a full 5% of the WMF Endowment on what you breezily describe as a "cool concept, deserves more integration and more & better proposals" is, well, distressing.
- I did not mean to distress you. I believe there was explicit discussion at the time about how to support knowledge and networks outside our current projects (but not outside our mission or potential future projects), to the point of recruiting the community advisors. I wasn't involved then, but did attend the public consultation a couple of weeks ago about the future of this program, and the ~50 community members from a wide range of wikis who attended were broadly in support of the idea, if not the initial execution. So we have different experiences of what 'most Wikipedians who are aware' believe. I imagine that "English Wikipedians regularly miffed at the WMF on Meta", "average English Wikipedia editors", "average global Wikipedia editors", and "global Wiki[p]edians who contribute to strategy discussions on Meta" would run the spectrum of opinions here. It's reasonable for the WMF to explore options supported by a reasonable subset of those groups, and for anyone to challenge that to make it better. – SJ +
- Also, grants aren't investments. They are expenses.
- In our case, most grants are intended to advance the mission; as are investments in staff and tools. Staff and tools often have recurring annual costs, in contrast to grants, so some who have been concerned about the rapid growth of WMF staff (investments which pose their own challenges for evaluating impact) have pushed for a better balance of grants to staff for reaching comparable goals.
- Advancing the mission: improving global free knowledge, and pursuit of the mission; with implied goals for effectiveness and returns in the form of more knowledge, in more languages, with better context and sourcing, and with more robust maintenance. "Out of community" grants should also be pursued in that context, ideally helping to expand the community. (I don't like that phrase, hence the quotes, because we should always be trying to expand the community; anyone adding to the sum of free knowledge should have a place in the ecosystem.) – SJ +
- The Equity Fund was the VERY FIRST disbursal of Wikimedia Endowment money (correct me if I am wrong).
- It did not come from the endowment. There's an FAQ on the fund page about this.
- SJ, I also question whether the Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Collaboration of the Week (or to be more faithful in quoting you, piped with "countering systemic bias") is truly
an important WP idea
to Wikipedians at large.- Well that particular project has certainly faded recently, like so many others. This is worthy of a longer conversation; and may get at the heart of why those who seem to see value in this approach tend to come from smaller wikis [where classes of knowledge that are important in their context are excluded by larger wikis due to the relative lack of available sources, or geo and language skew in sources]. – SJ +