In 2019, a scandal ripped through the Wikipedia community when a Wikipedia admin who goes by the handle Fram was handed a year-long ban from the site. While known to few outside the tight-knit but feverishly active collective of Wikipedia contributors, the affair was part of a far-reaching, partisan shift at the open encyclopedia with widespread implications for the future of media, technology, and politics around the world.

Although contributor bans are not uncommon on Wikipedia, this case was different. Instead of coming from the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee (Arbcom), the panel of editors empowered to make such decisions, the ban was handed down directly by Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the NGO that owns the site.

Little more than 12 hours after the ban’s announcement, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales publicly intervened to help quell the storm by publicly assuring the community he was reviewing the situation, and later saying he’d “raised the issue with WMF.” A week later, two Wikipedia bureaucrats — high-ranking editors who can assign admin rights — and 18 admins — editors with enhanced rights — resigned in protest. Arbcom released a searing statement saying the top-down ban was “fundamentally misaligned with the Wikimedia movement’s principles of openness, consensus, and self-governance.”

At its lowest resolution, the controversy was born from the tension between the decentralized Wikipedia site and the highly centralized Wikimedia Foundation. In reality, the ban and subsequent backlash were tied to a massive culture shift at Wikipedia, precipitated by the rise of a new social-justice-minded power structure at Wikimedia Foundation.

The launch of Wikiproject Black Lives Matter in 2020 exemplified Wikipedia’s all-in pivot to DEI. Seeking to address what it called Wikipedia’s “systemic bias,” the project called for editors to enrich the content, and elevate the visibility, of pages like “Black Lives Matter,” “Police Brutality in the United States,” “Racism in Oregon” and “US National Anthem Protests.” Most importantly, the project represented a carve-out from Wikipedia’s foundational policy of providing No Original Research: instead of aggregating information from other sources, Wikipedia editors began both going to protests and proactively reaching out to photographers who would be willing to allow Creative Commons use of protest photography.

The controversy was ultimately about who would control the site containing “all the world’s knowledge,” and hundreds of millions in Wikipedia funding. Would the site’s community of decentralized, uncompensated editors continue to govern it according to its principles of openness, transparency, and neutrality, or would a handful of highly paid NGO technocrats re-orient Wikipedia toward endorsing and promoting the ever-shifting currents of the Western elite social justice regime? And how would Wikipedia respond to a revolution in American public life that challenged the idea that knowledge should be both neutral and objective as a vestige of white supremacy?

As the Wikipedia community (“communitah” in Wiki-speak) erupted over the scandal, a few crucial facts emerged. Fram was (and still is) a prodigious editor, with around 200,000 edits by the time of his ban. But he was also seen as sometimes being sharp-tongued with editors whose contributions he thought violated policy. One of those editors was Laura Hale, then an Australian PhD student whose Wikipedia contributions focused on feminism and women’s sports, particularly related to the Paralympic movement. Hale, who did not have admin status, had previously claimed that Fram had “harassed” her by leaving comments on her Talk page, where comments about an editor’s edits are aggregated.

In a FAQ about the ban, Wikimedia Trust and Safety offered no more than corporate policy-speak to explain why it had been issued, with no specifics supplied. “As described on the Metapage about Office actions, we investigate the need for an office action either upon receipt of complaints from the community, or as required by law. In this case we acted on complaints from the community,” was the most substantive piece of the explanation. As one Wikipedia editor put it, “Of all the non-answers I’ve seen in my life, that’s possibly one of the most long winded.”

In the thick of the #MeToo movement ripping through America, an allegation against a senior male editor (Fram is widely known to be a man) against a woman editor with less power resonated with progressive parts of the community. Women in Red, a Wikipedia faction founded to increase the number of active female editors and articles whose subject “self-identifies as a woman — binary and/or non-binary and/or other” on the site, doubled down, accusing Fram of “real crimes” in a since-deleted tweet. “[I]t’s pretty clear that something legal or very serious was involved in this case,” wrote one self-described “anti-racist, pro-LGBTQ+” editor on a community discussion page.

But the fact that Hale was then in a long term romantic relationship with an editor called Raystorm (real name Maria Sefidari), who had rallied to Hale’s defense, at one time thundering “Just leave Laura alone” on a Talk page, complicated efforts to frame the controversy as a #metoo issue. On its own, her defense of Hale was unremarkable — except for one fact. In addition to her capacity as an editor, Sefidari held a vastly more powerful role as Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, the board that oversees the Wikimedia Foundation that owns the site. In this position, Sefidari was responsible for working directly with the executive director on issues like staff compensation, finding the director’s replacement, and setting the literal agenda for the WMF Board of Trustees, which oversees financial aspects related to the Foundation. In addition, as a board member, Sefidari had served, or was serving, on many of the top-level decision-making committees, including the Audit Committee, which oversees the finances of WMF, and Board Governance Committee, which administers Board elections, committee appointments and assessments.

Accusations began to fly that Sefidari had helped secure for Hale a paid position as Wikipedian in Residence for the Spanish Paralympic Committee, a semi-official editor role associated with an NGO that paid a stipend. Hale’s bonafides for the positions were questionable at best: she created dozens of English-language Wikipedia articles from Spanish articles despite the fact that she had begun learning Spanish only a few years earlier, resulting in frequent errors and odd usages on her pages. She was also caught admitting to using a “Ukrainian bulk content developer” (in her own words) — a low-cost content creator that could fill out a template created by Hale to generate dozens of articles — to mill more articles on the subject.

This strange triangle of love, enmity, and power led many in the community to believe that Fram had been banned not for vague accusations of “abuse” but for calling out sub-par work of a top Wikimedia official’s love interest. Salacious as it all was, if this had been the end of the story, it would have been an unpleasant, but quirky, footnote in Wikipedia history. In reality, it was only the beginning of a fundamental change that would replace the decentralized ethos of the site’s founders, and impose the WMF agenda on Wikipedia to use it as a tool for progressive social change.

Two years later, Sefidari announced that she’d be stepping down from the WMF Board of Trustees. But there was a catch: she would transition into a role as a paid consultant. This immediately set off alarm bells in the community, with members protesting that a senior WMF official taking a separate paid role on exit smacked of self-dealing. The landslide of objections became so intense that WMF’s General Counsel, Amanda Keton, had to step in with a lengthy response.

Keton explained the new arrangement by saying the WMF had identified “gaps in implementation of the Foundation’s Movement Strategy” that required further staffing. Sefidari was supposed to fill this gap, now as a paid consultant, with her extensive knowledge of WMF and the Movement Strategy brought to bear on the work.

The Movement Strategy, also known as Wikimedia 2030, was indeed a massive undertaking. Launched in 2017 by then-WMF executive director and CEO Katherine Maher, the strategy would be a complete re-imagining of WMF and Wikipedia’s mission. Where Wikipedia had been built on the principle of decentralized knowledge, the Movement Strategy would veer into the hyper-centralized space of top-down social justice activism and advocacy. At the initiative’s launch event, Maher told the audience it had taken eight months to fully conceive and would draw in various stakeholders, like media, tech, academics and NGOs. (Among the few directly named was Maria Sefidaris.)

The key concept undergirding the Movement Strategy was “inclusion,” an idea rapidly becoming buzzy amid the swirling culture currents that would soon crystallize into #MeToo, BLM and the trans movement. One of the “Consensus Findings” derived from the process of fleshing out the initiative was a statement that could have come straight from a DEI handbook: “Inclusivity and new representation can be only forged on lower barriers to entry.”knowledge,” the WMF would need money — lots of it. Accordingly, the Movement Strategy devoted significant focus on funding WMF deep into the future. But it went much further, innovating a new structure for the Foundation that could harness the internet’s insatiable demand for digital information.

The central aspect of WMF’s new financial strategy was the establishment of the Wikimedia Endowment, a pool of money that, as its name suggests, is designed to fund the organization essentially “in perpetuity.” Distinct from Wikimedia’s budget, which funds Wikipedia’s day-to-day operations, the Endowment was set up in 2016 as a donor-advised fund at leftist mega-fund, Tides Foundation, an $800 million fund that’s part of the wider Tides Center, a network of such funds “that partners with social change leaders and organizations to…accelerate social justice.” The Tides Foundation’s IRS 990 filing lists its mission as “Grantmaking through funds to accelerate the pace of social change.”

Tides, which has received $34 million in taxpayer funding since 2008, funds a variety of left leaning groups focused on defunding police departments, like the Justice Teams Network, which works to defund the Oakland police, as well as Chispa, which worked toward the same end in Santa Clara, California. Tides has also founded numerous anti-Israel groups like the Council on Islamic American Relations, which is an unindicted co-conspirator in a plan to funnel millions of dollars to Hamas. The fund recently made the news for its association with the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, a group it not only funds but operates, which last November led the shutdown of the Bay Bridge to protest the war in Gaza.

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Via https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-the-regime-captured-wikipedia