On Fri, Mar 3, 2017 at 11:49 AM, Peter Southwood <peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote: > If the format was compiled before Trump was elected, then this argument is > either irrelevant or becomes that the foundation must avoid offending > politicians in power by changing public statements to be uncontroversial at > the time of publishing.
The arguments being made here are not that WMF should avoid offending politicians or be uncontroversial. Understanding how a message will be received is the core of communications, and should be reviewed and rechecked by the communications team throughout a project, and even re-evaluated as the final 'publish' button is clicked. In this case I feel the message of the Annual Report is that WMF is quite U.S. focused, and is overly anti-Trump. The selection and order of the first few facts mostly aligns with the key issues in U.S. politics. Those stories/examples/photos used to justify including these first few facts in the WMF Annual Report seems occasionally strained. e.g. How did WMF support Wikimedian Andreas Weith taking photos of polar bears? If the WMF wants to project that image, those fact pages need beefing up to support the WMF staking out a claim to get involved in those fights. Like others here, I dont think this is the right direction for the WMF to take, but I agree with all the positions and appreciate the significance of those issues. The cynic in me feels that the WMF projecting that image will resonate well with a large percentage of the typical "Wikipedia" donors. Given the facts (in the Annual Report) that most of the worlds population is still not online, and those coming online or yet to come online usually do not have access to education resources online in their own language, an International focus would highlight those facts as critical for the WMF's mission. Those facts can also very uncomfortable for politicians across the world, of all political leanings, who spend more on guns than on books. Those facts are also very uncomfortable for a lot of liberals who have had a good education and very comfortable lives, with a high quality Wikipedia in their own language. Those facts also underscore how far we are away from reaching our mission, and encourage us to re-focus on the mission and make us pause before getting too involved in problems that are not clearly on mission. -- John Vandenberg _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
