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


 * 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 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
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 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.