Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-08-01/Election guide/Candidate Op-Ed, Kunal Mehta

Candidate Op-Ed, Kunal Mehta

Why Legoktm is running for the WMF Board

Each of the six shortlisted Board of Trustees candidates were offered an Op-Ed space in The Signpost to express their thoughts. This article is an opinion piece and reflects the views of Mehta, rather than The Signpost. –E

I have always had a {{sofixit}} attitude – if I’m unhappy with something I’ll first try to improve it myself. It is precisely for this reason I am running for the WMF board.

I first started editing Wikipedia in 2007 focusing on ice hockey articles, before later discovering the technical side of the project, submitting my first patch to MediaWiki in 2012 because no one was fixing the bugs I filed. I was quickly hooked, and within a year started working for the WMF. It somehow turned into an 8-year stint that had me work on just about every area of the Wikimedia technical infrastructure. I encourage you to read my biography and statements from other Wikimedians who are supporting me.

Technical experience

Last week I spoke at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference about the importance of transparency in making Wikipedia's technical infrastructure work.

A key part of the WMF’s work is in developing and maintaining technical features – it is crucial that the board has someone who has real experience developing, deploying and maintaining features that meet Wikimedia's unique technical requirements.

Unfortunately, our technical prioritization is broken. If you asked a majority of editors for the top thing they'd like fixed, it would not be better diffs. Back in 2014, we had a very clear list of how to fix talk pages. Yet the mw:Talk pages project only started in 2019.

We need bottom-up prioritization and resourcing. Ironically, it seems like that push will need to come from the board at the top.

I regularly hear that the board and WMF upper management are out of touch with the needs of the developers and editors doing the work on the ground, and don’t realize the full scope or implications of projects they sign off on. Having collaboratively developed user scripts, gadgets, Toolforge tools, and MediaWiki features to benefit a diverse group of contributors, I’d bring my technical experience that is desperately lacking.

Staff experience

The main role of the board is to provide oversight of WMF’s operations and its CEO. Having someone on the board with experience as a staff member through the WMF’s highs and lows will be valuable.

Ultimately, it’s those lows that shape my perspective. We collectively endured through the Lila era, yet the board has failed to make good on its promises that would help prevent another such crisis. WMF staff were promised an ombudsperson, who would be able to raise staff concerns and complaints directly to the board, yet 6 years later the board hasn’t implemented the position.

Really such a position is just a stop-gap measure, the board must support the unionization of staff. If elected, I will propose and work to pass a resolution that indicates the WMF will negotiate in good faith with a union that has majority support and prevents the use of donor funds to engage in union busting.

It’s easy to brush off the events of Lila’s term as a one-off that was solved when she resigned. Yet, just as recently as November 2021, we saw C-levels break their promise to staff, unexpectedly and controversially reorganizing multiple teams in the Technology department. Inevitability, this was followed by a period of low staff morale and a non-trivial exodus of talented staff (while I also left around the same time, it was unrelated).

Every time this happens, it hampers the ability of WMF staff to get their jobs done, ultimately hurting the editors who rely on that work. It is crucial that the successful operation of the WMF is not up to a single person doing a good job, but that there are institutional protections in case things go wrong.

Conclusion

Whatever opinion one has about the WMF, the non-profit plays an incredibly important role in the health and success of Wikipedia and the rest of the Wikimedia projects. I hope you will vote for me in August and I am always happy to answer any questions you may have.

In this issue

Eyewitness Wikimedian, Vinnytsia, Ukraine

Discuss this story

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A big thank you to the Signpost team for publishing my op-ed as well as the other candidate statements. Given that the opportunities for interactions with candidates have been very limited this year, I'm happy to answer any questions or respond to comments that people might have about my candidacy. Legoktm (talk) 15:55, 1 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This isn't really a question more than a general endorsement. As one of BAG members (me that is), I've seen first Legoktm's work on bots and other technical areas behind the scenes, where a staggering amount of grueling, unglamourous, and unrecognized work is going on. He's got a solid head on his shoulders and definitely has the actual interests of the community at heart, not HR/PR talking points. Once I saw his name as a candidate, I knew who one of my votes would be for.

The WMF would benefit from his expertise, passion, and knowledge, and would we all benefit from him being on the board to represent the interests of the community. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:15, 1 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a few questions I'm going to ask of everyone.

In the community, it's a widely acknowledged issue that the WMF has a hearing problem. Its financial resources are larger than ever, and yet we can't get the most of the support we want from the WMF, who instead spends time and ridiculous amounts of money on issues like branding. It took YEARS of screaming from the community, culminating in an open letter with 1000+ signatories to drive the very simple point that the WMF does not, should not, and will not ever stand for the Wikipedia Foundation with any legitimacy.

At the same time, we have huge amounts of support for increasing the modest resources of the community team. There are very tangible projects that have massive amounts of community support that get dropped because of this lack of resources.

So my questions are these. 1) Do you think the WMF has a hearing problem? If so, why do you think is the root cause, and what do you plan to do about it? 2) What do you make of the proposal to allocate at least 1% of the WMF warchest/yearly budget to the Community Tech team, broadly speaking?

Thanks for your time. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:39, 1 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Headbomb, thanks for the questions.

1) I think it's important to remember that the WMF isn't a monolith. Some of the WMF teams I observe do a pretty good job of interacting with community members, genuinely taking in their feedback, resulting in a better outcome because the solution was developed collaboratively. However, I agree that in general there is a sense that WMF upper management and the Board are just out of touch with the situation on the ground. It's not too surprising that upper management is like that, none of them were originally Wikimedians, but the Board is more perplexing. I don't think there's a single root cause, it just gets ingrained over time (would love to learn if other people have specific ideas/thoughts on this).

OK, so what do I plan to do about it? First, as I mentioned in my op-ed, push for bottom-up prioritization. That means community members and staff on the ground are providing input and determining what gets worked on, not just upper management. I don't expect this to be an immediate switch, it'll probably happen gradually. E.g. start with the WMF actually publishing its annual and quarterly (draft) plans so people can provide feedback. Then start publishing plans earlier and soliciting feedback earlier, and so on until the feedback becomes the actual plans. Second, we can also start promoting people internally. As I pointed out on Wikimedia-l earlier this year, the two longest serving (and IMO, best) CTOs/VPs of Engineering were originally community members who got into those positions. We have a decent number of talented low level managers who I think would do a good job in higher-level positions. Instead of needing to onboard people from outside the WMF for 6 months, have them spend a year and a half doing something and then leaving, resetting the whole process, we could promote people who are already a good fit for the WMF, understand our cultural values, etc. (This is not meant to be any commentary on the new CPTO who I have yet to work with and wish the best of luck, just a general point.)

2) I sympathize with the proposal and agree in principle that we should be devoting more resources to things the community asks for (again, bottom-up prioritization!), but I don't agree with the specific proposal because I don't believe we should have a Community Tech team. Fundamentally, ALL the WMF tech teams should be working in service of the community's needs, not just one. To give a more specific example, the CommTech team recently implemented expiring watchlist entries, which is great! But, why don't we have a dedicated team that is working on all the other issues around watchlists and notifications and figuring out whats going on?

I hope this answers your questions, but if not I'm happy to expand (or be more concise). Legoktm (talk) 22:41, 1 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the answers. The questions were deliberately open ended. I can live with a board that has different opinions (especially if they're more informed opinions), but the character of the answers is what's important. I already knew what that was going to be (see the above endorsement), but it will let others assess your candidacy. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:57, 1 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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