Social justice isn't a bad thing. Social justice instead of actually fulfilling your primary goal is. If all the bugs are closed, the product is beautiful and there's still money sloshing about, then fill your boots.

Also, make sure that your donors know their donation is going to go to racial education of Arab journalists (grantee #1), and not to paying developers and server bills. The begging banners on Wikimedia sites fail to mention that there's already 9 figure surplus, and yet the engineering teams will not see any of it no matter what you give, and their money isn't going to actually end up helping a wiki at all.

If I wanted to donate to racial justice in media, I can send the money to the Media Foundation for West Africa (grantee #5), the Borealis Racial Equity in Journalism Fund (#2) or any of the others myself.

I think it's a bad thing by itself. With the wikipedia example - anyone can edit, editors can by anonymous or psuedonomous, and there is no preference, implicit or explicit, for race and gender. Over the years wikipedia has been built up, by volunteers, into an amazing and valuable resource.

Now, the organization controlling their work and this global good, decides that aggregate race and gender statistics are a problem. Wikipedia is a little too white, and a little too male, and that's a bad thing!

Imagine applying this reason to any other organization and any other race and gender combination. Here's a crazy idea - if you want to reduce race and gender based prejudice, start by not having clear race and gender prejudices yourself.

Instead of treating it as a nice-to-have when everything else is perfect, maybe consider that pursuing social justice will help you fulfill your primary goal?

I think you're both right.

Social justice INSTEAD of one's primary mission is a terrible idea. This happens when social justice initiatives are put in place to help the careers of people running them instead of the organization. That's when you get issues like the displeasure when I tried asking how many poor white people went to our graduate school in a racism discussion. My interest was in knowing whether it was first-order/direct racism resulting in an underrepresentation of POC or second-order/indirect racism (via classism and POC being more likely to be in poverty). Different causes would mean different solutions, but examining the issue wasn't the actual point. The POINT was so we could all stand up and declare ourselves good people + put it on our CVs.

Social justice in addition to a primary mission is very useful, because getting different people in the room means you think of way more things and identify new ways to carry out your mission.

They didn’t get my donations saying they’re gonna bring about racial justice. They said this is what is needed to keep Wikipedia without ads and that they’re suffering. Misleading is an understatement.

I don't think this is a social justice thing. I personally would be just as annoyed about any other cause. Wikipedia donations shouldn't be championing any cause that isn't open access to information, no matter what side of the political spectrum it's on. Especially if it's to the point that Wikipedia itself is being left to rot in favor of unrelated causes.

The thing being complained about is literally them executing their stated mission:

> This pilot initiative is rooted in our strategic direction, where Knowledge Equity emerged in 2017 as one of two key pillars of focus in order for us to achieve our vision for 2030. Knowledge equity acknowledges that we can’t achieve free knowledge if there are societal or economic barriers that prevent some people’s ability to share and contribute to knowledge. With this focused fund, we will invest in organizations working to address systems of racial bias and inequality around the world, with the goal of creating a more inclusive, representative future for free knowledge.

This is a motte and bailey argument. The motte here is that people living in unjust situations will likely be unable or less able to contribute to the Wikipedia project, which is true. The bailey is that donation funds are being funneled into these initiatives rather than improving Wikipedia itself (see other comments about bug counts and features lacking in Wikipedia, which are not being addressed). The Knowledge Equity fund may or may not improve "racial justice," however they define that - but the strategic goal of improving free access to the world's knowledge is almost certainly better reached by direct improvements to the Wikipedia software and development, and support of open access and free speech causes rather than racially-focused ones (such as, for example, support for Alexandra Elbakyan's endeavors to keep Sci-Hub operational, or speech protection in more repressive governments).

My favourite irony with the WMF's love of funding racial justice [1] is that one thing that does not work well at all in MediaWiki is the mobile editing interface [2]. It's basically just plain text and you're expected to type in the syntax manually on a phone, and also all the links to the talk, history and other pages are hidden when editing. Guess which countries disproportionately use mobile devices and don't have as much access to actual computers.

[1] Not my emphasis: the KEF seems very much racial rather then social. Social justice that cuts across "class" lines rather than race lines seems much inherently fairer to me, since the point is to offset disadvantages, and race is a proxy of disadvantage, while "class" is almost a direct statement of how disadvantaged you are.

[2] The reading interface is quite good, though certainly could be better (hidden ToCs in articles?).

> the mobile editing interface

They used to have a formalized project aimed at improving this, but it seems that work on it stopped mid-2019. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Advanced_mobile_c... Their stated (as of 2019) workflow requires going to site settings and turning on a special "Advanced" interface in order to get something that's not broken. Awful.

It's worth noting that the bias in Wikipedia editorship is very real, and persists even after controlling for obvious causal factors such as Internet access. This is why "knowledge equity" was identified as a key part of Wikimedia projects' future strategy. Of course, trying to single-handedly solve "systems of racial bias and inequality around the world" is a pointless, Sisyphean task: what they ought to do in the first place is identify what factors make it harder for minorities and the socially marginalized to contribute to Wiki projects, specifically, and address these things. But Wikimedia is not a very evidence-driven organization, so they'd rather content themselves with these pointless and self-defeating platitudes.

> At the same time, we recognize this is work that we as a movement cannot do alone. Our projects can only do so much when, for example, academic and mass media representation of marginalized communities remains insufficient, which in turn limits citations and primary sources for us to build from.

The document linked above has some very pragmatic and boring goals like:

* Supporting media and journalism efforts focused on people of color around the world, in order to expand reliable media sources covering these communities

* Addressing unequal internet access

* Improving digital literacy skills that impede access to knowledge

* Investing in non-traditional records of knowledge (i.e. oral histories)

What do you think they're doing that's so wooly and vague and useless?

These "goals" are far from narrowly targeted towards fixing the critical issue of biased minority editorship. We don't even know what exactly might deter marginalized people from contributing. Perhaps they're turned away by all the pointless wikilawyering, in which case the most effective solution would look very different from what the WMF is proposing here.

Supporting minority media is a job for minorities, who will be far more keenly aware of what media are worth supporting and what are not. Writing down oral history is great, but is properly a job for academia, not for WMF projects (with the singular and notable exception of Wikijournal, which is a primary source of publishable research). Other listed things are similarly beside the point, e.g. as argued above wrt. Internet access.

This is a grant giving programme in which they support vital projects that need to be done outside Wikimedia to further their mission and work with outside groups with proven experience in those areas to enable that. So, stuff inside wikipedia, is by definition not going to be in this list, and they are explicitly not doing any of these things themselves, because it's not their focus or skillset. Why are you assuming these tasks won't be done by minorities and/or academics as appropriate? Those both seem highly likely to be involved unless I'm missing something.

Np, this is gaslighting.

"If you don't agree with our objectives, you are the enemy!"

Disagreeing with specific elements of social justice, particularly statements like:

"The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide."

Etc. is not 'being against social justice'.

The distinction is quite important, in fact, it's kind of 'the point'.

Most people agree with basic elements of social justice.

How many people are opposed to women voting? To women having 'equal opportunity'? Etc.

We're now into a war of opportunity and outcomes, which is a different kind of playing field.

I think Wikepedia generally does a good job overall, and it's probably fairly hard to do, that said, there is bias.

Spoken like a true Culture citizen.