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Questions raised over WMF partnership with research firm

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By Go Phightins!, The ed17, and Pine
Asaf Bartov

The external research firm Lafayette Practice has declared that the Wikimedia Foundation is the "largest known participatory grantmaking fund," but several concerns have been raised with their report, the phrase being used (participatory grantmaking), the now-former Wikipedia article on that phrase, and an alleged conflict of interest by WMF staff members.

On February 19 the WMF's blog extolled the release of a new study by the Lafayette Practice, a France-based five-person team of philanthropy advisors. The partners describe themselves as "spanning 50 years of deeply engaged experience solving the complex problems that foundations and nonprofit organizations encounter." This report, funded and commissioned by the WMF, grandly noted that it is by far the largest participatory grantmaker in the world. As defined by the blog post, participatory grantmaking attempts to "include representatives from the population that the funding will serve in the grantmaking process and in decisions about how funds are allocated."

Shortly after the blog post was published, Gregory Kohs, a long-time Wikimedia critic, published an article on Examiner.com alleging misconduct on the part of WMF staffers, specifically regarding Wikipedia's conflict of interest guideline. Kohs, founder and owner of MyWikiBiz, is a banned Wikipedia editor and was a candidate in the 2009 WMF Board of Trustees election. He alleged that the WMF hired Lafayette, which he believes has "basically adopted the phrase 'participatory grantmaking' as a proprietary discussion point," and paid the research firm to declare the WMF as the "winner of sorts in the category it was hired to investigate."

This may be correct, in part: while the term "participatory grantmaking" was certainly used by others before Lafayette, very few besides Lafayette and the WMF use it. Google search results reveal more than half of all mentions presently found online are related to Lafayette and/or Wikimedia.

Kohs stated that based on his analysis of the page history of the Wikipedia article on participatory grantmaking, almost all of the page had been authored by a WMF staffer, Asaf Bartov. Bartov created the page on July 16, 2014 with Ijon, his volunteer username and an account he has been editing with since 2003; he came to the WMF in February 2011 through the Hebrew Wikipedia and Wikimedia Israel. He is now the head of WMF Project and Event Grants.

Two other Wikipedia editors whose user pages identified them as WMF staffers, Jessie Wild and the pseudonymous Opinenow, contributed minor edits to the article that day and the next, respectively; Opinenow returned to the article on July 23 for some further copyedits. Both Opinenow and Katy Love, the author of the Wikimedia blog post, edited the article’s talk page from July 23 through August 25, 2014, listing other grantmakers including the Wikimedia Foundation.

One day after the blog post was published, most likely in response to the criticism, the WMF added a disclaimer to its piece. In part, it stated that "the Wikipedia article on Participatory Grantmaking was written in part [Editor's note: this was later changed to "primarily."] by Wikimedia Foundation staff in their capacity as Wikimedia volunteer editors. This was done on their own time, using their personal editor accounts." Kohs questioned the validity of this statement and further accused Bartov of deliberately neglecting to declare the conflict of interest between the WMF and the Lafayette Practice.

Using the article's edit history, Kohs noted that given a "typical Wednesday workday," Bartov would have edited at 10:25am, 1:00pm, 1:09pm and 1:39pm (Pacific Time/San Francisco). He charged that "the substantial amount of content he ... created is highly unlikely to have been produced only on personal break time."

So, in short, Kohs alleges that there are two separate but related problems within the WMF's transactions with the Lafayette Group. First and foremost, the report's questionable metrics raise questions as to the expectations set down by the WMF. Second, did Bartov create a Wikipedia article with an intent to promote WMF goals on participatory grantmaking, the term popularized and most used by Lafayette?

COI concerns surround now-deleted Wikipedia article

Based on Signpost's inquiries, Kohs's assumption that Bartov created the article at his WMF desk was erroneous, as Bartov created the Wikipedia article while he was in New York City attending the 2014 International Human Rights Funders Group conference, held on July 15 and 16. Both Katherine Maher, the WMF's chief communications officer, and Bartov told us so, and we were able to independently confirm this. The conference was Bartov's first chance to attend a professional grantmaking forum in his then-new position as Head of WMF Project and Event Grants, and he took note of Lafayette's presentation of Who Decides? How Participatory Granting Benefits Donors, Communities, and Movements—their initial exploration of participatory grantmaking, created in April 2014 without funding or input from the WMF. He thought that the WMF's grantmaking structure had "interesting parallels" with funders in the human rights space, or what was described in the Lafayette report. On finding that the English Wikipedia had no article on the topic, he composed the majority of the article in his hotel room that night and saved it the next afternoon, Eastern time.

It is unclear whether the WMF had already contracted with the Lafayette Practice at this time. With recent changes within the WMF's grantmaking department's structure, Maher was not able to provide an exact date of when the WMF commissioned Lafayette to write the report. Publicly available information indicates that it was sometime before the London Wikimania conference in August 2014, where the research group presented Who Decides? again and interviewed eight WMF staffers: the earliest edit mentioning Lafayette came on July 22, when Alex Wang, the WMF's Project and Event Grants Program Officer, added them to the Wikimania schedule. Lafayette followed this with a tweet on July 28. These are mere days after Bartov created the participatory grantmaking article on July 16.

Given all of this, we directly asked Bartov about the possibility of a conflict of interest, both in regards to the WMF–Lafayette relationship and within the WMF itself. He told us that he was not aware of any relationship—potential or real—between the two organizations at the time he wrote the article. Had this been otherwise, he wrote in no uncertain terms that he "would not have created the article at the time, given its strong dependence on [Lafayette's] first report as a source." Furthermore, he did not edit the article at any time after being interviewed by Lafayette in London at Wikimania.

On the potential for an internal conflict of interest within the WMF itself, he wrote that he was aware of a potential for breaching the conflict of interest policy and therefore avoided mentioning the organization in his article.

From the WMF, Maher strongly rejected the notion that there was a conflict of interest in this case; in their view, WMF staffers—in their personal capacities, with the goals of Wikipedia in mind—contributed to the article and were never directed to do so by their supervisors or anyone else.

"Participatory grantmaking" and the WMF–Lafayette relationship

The second of two reports produced by the Lafayette Practice on participatory grantmaking was commissioned and paid for by the WMF (the first, Who Decides, was not). On page eleven, it declares that the WMF is the "largest known participatory grantmaking fund" based on a sample of eight other organizations.

Kohs wrote "You may never have heard of this phrase, participatory grantmaking, because (according to Google Books and Google Scholar) prior to about 2009, the phrase had never been written in any book or any academic paper." Despite having many traits of a trendy, in-vogue neologism, the base concepts of "participatory grantmaking"—which was only used as a single term starting after 2008—have been around for several decades under a myriad of different terms. The concept has roots in participatory budgeting, which started as an experiment in Porto Alegre, Brazil in the 1980s and has since spread to Asia, Europe, and North America. Lafayette points to the 1970s formation of the Funding Exchange, which "worked to provide long-term institutional support for grassroots social justice [and] movement-building work" in the United States until it shut down in 2013. Entities that have used "participatory grantmaking" itself include Harvard University, the Overbrook Foundation, and the Center for Effective Philanthropy. These go back to at least 2010, and the WMF has been using the term to describe its approach to grantmaking since at least May 2013—well before the two reports authored by Lafayette.

All that being said, there is cause for concern with Lafayette's definition of "participatory grantmaking." In their recent report on the WMF, they declare that it is the "largest known participatory grantmaking fund" based purely on the sample it created last year, which contains a total of eight non-profit organizations. For a neologism with such a wide scope, it is inevitable that a plethora of similar grantmaking models have been missed. For example, as noted by Wikipediocracy, the Colorado Trust disbursed $13.9 million in 2013. The WMF, in comparison, disbursed less than $6 million in its 2013/2014 financial year.

On the relationship between the WMF and Lafayette, Maher wrote that they hired the firm based on a Lafayette Practice report released in April 2014. The document, Who Decides?, was used as the main source in Bartov's Wikipedia article and did not have any WMF involvement. She also discounted Kohs' central assertion, that "the Lafayette Practice 'owns' the trade term 'participatory grantmaking', and the Wikimedia Foundation solidified the consultant's lock on that term by authoring a Wikipedia article about it":

The Lafayette Practice did not respond to a Signpost inquiry by press time. The article on participatory grantmaking was nominated for deletion on February 25 and deleted less than 24 hours later per the "snow" clause.

In brief

  • Departure of Anasuya Sengupta: WMF's Senior Director of Grantmaking has announced her upcoming departure due to health issues.
  • WMF organization chart changes: The Wikipedia Library, Grantmaking (now "Community Resources"), Learning and Evaluation, the Wikipedia Education Program, Community Advocacy, and Community Liaison WMF staff are now combined in the "Community Engagement" Department under new Senior Director of Community Engagement Luis Villa, who was previously WMF's Deputy General Counsel. Siko Bouterse has been promoted to Director of Community Resources.
  • Global user pages are now available. SUL finalization is planned for April.
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  • Hats off to the editors; this is some actual in-depth journalism, of far better quality than most "newspapers" of comparable staff and readership. As to the content, if Lafayette only created a sample size of 8 before deciding Wikimedia is the biggest one of this category then their report was a bit of a puff piece. That said, I agree with this article's implication and the deleted wiki article's statements (viewing deleted articles is the best part of being an admin) - while "participatory grantmaking" might be a neologism that pretty much only Lafayette uses, it does seem like the idea, sans name, is a real thing that's been around for a while, and Wikimedia might be one of the larger(est) organizations to use it, under whatever terminology. Unsurprisingly, this leaves me thinking the same thing I usually do with a Kohs report- he has once again turned a molehill into a mountain, and found malicious conspiracy in otherwise minor coincidences. About what I usually expect from a guy who has carried a 5+-year grudge for Wikipedia not letting him carry out his paid editing work unimpeded. --PresN 05:23, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@PresN: - It seems rather unfair to label Kohs in this way. If the Wikimedia Foundation were to respond to his requests for comment prior to his authoring news stories, then certainly fewer molehills would turn into mountains in his mind. It speaks volumes that the Wikimedia Blog editors won't even publish a comment of his on their blogs. How is that "open and transparent"? As for your theory that his grudge is "for Wikipedia not letting him carry out his paid editing work unimpeded", it sounds like you don't even know the history of MyWikiBiz. Kohs endeavored from the start to disclose every one of his paid clients and suffer the community's decision-making process on any of his content submissions. Jimmy Wales said that was unacceptable, encouraging Kohs instead to post content on his own site, then let other Wikipedians copy it over to Wikipedia, even if that meant the risk of losing proper attribution for the content. Then two months later, Wales reneged on even that small compromise. You do a disservice with your descriptions of Kohs, especially in a forum where he is not permitted to respond. - WilmingMa (talk) 13:06, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Per WP:REVERTBAN I've reverted a long-time banned editor who responded here.
As he has been banned for egregious violations of our rules, including vicious personal attacks, it would be unfair to say that he is being denied a chance to respond. He can just do it elsewhere, which he does all the time, at length.
I'll ask the Signpost editors to keep the banned editor's comments off this page, as much as possible. Smallbones(smalltalk) 14:00, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I don't doubt that with 21 edits, something strange is going on, but the SP has traditionally taken a very liberal approach when it comes to article comments to avoid the appearance of censorship. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 15:53, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
In exchange, I don't think it's too much to ask that if he's allowed to comment here, we don't have this farce of him referring to himself in the third person. Gamaliel (talk) 17:20, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@WilmingMa: I'm not arguing anything about whether Kohs should have been allowed to do open-air paid editing work on Wikipedia (I'm actually fine with that, given sensible restrictions). I'm saying that, when they said he (you) couldn't, most rational people would have been annoyed/angry, sure, but then they would have found something else to do, rather than spend 8 years complaining about Wikipedia, writing articles about invented conspiracies about Wikipedia, trying to self-promote at Wikipedia conferences, and bitterly complaining in any venue that would have him/you that Wikimedia won't return your calls any more. --PresN 19:19, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'm pretty sure Greg does more than criticise Wikimedia. Banning him from that conference was stupid. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 15:10, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Please add an editor's not indicating that a Google search for [ Wikimedia Foundation caught self-promoting on Wikipedia ] finds the page in question.
Note that I used brackets plus spaces rather than quotation marks. Quotation marks give you a different result if you include them or not, leading to awkward "without the quotes" instructions. Square brackets (plus spaces so they are not interpreted as wikinarkup) work the same on Google whether you include them or not. --Guy Macon (talk) 05:47, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • I nominated the piece for deletion; I didn't think it was a GNG pass looking at it. I'm a little disappointed that process wasn't followed and that the AfD debate was snowed shut so fast — it opens the door for Deletion Review doing that sort of thing — but it doesn't seem that the piece would have survived a full-length debate in any event. I for one am glad that Mr. Kohs is keeping an eye focused on WMF and their waaaaaaaaay too cozy relationship with paid consultants and professional service suppliers and the tendency for these (not just in this case, but in general) to manipulate WP content while at the same time engaging in a business relationship with WMF. Kudos also to the Signpost for the work of reconstruction of this tangled web. —Tim Davenport, Corvallis, OR (USA) /// Carrite (talk) 05:52, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Participatory grant" used in 2005 textbook [1]
  • This 2009 source gives a nice definition and says it takes place in a number of European cities [2] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 07:28, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • I hope the irony of Kohs' complaining about "conflict of interest" is sharpened by the good reporting here. These types of errors (and let us hope they are errors) are common in the leading articles posted on Wikipediocracy, even those written by somewhat more thoughtful authors. The groupthink there, though the individual creeds may vary, is pretty plain to see, and detracts from what could be a useful critical tool. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 10:38, 27 February 2015 (UTC).
@Rich Farmbrough: - Do you imagine that the good reporting here was enhanced by the reporters' access to responsive commentary from the Wikimedia Foundation staff? It's not really fair to critique Mr. Kohs' reporting when the subjects refuse to reply from their lofty (and "open and transparent") perches. What would you suggest Kohs do, in order to regain access to the Foundation's communications channels? Grovel? Apologize for past misdeeds? Or, do you imagine as I do, that the Foundation would never re-open dialogue with Mr. Kohs, no matter what, because he is simply too talented at spotting embarrassing misdeeds of the Foundation and its affiliates? - WilmingMa (talk) 13:26, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I don't imagine anything. Perhaps something both you and Kohs would be wise to emulate. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 14:47, 27 February 2015 (UTC).
Per WP:REVERTBAN I've reverted a long-time banned editor who responded here. (RF's response below was to the banned editor) Smallbones(smalltalk) 15:16, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
As per my comment above, I've restored the comment above. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 15:53, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have problems where a survey produces a graph from as few as "2 responses", produces graphs from varying numbers of responses where the results are clearly not validly comparable, and releases a "study" which was not even proof-read (graph showing $21 million "average" budget in 2011 is clearly a sore thumb). I am also concerned that some of them appear to have many "group decisions" made by a group of "1", and that some give out as little as 25% of their budget. In short, the report was not quite ready for prime time, and the Wikipedia article seems all too much like an effort to burnish the report's shine. If one does not have some statistically useful number of responses, one does not publish. Alas. Collect (talk) 13:16, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have edited this Signpost article to include a direct link to Kohs's Examiner article, using a URL which, as suggested on Wikipediocracy, circumvents the spam blacklist. The reasons given for ever including examiner.com on the blacklist at all, seem to me to be exceedingly weak, especially since the nominator for the blacklisting admits that he was "not aware of any concerted spam campaign", and not to meet the criteria for listing currently given in the guidelines. In any case, it's obviously ridiculous to forbid this Signpost article from linking to Kohs's.
David Wilson (talk · cont) 13:35, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • wow, is that the best you can do? it's face-palms all the way down. should WMF editors now check in with wpcrazy to edit their work? if they don't eat the cooking, then they will be even more detached from the UX. how many people you wanna get fired? is the gotcha wpcrazy adding to the battleground, rather than helping to change the dysfunctional culture? should that not be the goal? there is legitimate criticism of the WMF, that is not advanced by such a hatchet-job. Duckduckstop (talk) 19:07, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • That's a little harsh. Gigs (talk) 20:26, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
      • A more tactful variant, as I agree with the above poster that it is important for WMF staff to brave both the UX and the community. Without reading thoroughly and in detail: a PR piece that needed more proofreading and more thorough research, a decision to declare yourself/your client a winner, staff working on their own time, and an attempt to create an article about a marketing buzzword phrase that didn't turn out to be of sufficient quality-- all happening when a key employee is leaving for health reasons. This does not sound like something over-the-top nefarious; it sounds more like PR people who are trying to puff the organization up while they are struggling to keep up with their workload. Not saying there's nothing to criticize-- but rather pointing out that we do need a WMF staff, and throwing tomatoes at them every chance we get is "not cricket," it is unsportsmanlike. --Djembayz (talk) 03:02, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Tangential comment, in response to "should WMF editors now check in with wpcrazy to edit their work?" This is precisely one of the topics at issue in the proposed merger of Outreach Wiki into Meta. In fact, it was User:Ijon who first raised the point about how maintaining a more professional tone with GLAMs is important for GLAM and WMF staff discussing partnerships-- something the average editors here don't necessarily realize. --Djembayz (talk) 12:48, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Does anyone else find it ironic that the only person mentioned in this article with an actual conflict of interest is Greg Kohs? Kaldari (talk) 21:28, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'm really not following you there... Kohs has his business, such as it is (it's a really small fish in a big ocean) and he's still pissed that he tried to be a good guy and Jimmy Wales personally banned him off way back when. Long grudge and so forth... Still, he's not associated the PR firm financially benefitting from its relationship with WMF or from the creation of a new semi-proprietary concept. He's not a WMF employee, glorifying their employer with a blog post sourced out through blatant Citeogenesis... He's just a dude who is pissed at the hypocrisy of him being banned while WMF employees and paid PR peeps flout common sense by distorting WP content for their own betterment. So, I respectfully suggest: try again. Carrite (talk) 00:27, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
If Kohs' article miraculously convinces the Wikipedia community that his ban was hypocritical and unwarranted, and it is then overturned, he clearly stands to benefit financially. Thus he has a conflict of interest. Kaldari (talk) 01:35, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think Carrite said he doesn't - just that he's not the only one. Squinge (talk) 10:43, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • May I say something that is slightly tangential to this story? I can't help pointing out one obvious problem in Lafayette's report: their assumption of a black line etched between so-called participatory and non-participatory grantmaking. In the UK, the EPSRC, at least for some schemes, allows applicants to contact them for advice on framing their research funding applications. I believe that applicants typically receive feedback on their budget from the grantmaking organisation, and modify their budget, before it goes to the selection committee. This and similar bodies have enormous spends compared with WMF grantmaking, and this does rather suggest that the distinction is not simple—perhaps even not useful. Against this, some grantmaking bodies conduct their processes strictly at arm's length from applicants, which has a different set of advantages and disadvantages.

    I haven't read the Lafayette report properly, but it looks as though they weren't given a tight brief for critically focusing on the weaknesses and opportunities for improving outcomes of the WMF's grantmaking schemes. [Disclosure: I regularly review PEG applications at Meta.] Tony (talk) 06:26, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your comment. This is the sort of article focus that would help those of us who are not non-profit or philanthropic professionals understand a little more about the issues involved with grantmaking, and the pros and cons of different approaches. --Djembayz (talk) 12:28, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Re. "concrete criticism of the article text I composed":  Granting the avowed intention to document rather than to promote, there is a serious drawback to adopting the buzzword/neologism of some research consultancy as the title and frame for constructing an article. There is a strong tendency, whether intended or not, for the article to become a WP:COATRACK for the firm's views, subjects, and/or (subsequent) clients.

    To avoid this pitfall one might search for other works on the field (which the firm's 12014 paper avers has "proliferated over the past several decades") that do not use the same terminology. Failing that (supposing the same paper is correct that "there has been little research or documentation"), one might look for an existing article on a broader topic that encompasses the subject, to which some brief notes about this aspect might be added. Otherwise the article is prone to be so narrowly focused on one firm's view that neutrality is elusive. A narrow frame is always an attractive place to hang coats.

    [Thanks to The ed et al. for a fascinating report.] ~ Ningauble (talk) 18:03, 3 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]


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