Fjmustak
Member Arabic Wikimedians User Group
Member Wikimedia UK
Member Regional Grants Committee, Middle East and Africa
Member Wikimedia Strategy Steering Committee
Former Member Affiliations Committee
«If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.»
-- Desmond Tutu
About me
I'm Farah (In Arabic: فرح), a passionate Wikimedian and free knowledge advocate. I started out by editing the Arabic and English Wikipedias in 2005. In 2014, I became one of the founders of the Wikimedians of the Levant User Group, and I continue to be in its board. I was also involved in establishing the Arabic Wikimedians User Group. I am also a member of Wikimedia UK. In the global movement, I have served on the Affiliations Committee which works closely with and advises the Board of Trustees to approve and support Wikimedia affiliates. I was on the Wikimedia Strategy Steering Committee. I currently serve on the Regional Grants Committee for Africa and the Middle East, one of the first committees in the Movement to become decentralized.
My work
As part of my work with Wikimedians of the Levant UG, I initiated the Wikipedia Education Program in Palestine, created partnerships with NGOs, and helped build a local community that still thrives despite the challenges. In the Arabic Wikimedians UG, we have been working on establishing a hub for the Arabic speaking Wikimedia community that fulfills the 2030 recommendation Ensure Equity in Decision-making. I have been involved in the 2030 Wikimedia Strategy since its inception in 2016, participating in formulating it as part of the Steering Committee and contributing to the discussions and decision-making since.
I am currently an editor on Arabic Wikipedia, autopatrolled on Wikimedia Commons, patroller and rollbacker on Arabic Wikisource. I also served as a VRT member. Over the years, I have made thousands of edits on Wikimedia projects.
Contact me
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My CentralAuth
Candidacy for Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
editI am a candidate in the 2024 elections for the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Following are my answers to community questions to the candidates:
Q1:
editThe creation and implementation of a Universal Code of Conduct has been a Board priority since 2020. The original timeline for the implementation of the UCoC was wildly unrealistic, the UCoC was implemented by the Board without community ratification, and the first Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee was recently elected without a sufficient number of members to form a quorum. What lessons should the Board take from the UCoC process, especially about how the Board interacts with volunteers?
The Universal Code of Conduct is an important document that governs the interactions between the different stakeholders of the Wikimedia Movement. It lays out common ground among people of different backgrounds and sets common expectations of human conduct within the movement. As with many actions taken by the Foundation and the Movement as a whole, the idea is in the right place, but the implementation is an iterative process that's not right the first time. Processes like this are time consuming, and require wide participation from the community and resources from the WMF. Ratification by the Board without a community ratification was an oversight, even if a fraction of the community took an active part in discussing it and the wider community had a chance to weigh in on it. This brings us to the importance of constant communication between the various stakeholders, and more transparency in Board decisions that directly affect the community.
Q2
editThere has been some trend towards devolving or sharing the governance of the Wikimedia movement, including having a separate board for the Wikimedia Endowment and the proposed Global Council in the Movement Charter. What do you see as the positives and negatives of these trends, and what is your overall assessment of the work so far?
While I can understand the need for creating a separate board for the Endownment, one with a different skillset, it moves away from having an open ecosystem where everyone has a say, as we've always had in the Wikimedia Movement. The workings of the Endowment is opaque to the community. In my opinion, the work of the Endowment Board could have been the work of a subcommitte on a larger Board of the Wikimedia Foundation. As for the Global Council, it is a step in the right direction of giving the community a larger say in the direction of the Movemement. It is great having about half of the Board be elected by the community/affiliates, but having a body that is larger and closer to the community will make the its voice better heard. One of the major complaints about the perceived shortcomings of the Foundation is that it doesn't listen to the community, so having a body that is more representative of the community be involved in decision-making would help dispel these complaints.
Q3
editIn the 2024-25 draft Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan, there is a statement that Wikimedia content is becoming less visible as part of the Internet's essential infrastructure, because an increasingly closed and artificial intelligence-mediated internet doesn't attribute the source of the facts, or even link back to the Wikimedia projects. What responsibility does the Board and the Wikimedia Foundation have in enforcing the CC-by-SA licensing of the content from all projects by AI or other digital media information formats that do not respect the copyright law?
I don't believe the Board has a mandate to enforce licensing. The WMF should be involved in talks with tech companies that are at the forefront of the offending AI scraping of content, including content published on Wikimedia projects. The WMF should also, together with like-minded organizations in the Open Knowledge realm, lend their expertise and lobby legislatures to ensure that due credit is given to content creators.
Q4
editWikimedia Foundation's Annual Plan recognizes multiple trends negative to the Wikimedia movement: decreasing visibility, audiences moving to a novel competition such as artificial intelligence solutions and Internet influencers, increasing information warfare and erosion of trust, necessary technical investments while the revenue growth was flattening. At the same time, the movement's products and processes change very, very slowly. Which bold steps would you recommend to the Wikimedia Foundation?
The Foundation is in no position to stand against the current trends and needs to be flexible in coopting the emerging trends and invest in them, such as Artificial Intelligence tools that can be used to enhance content, in keeping with the ethos of the Movement. As for trust, the Foundation needs to focus on iterating policies with direct impact on the communities and individuals and improve communication channels with the different stakeholders to ensure engagement and transparency. Sharing insights with the communities on what readers and consumers of knowledge are after is important to aid the volunteers in producing knowledge that is sought after and that can continue to compete within the evolving ecosystem. The Foundation needs to constantly be aware of the emerging trends in technologies and knowledge consumption patterns.
Q5
editWhat are your thoughts about systemic bias on Wikimedia projects, both in their content and their demographics, and including identity-based, language-based, economic/resource-based, ideological/worldview-based, and other forms of system bias? What measures or initiatives do you think the Board can appropriately take to address systemic bias?
Systemic bias is an issue we, the Wikimedia Movement, have grappled with ever since the inception of Wikipedia, and continue to this day to work to counter. It is a topic that is very important to me personally. The biases manifest themselves on different levels. One of the identified issues is gender representation. For example, less than 20% of biographies on the English Wikipedia are of women. There are initiatives to shed light on and bridge this gap. Similarly, there is a heavy English language bias: While English is the most widely-spoken language in the World and is considered the most universally understood working languages, this favors native English speakers. An example is that "Wikipedia" is often synonymous with "English Wikipedia". The "Global North" is also heavily represented. Western ideals, sources, and even sometimes people are placed on a higher tier than the rest. The inherent human bias is clearly evident in the makeup of the Board: there is not a single affiliate/community member from the "Global South", for example. The will is there to make a change to counter this systemic bias, not least in the strategy recommendation to "Ensure Equity in Decision-making", and is commendable. What is often done to counter these biases is to look at the symptoms and not the root cause of these biases. For instance in terms of sources, as Wikipedia (in its different language editions) relies on written sources, it is much more likely to find information written by Western men about Western men. Additionally, Wikipedia (English and others) tend to favor Western news sources - bias and all - over others, thus spreading the prevailing narrative in these sources as "fact". As for the community, the Wikimedia Movement community is more concentrated in the more affluent "Global North" (and mainly male), which can affect a (understandable) sense of entitlement from those who make up the majority of contributors (financial and otherwise) in shaping the movement and the content in the projects. What the Foundation can do is to keep acknowledging this systemic bias exists, to listen to those subject to the biases and get their input on how this bias is perpetuated, and provide them with resources to counter it.