I went and looked at the application form for the first job linked and this is absolutely standard in the US at every company I've ever applied to. It's not just some Wikimedia thing. It's voluntary to fill it out and the company is not supposed to use it in deciding who to hire. The purpose is to have retrospective data a company can use to make sure they are not introducing bias into their hiring process.

Here’s the EEOC information page on the practice:

https://www.eeoc.gov/pre-employment-inquiries-and-race

From an applicant perspective, while physical tear-off sheets for mail-in applocations (one can imagine hand-delivery setups that solve this) are clearly imperfect, web forms are even worse.

> Questions about race, like on the Wikimedia Foundation's application forms

Those don’t (oddly enough, given that the voluntary self-identification section for US applicants to support government reporting has a “race/ethnic definitions” expansion block) have a question about race, just gender identity and whether or not one identifies as Hispanic/Latino ethnicity.

So its kind of odd to complain about a race question with those as the example.