Hello, Arvind. The list is moderated by seven volunteers, only two of whom (yours truly and Satdeep Gill) happen to also work for the Wikimedia Foundation. I moderate this list as a volunteer, not as part of my duties at the Foundation, having stepped up to help at a time when the other moderators at the time (H. P. Nadig of the English and Kannada communities and Anirudh S. Bhati of the English community) all became inactive.
I contacted Anirudh when I noticed the moderation queue was not being handled in a timely manner, and offered to help. Anirudh graciously accepted my help, and explained he became very busy at work. After taking care of the queue, I set about (with Anirudh's blessing) recruiting additional volunteer moderators, as I am aware my being a member of the Foundation staff can create the appearance of Foundation influence on this list, but also because it is of course good governance for this community mailing list to be governed by community members from India, which I am not. I had recruited two veteran and trusted volunteers (and whose identities are public) Chinmayee Mishra (of the Odia community) and Abhay S. Natu (of the Marathi community), as well as Satdeep Gill (of the Punjabi community, who is also working for the Foundation but moderating as a volunteer) to help moderate the list, and myself took a step back. Anirudh and Hari remain moderators and can step back into activity at any time. For the low volume in this list, I think this number and composition of admins is enough. If the need arises to appoint additional moderators, I am confident the list community can say so, and the existing Indian moderators can appoint additional ones. If there is reason to suspect the list moderators are not doing their job properly, folks can bring it up on the list, with evidence supporting their allegations, and it can be discussed. If folks are *prevented* from bringing it up on this list (which, in my experience, has been quite tolerant of [even wild and baseless] allegations and did not practice censorship preventing people from bringing up issues, while it does prevent people from kidnapping the list with endless repetitions of allegations already shown to be baseless), they can contact the Wikimedia Foundation's Trust and Safety team at [email protected] and demonstrate their case. This is a community list, meant to be for and by members of the Indian Wikimedia communities. As such, the Foundation seeks no special influence on it, and would only intervene in case of technical need (like the aforementioned period of extended inactivity of all moderators, which was hindering discussion on the list), or catastrophic failure of the existing moderators (which hasn't happened yet, but theoretically could, as described in the previous paragraph). I hope that satisfies your curiosity, Arvind. If it does, perhaps you would reciprocate by satisfying Soni's curiosity about your own contributions to Wikimedia, because for someone interested in transparency you sure haven't demonstrated any so far. A. Asaf Bartov (he/him/his) Lead Program Officer, Emerging Communities Community Development Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/> Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! https://donate.wikimedia.org On Fri, May 1, 2026 at 12:24 PM Arvind Menon via WikimediaIndia-l < [email protected]> wrote: > Hello, > > Who is controlling this Mailing List? The Mailing List Admins are people > from WMF? Is it true for now? Earlier volunteers are no more. > > If WMF is controlling then kindly step down and let the community take > care. > > Arvind > _______________________________________________ > WikimediaIndia-l mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit > https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikimediaindia-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
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