Dear Climate Outreach,
A few weeks ago, my colleagues Lane Rasberry and Daniel Mietchen nominated the Wikimedia community for the Climate Change Public Engagement Award. They informed the Wikipedia community about the nomination through "WikiProject Climate Change”, which is the English Wikipedia’s primary forum for co-ordinating efforts to improve its articles on climate change (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Climate_change). The English Wikipedia community is a subset of the Wikimedia community, making up around half of its active members.
In the discussion among Wikipedia contributors that followed, various individuals expressed both gratitude for the sentiment behind the nomination and significant opposition based on how the award might affect public perception of Wikipedia’s work. Lane explained to us that you want all organizations being nominated for a Climate Outreach award to have strong internal consensus, if not unanimity, that they want to be nominated. It wasn’t feasible for the nominators to see whether consensus existed before nominating us, but it has become apparent since then that we in the Wikimedia community are not in consensus that we could accept this type of award.
Personally, I am a huge admirer of Climate Outreach’s work. I first became aware of your organization last spring when I was preparing to facilitate a session involving people from British Columbia and Alberta, and used your fantastic Alberta Narratives Project materials. Somewhere in your archives from earlier this year is a message from me asking for your organization's help in improving Wikipedia. I would still very much like to chat with you about working together - more on this later.
I am also one of the volunteer Wikipedia contributors who was not comfortable with being nominated for this award. Readers from across the political spectrum trust Wikipedia to be a neutral educational resource that presents all points of view fairly, including (for example) points of view that the U.S. should mine more coal and Canada should build more pipelines. I feel that receiving an award for "generating a shift in attitudes and empowered ongoing engagement with climate change" could jeopardize that trust.
I also believe that there’s a fundamental difference between the type of public engagement you are seeking to recognize and the type of public engagement that the Wikipedia community performs. The Wikipedia community engages with the public in that it invites the public to edit articles, but site policies strictly forbid having people use Wikipedia to add their own opinions, values, and lived experiences to articles. Public engagement initiatives at Wikipedia are primarily aimed at teaching people how to improve Wikipedia content by summarizing information from publications such as IPCC reports. Wikipedia’s public engagement initiatives are only intended to inform the public with objective information on all topics, including climate change. Wikipedia takes no advocacy position on any issue except the free sharing of reliable information.
Let me emphasize that the discussions the Wikipedia community has had around this nomination have been positive and useful. We’ve had an exchange of ideas that exemplifies the collegial spirit of Wikipedia’s inner workings at their best.
Many of us would love to have your help in terms of improving Wikipedia's coverage of information in this field. In our partnerships, organizations typically offer subject matter expertise, shareable media files, and editing engagement, in exchange for the Wikimedia community helping to achieve communication impact and community guidance in navigating our social norms. If you are interested in helping, please let me or Lane or Daniel know.
Sincerely, (my real name and Wikipedia username)