Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-06-28/Interview

We asked four of the signers of the Community open letter on renaming to answer questions on the open letter and the issues behind it. They are Andrew, Joalpe, Pharos, and Sj.

Signpost: The Wikimedia Foundation's handling of the proposed brand change and survey has been clumsy, tone-deaf, or even worse. But the argument for changing the brand name, as I understand it, is very well-intentioned. The WMF's major goals include spreading knowledge in various forms to every place on earth. It has been very successful in doing this in the global north in the form of encyclopedias, making the name Wikipedia world famous. But many of its projects are much less known. Thus the WMF wants to promote the lesser known projects by using the world famous name. They have the legal right to make the change and there was no previous community approval process in place that can deal with such a far reaching change. So they have created a method of approving the change. Do you disagree with the WMF's goal, the assumption that the name change will help the lesser known projects, or the method of approval?

Joalpe: Let me start by saying that I am replying here in my capacity as an individual Wikimedian, not as the current chair of the Wiki Movement Brazil User Group. The majority of members in the user group are against the renaming change proposal as it stands, changing from Wikimedia Foundation to Wikipedia Foundation and all trickle-down effects this change leads to. I personally support the change. I understand the benefits and opportunities of renaming who we are, including the Foundation, the Movement and most Affiliates, to our best-known brand are larger than the costs and risks of this renaming. Costs and risks have been discussed by the community and are well documented. They should be addressed specifically. I am actually frustrated the WMF team has done such a poor job conveying these risks and costs would be taken seriously, and has not engaged more purposefully with elaborating collaborative solutions to overcome each one of them. I am, however, convinced we can lead to increased engagement with and support of our projects if we build upon Wikipedia as a brand. In this direction, some points raised by the WMF team and some members of our community are well taken, particularly on increasing outward-facing engagement and support. These points relate directly to the strategic direction that we have outlined for 2030. The major flaw in all this – which eventually led me to erase my support vote on the RfC on meta – is the process: I wish more WMF team and resource investment had been used to work on this proposal the wiki way, with consensus-building, accurate research and documentation, and participatory decision-making. The way this whole process has worked out was painfully disruptive, and it should be stopped and started afresh.

SP: The open letter seems to be based on some assumption about power sharing between various parts of the Wikipedia movement – a constitutional order, if you will. "Clear distinctions among the Wikimedia Foundation, affiliates, and individual contributors are essential. Any change that affects this balance demands the informed consent and collaboration of the communities," the letter says. What is the current power sharing arrangement now? What would be your ideal version of power sharing?

Pharos: The Wikimedia movement has always relied on a vital balance of decentralization and consensus-building. One does not need to posit a grand constitutional arrangement to know that it only works when its different parts are respected. This is fundamental to how any community worthy of the name functions, and only moreso for a successful grassroots community such as ours that has risen together to be the number one reference site in the world in nearly every language. Open deliberation has to drive our decision-making as a movement, and whatever structures we evolve, they must reflect the basic thoughtfulness of the community.

It is also to remind the WMF that it should heed its own advice – they noted the internal community risk in 2015 at the outset of the brand project – "Wikimedia is a strongly-held community identity. Name changes have implications for community cohesion and participation." The team has admitted they did not adequately carry it through the process as a risk factor, which is disappointing given that this was brought up by community members multiple times ahead of the survey being sent out. The board even raised the issue with the brand team about, "the importance of being thoughtful in engaging the community," and "how we would lose any benefits from the current separation of the Wikimedia and Wikipedia brand if the Wikimedia brand goes away."

SP: The proposed brand change comes at the same time as Wikimedia 2030 Movement Strategy Recommendations which seems to break down, redefine or redirect every part of the Wikipedia movement. Is your reaction to the proposed branding change in any way related to the overall proposed Movement strategy change?

Andrew: It is somewhat of a mystery why the 2030 Brand Project was set apart from the 2030 Strategic Direction in the first place and remained an undertaking outside of the 2030 Movement Strategy process. There have been various explanations offered by the WMF. However, numerous people come back to the same question: Isn't branding and what we call ourselves and how we portray ourselves to the world a crucial part of the 2030 Movement Strategy?"

The WMF claims that branding is indeed part of the 2030 Movement Strategy, but is being pursued with a "different timeline and a different process." This explanation seems odd, as it doesn't leave much in common if those two elements are separated out. Another explanation was that the 2030 Movement Strategy effort had no "bandwidth" to encompass the branding issues. If this is true, this seems like a significant oversight, given how important project names are to the identity of our communities and what they do.

However given where we are now, there is an opportunity to re-connect the 2030 Brand Project with the 2030 Movement Strategy, which is about to enter a crucial design and implementation phase in September. This may be an ideal time to consider intersecting these two endeavors so that there is better community engagement, oversight, and execution under a combined effort. This would go far to remedy the mistrust and confusion that exists between the WMF and the communities subsequent to the Branding Project's separation from the main Movement Strategy.

The closing sentence of the Community Open Letter on Rebranding refers to two specific parts of the 2030 Movement Strategy recommendations – Ensure Equity in Decision-making and to Coordinate Across Stakeholders. The letter details how those two particular cornerstones of the 2030 Movement Strategy recommendations were not met during the execution of the Brand Project. It is hard to imagine how the Brand Project can continue without guaranteeing these two criteria being central to the process.

(Full disclosure: I am answering in my own individual capacity and not on behalf of any affiliates I am working with.)

SP: Your major recommendation is just that the Board of Trustees pause or stop renaming activities – kicking the can down the road. How would you like the final decision to come out?

Pharos: The community needs an open process with informed and well-selected choices. If it wishes to proceed with any branding activities, the WMF must implement a process where the communities are directly involved as to whether “Wikipedia” is used in ways consistent with community norms, instead of presenting three nearly identical options in a survey.

People should not see the letter's recommendation as "kicking the can down the road." It is a request to engage the community in specific ways the signatories find to have been missing so far. It captures the most common and highest priority concerns from the communities and attempts to inform the WMF and its trustees of the severity of the situation. They now have the ten recommendations from the 2030 Movement Strategy in hand. Two of them, equity in decision-making and coordinating across stakeholders goals, are clearly missing from this process so far.

Sj: Renaming the Foundation will cause confusion for a time, so any change should be an idea good enough to make up for that. Community interest and enthusiasm for a change are some of our best measures of impact and success.

Renaming so as to make the Foundation’s name less confusable with Wikipedia makes sense, and has a baseline of support in recent discussions. The world of free knowledge is growing rapidly outside the realm of current Wikimedia projects. We are seeing a fantastic expansion of interest in other open tools, platforms, and modes of collaboration for building shared understanding – from open and freely-licensed scientific atlases and courses, to popular new wiki tools, to linked open data and Wikidata itself. A rename that broadens our horizons could embrace those developments, point the way towards new experiments, and be well-worth the switching cost.

Renaming the Foundation so as to maximize confusion with Wikipedia would lose those benefits, and has strong opposition in recent discussions. In addition to being inward-looking, this goes beyond changing the Foundation's name to claiming the identity of its largest Project, which adds problems and worry for core communities. Problems highlighted in discussions so far include: challenges to our founding spirit of independent, consensus-driven decision making (and implications for self-governance); worry that our marks are not being cared for thoughtfully; the sense that the Foundation can speak for Wikimedia, but not for Wikipedia; added burden for affiliates and OTRS teams, who already spend countless hours explaining that our movement's incorporated entities do not dictate content on the projects; dilution of the meaning of Wikipedia both inside and outside of the movement; and the potential for sidelining smaller Projects. Repurposing the name of an existing community risks more than just a switching cost, and would need unambiguous community support to avoid being self-defeating.

SP: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Pharos: The Wikimedia Foundation’s decision to spend its human, financial and social capital on renaming has come at the expense of important consensus-building efforts and the community goodwill needed to pursue them. The engagement of volunteer communities is not an unlimited resource, it is quite finite, and any choice for a grand hard-fought campaign incurs a major opportunity cost. It is the WMF’s duty to focus its powers of persuasion on furthering those potentially unpopular ideas that could produce an actual social good, rather than on aggrandizing its own position.

The m:Universal Code of Conduct drafting process is about to begin on July 1, and is particularly core to what we want to accomplish as a social movement in opposing harassment and supporting diversity in our communities. It would be a difficult conversation in any circumstance, with a need for consensus-building across many projects, languages and cultures. As a volunteer trying to bolster the Wikimedia Foundation’s effort on this, I am keenly aware of how much harder it will be because of the goodwill unnecessarily squandered during the rebranding project.

Joalpe: The last paragraph of the "Community open letter on renaming" is very relevant: "Every major activity in the Wikimedia movement has been delayed or postponed this year – the global Wikimania conference, Wikimedia Foundation board elections, Wikimedia Summit and Strategy working groups. It is appropriate to treat renaming with the same level of care and concern. Any future work should be restarted only in a way that supports equitable decision-making among all stakeholders." We shouldn't be working on the renaming proposal at this time and at this pace.

Firstly, the rush in this process reflects lack of sensitivity to what community members might be going through in their local contexts. The surprisingly fast rhythm with which the renaming process was launched has fostered a sense that this was being pushed in bad faith, as was expressed in several comments at the RfC. I disagree with this perspective, as I think the fast pace mostly reflects clumsiness.

Secondly, several BoT members were expected to have stepped down, and any decision of the magnitude of renaming our Movement should be made after elections have happened. Any legitimate decision-making process by the BoT must require accountability through an openly-deliberated election for the community-selected seats beforehand.

Thirdly, affiliates did not have a chance to appropriately discuss the renaming proposal, as the Wikimedia Summit was – of course – cancelled in the context of the pandemic. This is again a pitfall, as major stakeholders were not able to fully engage in the process. We have held extraordinary meetings among affiliates, but many organizations of our movement have not responded to the call which again provides a sense that they might be facing challenges and are currently unable to engage with the process. The consensus point in our affiliate meetings was that we would request the pause or stop of the renaming process. This is what we did on the open letter, a document that is not directed particularly to the WMF, the BoT or any other instance: it is a call for reflection across stakeholders.

Fourthly, and I second what was already said in this interview, it is unclear why this renaming process was organized independently of the 2030 Strategy working groups.

Finally, I am particularly concerned that the time and pace have influenced growing animosity and frustration among WMF staff and community volunteers. A deliberative process of the magnitude of rebranding should be if anything empowering, for both the staff and Wikimedians. To create a deeply equitable decision-making process is definitely not an easy task, but it is unavoidable for the renaming proposal and for any other strategic decision in our mission of becoming the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge and fostering a dynamic, ever-growing community bringing onboard anyone who shares our vision.

Andrew: The open letter was a collaboration among many community members after affiliate leaders and liaisons held urgent meetings to discuss the issues around the brand project. More than 70 people met in online meetings after the release of the survey and shared concerns about where the process was going. The content of the open letter was crafted over a period of only 3-4 days and showed the impressive ways the community can come together to form a collaborative voice. We felt it was important to release the open letter at the start of the survey period in order to draw attention to the problems of the process, lest the WMF and the Board of Trustees treat the results as the will of the community. We are encouraged that the board chair and the brand team have acknowledged the open letter, have explained how the survey will not be interpreted as the only choice to be made, and have come out with comments indicating they are taking the open letter into consideration.

One last thing that has not been addressed in this process that we should highlight here: Ever since the 2030 Brand Project was started in 2015, major developments within our communities and content activities have affected the assumptions made five years ago. The rise of Wikidata and the prominence of Wikimedia Commons has been amazing to see. We now have large-scale public-facing contests and content drives that are based around contributing photography and geolocation data to Wikimedia Commons. Projects like Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Earth have signed up thousands of new contributors to the Wikimedia community in the form of photo contests, photo walks and fieldwork. This has been especially valuable for engaging emerging communities we have tried recruiting for years, as has been shown by the stunning imagery and multimedia from Wiki Loves Africa or Wiki Loves Love, which has engaged many new contributors across Asia and beyond.

Wikidata is now a new major center of gravity within the movement. It is now one of the busiest wikis in the movement with more than half of all Wikipedia articles making use of Wikidata's content. [1] Through Wikidata and Commons, the movement has major engagement with galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) in ways that Wikipedia never had. Wikimedians-in-residence and volunteers working with the cultural sector have heard from librarians and archivists that Wikipedia was not useful to them because they do not engage in the historical interpretation that article writing entails. Instead, these GLAM entities work with shared metadata and connect to collections around the world. Wikidata has been central to a renewed vigor and interest in the Wikimedia movement in the heritage and governmental sector ever since GLAM Wiki came of age in 2010. As a result, Wikidata is now a presence at every major international museum and library conference resulting in high demand for training and expertise. Another reason for interest in these projects is that Wikipedia's notability bar remains very high (perhaps too high), which means Wikipedia captures only a fraction of human knowledge that these cultural and heritage institutions (and the world) have to provide.

Therefore, the argument that embracing the Wikipedia brand to further smaller projects is dubious and untested. In fact, we have empirical evidence of the opposite – the very reason why partners have embraced projects like Wikidata, Commons, and Wikisource is because they operate in a modality that goes beyond Wikipedia. Aiming for the "sum of all human knowledge" using only Wikipedia's standard for notability and inclusion would leave us far short of the 2030 Strategy goals.

None of this should be new to the brand project team – this was expressed in online video meetings, in written feedback and in-person conversations we have had with the top leadership of the brand project for more than a year. It is therefore disappointing that the branding effort has reached this point without a serious discussion of this dynamic and how the landscape has changed for our projects and our extended stakeholders.

However, let's be clear: The point here is not to argue for a specific naming outcome, but to illustrate why the current process has not captured these crucial inputs from the communities to make an informed, inclusive and optimal decision. An iterative, adaptive, and community-engaged process is needed to take such factors into account because the assumptions and realities of 2015 have shifted dramatically. The current process fails to consider this and fails to engage the communities as stakeholders and knowledgeable front-line experts about branding and naming matters.

Finally, the lack of consideration for the downstream implications of embracing a new brand for the foundation and movement (ie. butterfly effect) is of great concern. This cannot be left as a simple checklist at the end of the process. We have heard concern from affiliates under pressure from governments, or from volunteers on the front line of answering OTRS tickets that the major implications of a name change have not been addressed.

Taking all these together, a pause to the branding process to discuss the possible ways forward is the most responsible action for the Wikimedia Foundation and the board.