Why Mike Peel is running for the WMF Board

Candidate Op-Ed, Mike Peel

Why Mike Peel is running for the WMF Board

Each of the six shortlisted Board of Trustees candidates were offered an Op-Ed space in The Signpost to express their thoughts. Peel requested we republish their candidate statement. This article is an opinion piece and reflects the views of Peel, rather than The Signpost. –E

Personal:

Name: Mike Peel
Location: Tenerife, Canary Islands
Languages: en-N, es-2, pt-BR-1, fr-1, python, C

Editorial:

Wikimedian since: 2005
Active wikis: English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, English Wikisource, Meta

Introductory statement

I want to bring my Wikimedia and lived experience to the WMF board at a time of change, with the movement strategy implementation and upcoming Global Council. I want to see WMF collaborate more onwiki in the 'wiki way', with better technical support and tools to support multilingual free knowledge across all Wikimedia projects. I also want WMF to work better with affiliates to grow Wikimedia significantly, particularly in the global south. I have been a Wikimedia editor since 2005, with contributions across Wikipedia, Wikidata, Commons, Wikisource, and more, both by hand and with automated and semi-automated tools. On the organisational side, I co-founded Wikimedia UK and I am a member of Wiki Movimento Brasil. I was on the Funds Dissemination Committee for four years, and am currently a regional grants committee. By day I am a radio astronomer, based in Tenerife, Spain (previously working in the UK and Brasil).

Contributions to the Wikimedia projects

I've made over 400,000 edits, mostly to Wikidata, Commons, and English Wikipedia, as well as to English Wikisource, Meta, and others. I am an admin on the first three. I operate Pi bot, which has made nearly 10 million edits, mostly on Wikidata and Commons. I created the multilingual Wikidata infobox that is used in nearly 4 million Commons categories. I co-founded Wikimedia UK and was a trustee for its first 5 years as it established and became a charity: I am now an honorary member. I have been part of Wiki Movimento Brasil since 2019 (informally since 2016).

Expertise in skill areas

I have gained a lot of experience with organisational strategy and management work through the Wikimedia movement since 2008. I was a Trustee of Wikimedia UK for 5 years (2008–2013, including as Chair, Secretary, and Membership Secretary), I served on the Funds Dissemination Committee for four years on its inaugural committee in 2012–14, and a returning term in 2015–17. I am currently on the Northern and Western Europe grants committee since 2021. I understand and work to support the governance needs of organisations across the Wikimedia movement, and want to bring this experience and viewpoint to WMF in a time of Wikimedia organisational change with the Global Council. I am an experienced developer through my day job as a radio astronomer, which includes scientific analysis of large (TB+) datasets through self-written software packages. I understand software development processes at a practical level, focused on implementing them to solve specific problems.

Lived experiences in the world

I was lucky enough to be born in the UK, and grew up in the north of England. After studying astronomy up to the PhD level (thanks to a student loan and a PhD studentship), and working in a postdoctoral position in the UK, I moved to São Paulo, Brasil, in 2016 to work on a new telescope project there as a jovem pesquisador. My experiences there included living in one of the largest cities in the world, and one of the most economically divided, as well as visiting remote parts of Paraíba to find a radio quiet zone for a new radio telescope. In 2019 I moved to Tenerife, part of the Canary Islands - a Spanish region off the coast of Africa - to work on telescope projects at Teide Observatory. Through astronomy, I regularly work with scientists from a wide range of cultures and backgrounds. I also supervise both astronomy and Wikimedia students from across the world, whenever I can. This includes improving both gender and geographical diversity through the students I mentor. There is a huge opportunity for Wikimedia to grow significantly in the global south, linked to the movement strategy, which requires decentralisation of power from WMF and increased support (resources, growing leadership capacity) through the Wikimedia affiliates. I would like to build on my expertise from the grants committees and lived experience from Brasil to help WMF accomplish this.

Cultural and linguistic fluency

Learning new languages and cultures is not easy. While in Brasil, I learned some Portuguese, and explored the culture and country, particularly with other Wikimedians from Wiki Movimento Brasil. I've tried to document part of this through the articles on, and tens of thousands of photos of, Brazil that I've shared to the Wikimedia projects. In Tenerife, I am learning Spanish, and also exploring and documenting the local history and culture - although Tenerife has already been quite well documented, particularly on the Spanish Wikipedia, less so on the English Wikipedia. Whenever I have visited another country for work, wiki, or tourism, I always take my camera - not for the usual tourist photos, but to document its history via Wikimedia. I also try to support multilingual knowledge through Wikidata. This is best demonstrated through the Wikidata Infobox in Commons categories, which I created to be able to better understand the local history in Brasil that I was photographing, and is now one of the biggest multilingual uses of Wikidata in the Wikimedia projects outside of Wikidata itself. I would like to see the WMF make more use of such multilingual opportunities, particularly through the Wikimedia sister projects.

Experience as an advocate

Safe and collaborative spaces are really important. While I do not have experience with creating them, I support and encourage them as much as I can. I have also seen the after-effects of dictatorships and censorship in both Brasil and Spain, although I have not experienced it directly: the best I can do is to help document this and hope it doesn't happen again in the future.

Experience in...a group that has faced historical discrimination and underrepresentation

I can't claim experience here beyond trying to support such groups and individuals whenever I meet them. Both Wikimedia and astronomy (and physics in general) have huge issues with under-representation, and I try to help improve that through supervising students, doing outreach work, and providing general support wherever I can.

2022 Board of Trustees Analysis Committee Rating

This table shows the candidate rating provided by the 2022 Board of Trustees Analysis Committee
Candidate Name	Wikimedia Background	Sought Skills	Sought Regional Experience	Human Rights & Underrepresentation	Overall rating from the average score of the four categories	Overall rating from the average score of the nine criteria
Mike Peel	Gold	Silver	Gold	Silver	Silver	Gold

In this issue

Eyewitness Wikimedian, Vinnytsia, Ukraine

Discuss this story

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Here's a few questions I'm going to ask of everyone.

In the community, it's a widely acknowledged issue that the WMF has a hearing problem. Its financial resources are larger than ever, and yet we can't get the most of the support we want from the WMF, who instead spends time and ridiculous amounts of money on issues like branding. It took YEARS of screaming from the community, culminating in an open letter with 1000+ signatories to drive the very simple point that the WMF does not, should not, and will not ever stand for the Wikipedia Foundation with any legitimacy.

At the same time, we have huge amounts of support for increasing the modest resources of the community team. There are very tangible projects that have massive amounts of community support that get dropped because of this lack of resources.

So my questions are these. 1) Do you think the WMF has a hearing problem? If so, why do you think is the root cause, and what do you plan to do about it? 2) What do you make of the proposal to allocate at least 1% of the WMF warchest/yearly budget to the Community Tech team, broadly speaking?

Thanks for your time. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:40, 1 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Headbomb! I'm not sure if you read my statement before posting this? You know I'm very concerned about this issue, and it's one of the key reasons why I'm running for the Board. As best as I can tell, change needs to come from the top (maybe a board resolution, maybe through guidance to the ED) to make sure that the community is properly embedded in any project that the WMF runs, and community priorities are followed up on. I'm a big fan of (and repeat proposer at) the community wishlist, and I was the third person to support your proposal to increase its budget! (Although, branding *is* an issue that needs to be properly solved at some point - but in a way that the community supports.) Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 18:43, 2 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I did read your statement (I read everyone's), but I wanted to be fair to all candidates and have give them the opportunity to either further elaborate or clarify these things, since these areas are often not explicitly touched on in the statements.

I'll agree with you that something could be done about improved branding, but the issue with the branding efforts were that one specific thing was being pushed extremely hard against the wishes of the community, while the community insisted from the outset that that specific thing was a non-starter.

If branding comes around again, you may be interested in

There's plenty that could be done on branding (though now that the well has been poisoned, it's going to take a very skilled person to take on that mantle), but the WMF needs to tell us what problems it's trying to address in plain speak, and involve the community in the process. Because the "problem" of "a random person on the street doesn't know WikiSpecies and WikiData are related brands" is a very different problem than "Event organizers have troubles communicating the difference between Commons, WikiData, and Wikipedia".

Anyway, that's enough on branding. I'm mostly interested in your broad-level approach and views. As I told Legoktm, I can live with board members having different opinions than mine, especially when they're well-informed opinions. But the character of the answers and opinion matter, because the board really lacks a community perspective. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:58, 2 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Headbomb: Whenever I talk about Wikimedia, I have to explain that we have Wikipedia, which is the encyclopaedia, then Wikimedia, which is all of the projects/movement/organisations, then start explaining the different bits of Wikimedia. It really isn't something that is obvious to most, and that is a branding issue... But we'll see how it goes in the future - definitely any change that happens there has to have community consensus! Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 06:57, 4 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

What does "community is properly embedded in any project that the WMF runs" mean to you, concretely? For example, how would you know if you have succeeded and the community is sufficiently embedded? Everyone always talks about how its important that the community be "involved", but its always vague and aspirational. What do you think concretely should be done to fix the issue? Bawolff (talk) 22:52, 2 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Bawolff: It's a really complicated issue in practice, which makes it difficult to be concrete about it. It's also a never-ending process. ;-) The ideal outcome would be that every project has community involvement at a level that makes sense for it (i.e., as much as possible...) - and that this is routinely thought through and embedded in project plans right from the start. It also links in with transparency and sharing information about what's going on - with ways for the community to get involved at any point. A good measure might be how many on-wiki controversies take place about WMF activities - which should be zero. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 06:57, 4 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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