Here is a machine translation, by DeepL.com (Google Translate produces
gobbledygook by comparison!)
Qiuwen - Wikimedians of Mainland China
Drop the illusion and prepare for the fight - a comment on the Foundation's
region-wide lockdown of Chinese Wikimedians and Maggie Dennis's "statement"
Posted by Qiuwen on September 14, 2021 in Drop the illusions, prepare for
the struggle - A comment on the Foundation's region-wide targeting of
Chinese Wikimedians and Maggie Dennis' "statement"
[.This commentary, by Lu Zu, takes the form of an open letter and will be
translated into English shortly.]
September 13, 2021 will be remembered by all Chinese Wikipedians.
The Wikimedia Foundation has locked out all Chinese Wikipedians, including
members and liaison members of my group, for no apparent reason, and has
removed the administrator and administrative privileges of many more
Wikipedians. This decision was made by the Foundation at the instigation of
some people in the Chinese wiki community, without any consideration,
without listening to the views of the community, and without any basis for
believing the slander of a small group of people.
It is no accident that the Foundation has decided to take action at this
point in time. The Foundation has torn off its mask of hypocrisy towards
us, and indeed towards the entire mainland Chinese community, and has
revealed its green fangs. Following the Foundation's decision, the
perpetrators of this farce are rejoicing that their imagined greatest
rival, our own Wikipedians of Mainland China (WMC), has been knocked off -
just as they were four years ago when they were region-wide locked out at
Watchtower Ai Meng.
The Chinese government and the Communist Party of China have been
criticized for blocking foreign websites and suppressing Wikipedia's
development in China. But the Foundation has done what even the Chinese
government has failed to do - the Chinese government has not stopped us
from organising meetings or events, and has not declared our grey area,
university club-like organisation an "illegal group". Zero Wikipedians have
been arrested, threatened, or in any way obstructed by the Chinese
government, and the Foundation has banned seven people and removed the
administrative powers of 12 others with a single move.
These people have done the dirtiest and toughest work in China, a country
where Wikipedia has been blocked until now, to grow the community to its
current size. Now, they have to be slapped backwards and bitten back by the
Foundation.
The Foundation has clearly learnt its lesson from when Fram, the
administrator of the English Wikipedia, was banned in 2019. At that time,
Fram's administrator was pulled from his post and was also banned from the
English Wikipedia. This caused an uproar in the English Wikipedia community
at the time. The Foundation never dreamed that the community would react so
strongly to the banning of Fram. The foundation may have had an external PR
team, but they didn't realise that it was the community that needed PR the
most. It took the Foundation over a month to put out the fires in the
community. Even though the vast majority of the English wiki community
objected to the Foundation's forced involvement in the community, the
Foundation did not budge: the Fram, who had his administrator privileges
removed for no good reason, was not reinstated after weeks of protest and
opposition from the community.
We know that there are many people in the community who care about us, who
want Wikipedia to be unblocked in China, who want the Wikimedia movement to
grow in China, who recognise the efforts and even sacrifices that WMC has
made for the development of Wikimedia in China, or at the very least, who
think that the Foundation should not have banned so many administrators
overnight and without warning. You may also be under the illusion that the
Foundation has the possibility to admit its mistake or to retract their
decision. The truth, dear friends, may have disappointed you. Like you, we
hope that today is just a nightmare. However, I am here to give you a
precautionary note: lose your illusions and prepare to fight.
Having seen what happened with Fram, this time the Foundation accompanied
the lockout and de-prioritisation with a "statement" in an attempt to
obfuscate and justify its unjustified actions before the community could
react. This "statement" by Maggie Dennis, the Foundation's community
development officer, also officially sounds the death knell for the
Wikimedia movement in mainland China under the Foundation's leadership -
I'm not saying here that the Wikimedia movement is dead in China, I'm
saying that the Foundation I am saying that the Wikimedia movement under
the leadership of the Foundation is dead..
The Wikimedia movement is much more than the Foundation: it is about
opening up one's copyright, respecting the copyright of others, being
willing to share, treating everyone with courtesy, and so on. This is the
reason why many mainland Wikipedians have abandoned Baidu and switched to
the wiki. Wouldn't you like to have an entry for every protected cultural
heritage unit in mainland China? Wouldn't you want China's astronautical
centres to disclose the copyright of their images like NASA does in the US?
Don't you want to use the keyboard in your own hands to document your own
hometown and your own profession? This is the purpose and the original
intention of writing the wiki, this is what the Wikimedia movement is all
about. The Foundation, on the other hand, should only be a handyman,
helping to fix the server. The Foundation has done very little to help the
development of the Wikimedia community in mainland China in any way. Our
gatherings, our "editathon" and our "Wikimedia loves China" events are all
our own efforts, and we don't take any money from them. We don't owe
anything to the organisation that rides over the heads of the volunteers,
and we don't need to have anything to do with them as we continue to fight.
Rather, we can certainly thrive without the shackles of the Foundation. We
continue to develop in the true spirit of the Wikimedia movement; and the
Wikimedia Foundation is not necessary for the development of the Wikimedia
movement.
Mainland China, arguably the most unique place to develop Wikimedia, also
faces the most unique pressures. Our first priority is to ensure that
mainland Wikipedians have proper access and editing. With the help and
support of the WMC, we have helped to open up access to QQ mailboxes to
receive emails from the wiki system, we have provided free wall servers and
mirror sites, pushed for a relaxation of the threshold for applying for IP
Blocking Exemptions (IPBE), and created tutorials on walling and applying
for IP Blocking Exemptions. "tutorials. There have been countless other
gatherings and "editathon" events.
We have done a lot of down-to-earth work for the mainland community.
However, the Foundation has never shown any compassion or support for the
mainland Chinese community, and when the Chinese Wikipedia was blocked in
2015, before the WMC was established, the Foundation issued a "statement"
in 2019 when all language Wikipedias were blocked. The "statement"
"condemned" the Chinese government, and so on and so forth. But has the
Foundation done anything practical other than issue a "statement" with its
mouth? Nothing. We bought the wall software ourselves, the mirror site is
our own server, and the "IP blocking exemption" is only added in layers,
and you are going to do some "IP masking" to make it more difficult for
administrators to distinguish proxy IP addresses. Also, if the development
of Wikipedia in mainland China is as dangerous as you say in your
"statement", then isn't the statement issued by your foundation
"condemning" the Chinese government pushing us mainland Wikipedians into
the fire? We are doing the most "dangerous" work in China, and you want to
destroy our community and our user groups in turn.
Some of you may be thinking, "Since WMC has been branded as an "illegal
organisation" by the Foundation overnight, I can just create another one!
You are so naive. The Foundation has been ambivalent about developing
mainland China (or even giving any help to mainland users). But in Maggie's
"statement", the Foundation's attitude is clear - they are abandoning
mainland China. In the "statement", Maggie says
Speaking of removing administrator privileges, we hope to be able to
contact Chinese speakers overseas in the near future ...... to ensure that
people do feel safe when working on the Chinese Wikipedia.
See? That's the only thing in Maggie's "statement" that is even remotely
relevant to the vision of the mainland community, apart from the polite
words. The Foundation wants to abandon China, that's all. The Foundation
may have grand ambitions of its own, "to be the infrastructure of knowledge
for all mankind", but for China, which has a fifth of the world's
population and a quarter of the world's internet users (you could say China
is a "local area network", but at least it has the infrastructure to access
the internet), they just gave up. Leaving aside the consequences of letting
overseas Chinese whose Chinese language skills have deteriorated
dramatically and whose words don't make sense write Chinese Wikipedias that
create nothing but piles of G13 entries, isn't the abandonment of mainland
China worth talking about? I don't know whether Maggie is saying that it is
because the Chinese government has blocked Wikipedia that it is "unsafe" to
contribute to wikis on the mainland, or that it is because of the existence
of our "triad" organisation, the WMC, that it is "unsafe" to contribute to
wikis on the mainland. In the former case, I hope that the Foundation will
immediately withdraw its statement "condemning" the Chinese government; in
the latter case, I hope that Wikipedians who have attended our WMC
gatherings will come forward and tell us whether it is safe to attend WMC
gatherings or not, and whether anyone has a hard time when someone says at
a gathering "I don't want to join the WMC, I want to stay independent".
The Foundation has abandoned mainland China. They don't care if our
community lives or dies. I don't know what the Foundation's Vision 2030
plan is, and I don't know where their steering committee is going to steer
the ship, but it certainly seems to be "as far away from China as
possible". Despite the fact that China's NGO Law has clear procedures for
setting up branches, and despite the fact that there are still private
non-institutions and other types of organisations in China, the Foundation
simply gave up without even trying. If the world was shocked when Google
withdrew from China in 2009, and a commercial company gave the Chinese
government the middle finger, in contrast, the Wikimedia Foundation
announced its withdrawal from China in 2021, the core of which was
sandwiched in the middle of a "statement" that did not even dare to
acknowledge it explicitly.
I hope that Maggie will come out and rebut my misinterpretation of her
"statement". Please come out and tell us how to develop the wiki in
mainland China in the future, and tell us whether the foundation is giving
up on mainland China because the wiki is blocked. This way, after the fall
of our WMC, the next group of mainland Wikipedians can take two steps less.
There is much to say in Maggie's 'statement'. Due to space and time
constraints, I will continue in the next few open letters. There are,
however, two other points that I must make in my first editorial since the
event to set the record straight. One is that Maggie's "statement"
desperately tries to belittle the status of my group, repeatedly using the
term "unrecognized user group" and even "unrecognized group" throughout the
statement. unrecognized group", emphasizing that our group is not
recognized by the Foundation's Affiliation Committee (AffCom). This use of
Maggie's "statement" is extremely confusing and gives the impression that
our WMC is informal.
I should mention here that our WMC is far more active than many, if not
more than half, of the user groups recognised by the Foundation. This year
alone, we have had four or five online 'editathons' and four or five public
gatherings across China. We are not recognised because we have not formally
applied for your recognition. According to the Foundation's rules, a user
group can be recognised if it has at least three members and has been
active for a year. We have 300 people in the WMC and have been active for
over four years, so we have been recognised by AffCom hundreds of times. We
did not apply for AffCom recognition because China's NGO Management Law
restricts us from being recognised as a branch of a foundation and
therefore unable to carry out activities in China. In other words, we are
deliberately not recognised by your AffCom. In contrast, when we discussed
with AffCom between 2017 and 2018 whether there was a way to skip the "you
have to be a recognised user group before you can be upgraded to
affiliate", AffCom's discussions with us were ineffective, did not respond
to our emails for weeks, and were full of bureaucracy --We reckon that this
was partly because there was still the Wikimedia User Group of China
(WUGC), a dead group that had been occupying the seat of a recognised user
group in China but was never active. They didn't bother to look into it, so
they just pretended they couldn't see the emails and delayed it again and
again. In the end, we gave up communicating with AffCom and started to
develop community activities such as parties instead of asking for AffCom's
recognition.
This is one of the reasons why I think that the Foundation, encouraged by
some people, has finally gone after us at WMC - we are finally clear of the
Foundation, and we can finally give up all our illusions about the
Foundation and focus on the development of the mainland wiki. In order to
set up a branch of the Wikimedia Foundation in mainland China in accordance
with the NGO Management Law, we would need, let's say, the Foundation's
business license on the US side and other documents. With AffCom's
efficiency of only answering one email in a few weeks, how long would we
have to wait? According to the original plan, we were caught in the middle
of the Chinese government and the Wikimedia Foundation, and we had to serve
both sides, meeting all the rules and regulations of the Foundation, such
as "the user group must be established for one year", "the user group must
be recognised before it can apply for a chapter", and so on, as well as the
business licence required by the Chinese government. Now that we are no
longer connected to the Foundation, we can do whatever we want.
This is one of the reasons why we have such a problem with the Foundation
and AffCom, because so far it has been the Foundation that has stuck us,
been inefficient, and refused to give us the materials we need, while the
Chinese government has never come out to stop or harass us. We would like
to blame the Chinese government for the NGO Law, but the problem is that
the foundations don't even give us the materials, so we don't even have a
chance to complain to the Chinese government. If our plan to set up a
branch organisation had been rejected by the Chinese government, then we
would have accepted that we had at least tried, and we would not have been
so hostile to the Foundation.
Another thing in Maggie's 'statement' that we must point out right now is
that it refers to what we at WMC are doing on the Chinese wiki as
'community capture' (community capture). Maggie uses the Croatian Wikipedia
as an example. The Croatian Wikipedia, as is typical, is full of entries by
neo-Nazis and the like because of community issues. I'm sure you know that
the Japanese Wikipedia entry for "Nanking Massacre" is called "Nanking
Incident (1937)" instead of its Japanese equivalent "Nanking Massacre".
What? And the Japanese wiki entry for "Nanking Incident (1937)" doesn't
even have a picture of Chinese people dying. The Croatian language is even
worse than that.
But the problem is that I still don't understand how we "seized the
community". "Taking over the community" is one of the key accusations
against my WMC in Maggie's "statement". As I understand it, they think we
are hijacking the community, that we are in charge of the whole community,
and that we are "canvassing" (the term "canvassing" appears repeatedly in
Maggie's "statement" and in the "warning emails" of those who had been
"warned" by the Foundation for no good reason).
First of all, thanks to the Foundation for the lift. Before the Chinese
wiki was blocked from mainland China in 2015, the last valid statistics
showed that the Chinese wiki was split between mainland Chinese editors,
Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, each accounting for about a third of the
editors and visitors. We at WMC are called the Mainland Chinese Wikipedians
User Group, and it took more than a third of the people scraped from the
sky to allow us to dominate the community? I don't even know how WMC does
it. I was in a hurry to write this open letter, so I didn't have time to
delve into it, but I was under the impression that the number of "neo-Nazi"
editors in Croatian must be more than half, right?
The Foundation (and the people behind it) are still making the same old
accusations against the WMC, but it is clear that because the WMC has
always considered those unfounded accusations to be worthless, they assume
that the WMC has no grounds to refute them. The accusations of "canvassing"
against the WMC in Maggie's "statement" are pure nonsense. Leaving aside
the fact that "canvassing" has long been in line with Chinese Wikipedia's
guidelines, and was only officially banned earlier this year - how does
your foundation come to control something that is not even banned by local
guidelines? Furthermore, what evidence do you have that canvassing actually
happened? Because of irregular voting results? And should I show your
foundation a few examples of other user groups and chapters that we at WMC
think are canvassing? (Save that for the next open letter.) Maggie's
"statement" and some of WMC's editors perpetuate this accusation of WMC
canvassing as if they were extreme Republican supporters who voted for
Donald Trump in last year's US presidential election. At the time, they
were screaming "Stop stealing [votes]!" at polling stations because they
thought the vote was abnormal, but in fact it was Biden who won those
states. But the problem is that the mob that broke into the US Congress on
6 January succeeded and Trump was re-elected.
These people who scream about democracy are the most anti-democratic of
all. In their eyes, it is only democratic when the vote goes their way, and
when they vote for a candidate they don't like, they are told to "stop
stealing".
The administrators who were removed and banned across the board were all
elected through a formal, democratic process. Some of them had been
administrators for several years, only for the Foundation to suddenly come
out and remove their administrator privileges. Is the Foundation saying
that these elections several years ago were unjust? Why is the Foundation
dragging its feet on removing the rights until now? Has the Foundation seen
evidence of the use of stooges and real-life puppets? Why did the
Foundation, for some of them, only de-prioritise and not ban the whole
area? Is it because they are "close, but not too close" to the WMC? And in
that case, what is the practical purpose of removing their access? Is it to
force them to have a "fair" election again?
The Foundation and the people who started this fiasco can fabricate all the
evidence they want that we are canvassing, harassing, etc. They can say
that they only target WMC as an organisation and users who are, by their
supposed standards, closely associated with it. But no matter what they say
on the surface, the real target behind them is the mainland wiki community
as a whole, not us, the WMC, and anyone who doesn't listen to them will be
beaten up. I know that there are many people in the community who are not
happy with the WMC, but what I am about to say is not about whether you
support the Chinese government or not, or how you feel about the WMC. If
you are a person of conscience, you will not agree with what the Foundation
is doing.
One, the Wikimedia Foundation has an annual budget of $100 million. In at
least the past five years, the Foundation has never spent a single penny on
mainland China. Nor has the Foundation ever provided mainland editors with
wall-wall servers, wall-wall tutorials, mirror sites, and any other tools
that could be implemented outside of China that would facilitate their
editing (you may have heard that Google, Microsoft, and other companies
have no walls in their Chinese branches), despite the fact that the NGO
Management Law states that the Foundation cannot fund activities inside
China; the Foundation has not taken the initiative to adapt its servers so
that they can bypass the GFW blockade ; nor has the Foundation made any
fixes to the MediaWiki software to improve its operational processes so
that editors can contribute via a proxy server. Although the Foundation has
a number of lawyers, they are probably too busy raising money or dealing
with US politicians. This is because, as far as we know, the Foundation has
never had a lawyer study the NGO Management Law to see if there is a viable
path in the Chinese policy environment. Let me repeat: the Foundation's
annual budget is $100 million. Zero dollars of that is spent on the Chinese
community.
Secondly, knowing that Wikipedia is being walled and that there may be
difficulties with contributions from mainland Chinese editors for "white
left" reasons, there is a user group called WMC that is active but not yet
recognized by AffCom, and it is unlikely that the Foundation and AffCom are
unaware of WMC's existence. The contact details of the WMC have also been
publicly available on the site page. However, the Foundation is outwardly
"concerned" about mainland users (just read Maggie's "statement" and the
statements made by Foundation staff in public, but without being held
accountable for what they say), but never in any way concern for mainland
users. We at WMC have never received an email from the Foundation or AffCom
asking us if we need any help with our situation. One email came from them
asking "I heard that the wiki is being walled in China, are you having any
trouble? Do you need any help?" I'll count them as having made an effort.
Thirdly, users who use proxies to edit the wiki may encounter a bug known
in the community as "auto logout", which we suspect may be related to the
handling of proxy IPs in cross-project bans and cross-site cookies. This
bug is likely to be encountered by one in five newcomers to the mainland.
Now the bug is at a level where no one cares about it at all, and it does
not even have the triage needed to fix it as a first step.
Fourth, roughly twelve hours have passed since the first foundations acted
and this open letter is being written. During these twelve hours, from my
own investigation and from reports and communications from other users, it
appears that all known users who have been locked out, debarred, or
"warned" for unfounded reasons were not aware of this news in advance, nor
have they been contacted by the Foundation. I don't care how you do it. I
don't care how you conduct your so-called "investigation", you don't have
any solid evidence, you don't even give people a chance to explain or
debate, you just cover everything up as much as you can. The Foundation
does not consider in any way whether the people who reported and submitted
the so-called evidence behind the scenes have any conflict of interest with
the WMC, or whether their political ideology is so "Hong Kong-independent",
"Taiwan-independent" and "anti-communist" that they need to suppress the
WMC, which is politically neutral in terms of policy, but whose editorial
team is actually biased towards supporting Beijing. I need to point out:
these people, whether they are de-prioritised or region-wide locked, are
better at writing entries and countering sabotage than at wheedling and
sniping.
Fifth, according to my rough statistics, according to the ranking of
admins' activity on XTools, the top thirty active non-robot admins (meaning
those who handle site affairs and other site contributions) on the Chinese
wiki ranking, ten, or one-third, have been de-privileged or domain-wide
locked. One-third! And four of the top ten most active administrators have
been de-prioritised. This includes the most active admin from Hong Kong,
"Buggy Fly". What are you going to do about the site administration mess?
The Chinese Wikipedia is not a small project, and the amount of work it has
to do and the amount of work it has to do is considerable. What is your
foundation going to do about it? Have you researched it before you go
ahead? Have you considered the consequences?
At the end of the day, I'm sure there are some newbies, especially those
who have just made dozens or hundreds of edits, who want to ask: "If the
Foundation is so uncomfortable with the mainland community, why are we
still writing a wiki?"
What I want to say to you is: you are the future of the mainland community.
We write about the wiki because we agree with the idea of sharing and
opening up the wiki, and we write for your home town, your profession and
what you love, not for the WMC or the Foundation. Tell everyone with your
practical actions that the mainland community is not made of clay, and the
more they suppress, the more we resist. It is time for you to stand up for
yourself. Fight, fail, fight again, fail again, fight again ...... until
victory!
In closing, I, on behalf of the Wikipedians User Group and the Wikimedia
community in mainland China, would like to shout out to the Wikimedia
Foundation: our door is always open, and it is your foundation that is not
willing to talk to us. If there are problems, we can discuss them; if there
are misunderstandings, we can clear them up. If you want to discuss issues
on an equal footing, we are ready to do so. We all have a weighing scale in
our hearts. You are doing it, the community is watching.
On Tue, Sep 14, 2021 at 7:05 AM William Chan <william@wchan.hk> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Of course I am not from WMCUG, but they issued a statement regarding the
> series of serious office actions:
>
> https://qiuwen.wmcug.org.cn/archives/390/on-wmf-office-action-zh-1/
>
> Of course there is an archive.is link so as not to , you know, they may
> just take down:
> https://archive.is/EE6AD
>
> Interesting to see if they really translated this to English.
>
> Regards,
> William
> _______________________________________________
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gobbledygook by comparison!)
Qiuwen - Wikimedians of Mainland China
Drop the illusion and prepare for the fight - a comment on the Foundation's
region-wide lockdown of Chinese Wikimedians and Maggie Dennis's "statement"
Posted by Qiuwen on September 14, 2021 in Drop the illusions, prepare for
the struggle - A comment on the Foundation's region-wide targeting of
Chinese Wikimedians and Maggie Dennis' "statement"
[.This commentary, by Lu Zu, takes the form of an open letter and will be
translated into English shortly.]
September 13, 2021 will be remembered by all Chinese Wikipedians.
The Wikimedia Foundation has locked out all Chinese Wikipedians, including
members and liaison members of my group, for no apparent reason, and has
removed the administrator and administrative privileges of many more
Wikipedians. This decision was made by the Foundation at the instigation of
some people in the Chinese wiki community, without any consideration,
without listening to the views of the community, and without any basis for
believing the slander of a small group of people.
It is no accident that the Foundation has decided to take action at this
point in time. The Foundation has torn off its mask of hypocrisy towards
us, and indeed towards the entire mainland Chinese community, and has
revealed its green fangs. Following the Foundation's decision, the
perpetrators of this farce are rejoicing that their imagined greatest
rival, our own Wikipedians of Mainland China (WMC), has been knocked off -
just as they were four years ago when they were region-wide locked out at
Watchtower Ai Meng.
The Chinese government and the Communist Party of China have been
criticized for blocking foreign websites and suppressing Wikipedia's
development in China. But the Foundation has done what even the Chinese
government has failed to do - the Chinese government has not stopped us
from organising meetings or events, and has not declared our grey area,
university club-like organisation an "illegal group". Zero Wikipedians have
been arrested, threatened, or in any way obstructed by the Chinese
government, and the Foundation has banned seven people and removed the
administrative powers of 12 others with a single move.
These people have done the dirtiest and toughest work in China, a country
where Wikipedia has been blocked until now, to grow the community to its
current size. Now, they have to be slapped backwards and bitten back by the
Foundation.
The Foundation has clearly learnt its lesson from when Fram, the
administrator of the English Wikipedia, was banned in 2019. At that time,
Fram's administrator was pulled from his post and was also banned from the
English Wikipedia. This caused an uproar in the English Wikipedia community
at the time. The Foundation never dreamed that the community would react so
strongly to the banning of Fram. The foundation may have had an external PR
team, but they didn't realise that it was the community that needed PR the
most. It took the Foundation over a month to put out the fires in the
community. Even though the vast majority of the English wiki community
objected to the Foundation's forced involvement in the community, the
Foundation did not budge: the Fram, who had his administrator privileges
removed for no good reason, was not reinstated after weeks of protest and
opposition from the community.
We know that there are many people in the community who care about us, who
want Wikipedia to be unblocked in China, who want the Wikimedia movement to
grow in China, who recognise the efforts and even sacrifices that WMC has
made for the development of Wikimedia in China, or at the very least, who
think that the Foundation should not have banned so many administrators
overnight and without warning. You may also be under the illusion that the
Foundation has the possibility to admit its mistake or to retract their
decision. The truth, dear friends, may have disappointed you. Like you, we
hope that today is just a nightmare. However, I am here to give you a
precautionary note: lose your illusions and prepare to fight.
Having seen what happened with Fram, this time the Foundation accompanied
the lockout and de-prioritisation with a "statement" in an attempt to
obfuscate and justify its unjustified actions before the community could
react. This "statement" by Maggie Dennis, the Foundation's community
development officer, also officially sounds the death knell for the
Wikimedia movement in mainland China under the Foundation's leadership -
I'm not saying here that the Wikimedia movement is dead in China, I'm
saying that the Foundation I am saying that the Wikimedia movement under
the leadership of the Foundation is dead..
The Wikimedia movement is much more than the Foundation: it is about
opening up one's copyright, respecting the copyright of others, being
willing to share, treating everyone with courtesy, and so on. This is the
reason why many mainland Wikipedians have abandoned Baidu and switched to
the wiki. Wouldn't you like to have an entry for every protected cultural
heritage unit in mainland China? Wouldn't you want China's astronautical
centres to disclose the copyright of their images like NASA does in the US?
Don't you want to use the keyboard in your own hands to document your own
hometown and your own profession? This is the purpose and the original
intention of writing the wiki, this is what the Wikimedia movement is all
about. The Foundation, on the other hand, should only be a handyman,
helping to fix the server. The Foundation has done very little to help the
development of the Wikimedia community in mainland China in any way. Our
gatherings, our "editathon" and our "Wikimedia loves China" events are all
our own efforts, and we don't take any money from them. We don't owe
anything to the organisation that rides over the heads of the volunteers,
and we don't need to have anything to do with them as we continue to fight.
Rather, we can certainly thrive without the shackles of the Foundation. We
continue to develop in the true spirit of the Wikimedia movement; and the
Wikimedia Foundation is not necessary for the development of the Wikimedia
movement.
Mainland China, arguably the most unique place to develop Wikimedia, also
faces the most unique pressures. Our first priority is to ensure that
mainland Wikipedians have proper access and editing. With the help and
support of the WMC, we have helped to open up access to QQ mailboxes to
receive emails from the wiki system, we have provided free wall servers and
mirror sites, pushed for a relaxation of the threshold for applying for IP
Blocking Exemptions (IPBE), and created tutorials on walling and applying
for IP Blocking Exemptions. "tutorials. There have been countless other
gatherings and "editathon" events.
We have done a lot of down-to-earth work for the mainland community.
However, the Foundation has never shown any compassion or support for the
mainland Chinese community, and when the Chinese Wikipedia was blocked in
2015, before the WMC was established, the Foundation issued a "statement"
in 2019 when all language Wikipedias were blocked. The "statement"
"condemned" the Chinese government, and so on and so forth. But has the
Foundation done anything practical other than issue a "statement" with its
mouth? Nothing. We bought the wall software ourselves, the mirror site is
our own server, and the "IP blocking exemption" is only added in layers,
and you are going to do some "IP masking" to make it more difficult for
administrators to distinguish proxy IP addresses. Also, if the development
of Wikipedia in mainland China is as dangerous as you say in your
"statement", then isn't the statement issued by your foundation
"condemning" the Chinese government pushing us mainland Wikipedians into
the fire? We are doing the most "dangerous" work in China, and you want to
destroy our community and our user groups in turn.
Some of you may be thinking, "Since WMC has been branded as an "illegal
organisation" by the Foundation overnight, I can just create another one!
You are so naive. The Foundation has been ambivalent about developing
mainland China (or even giving any help to mainland users). But in Maggie's
"statement", the Foundation's attitude is clear - they are abandoning
mainland China. In the "statement", Maggie says
Speaking of removing administrator privileges, we hope to be able to
contact Chinese speakers overseas in the near future ...... to ensure that
people do feel safe when working on the Chinese Wikipedia.
See? That's the only thing in Maggie's "statement" that is even remotely
relevant to the vision of the mainland community, apart from the polite
words. The Foundation wants to abandon China, that's all. The Foundation
may have grand ambitions of its own, "to be the infrastructure of knowledge
for all mankind", but for China, which has a fifth of the world's
population and a quarter of the world's internet users (you could say China
is a "local area network", but at least it has the infrastructure to access
the internet), they just gave up. Leaving aside the consequences of letting
overseas Chinese whose Chinese language skills have deteriorated
dramatically and whose words don't make sense write Chinese Wikipedias that
create nothing but piles of G13 entries, isn't the abandonment of mainland
China worth talking about? I don't know whether Maggie is saying that it is
because the Chinese government has blocked Wikipedia that it is "unsafe" to
contribute to wikis on the mainland, or that it is because of the existence
of our "triad" organisation, the WMC, that it is "unsafe" to contribute to
wikis on the mainland. In the former case, I hope that the Foundation will
immediately withdraw its statement "condemning" the Chinese government; in
the latter case, I hope that Wikipedians who have attended our WMC
gatherings will come forward and tell us whether it is safe to attend WMC
gatherings or not, and whether anyone has a hard time when someone says at
a gathering "I don't want to join the WMC, I want to stay independent".
The Foundation has abandoned mainland China. They don't care if our
community lives or dies. I don't know what the Foundation's Vision 2030
plan is, and I don't know where their steering committee is going to steer
the ship, but it certainly seems to be "as far away from China as
possible". Despite the fact that China's NGO Law has clear procedures for
setting up branches, and despite the fact that there are still private
non-institutions and other types of organisations in China, the Foundation
simply gave up without even trying. If the world was shocked when Google
withdrew from China in 2009, and a commercial company gave the Chinese
government the middle finger, in contrast, the Wikimedia Foundation
announced its withdrawal from China in 2021, the core of which was
sandwiched in the middle of a "statement" that did not even dare to
acknowledge it explicitly.
I hope that Maggie will come out and rebut my misinterpretation of her
"statement". Please come out and tell us how to develop the wiki in
mainland China in the future, and tell us whether the foundation is giving
up on mainland China because the wiki is blocked. This way, after the fall
of our WMC, the next group of mainland Wikipedians can take two steps less.
There is much to say in Maggie's 'statement'. Due to space and time
constraints, I will continue in the next few open letters. There are,
however, two other points that I must make in my first editorial since the
event to set the record straight. One is that Maggie's "statement"
desperately tries to belittle the status of my group, repeatedly using the
term "unrecognized user group" and even "unrecognized group" throughout the
statement. unrecognized group", emphasizing that our group is not
recognized by the Foundation's Affiliation Committee (AffCom). This use of
Maggie's "statement" is extremely confusing and gives the impression that
our WMC is informal.
I should mention here that our WMC is far more active than many, if not
more than half, of the user groups recognised by the Foundation. This year
alone, we have had four or five online 'editathons' and four or five public
gatherings across China. We are not recognised because we have not formally
applied for your recognition. According to the Foundation's rules, a user
group can be recognised if it has at least three members and has been
active for a year. We have 300 people in the WMC and have been active for
over four years, so we have been recognised by AffCom hundreds of times. We
did not apply for AffCom recognition because China's NGO Management Law
restricts us from being recognised as a branch of a foundation and
therefore unable to carry out activities in China. In other words, we are
deliberately not recognised by your AffCom. In contrast, when we discussed
with AffCom between 2017 and 2018 whether there was a way to skip the "you
have to be a recognised user group before you can be upgraded to
affiliate", AffCom's discussions with us were ineffective, did not respond
to our emails for weeks, and were full of bureaucracy --We reckon that this
was partly because there was still the Wikimedia User Group of China
(WUGC), a dead group that had been occupying the seat of a recognised user
group in China but was never active. They didn't bother to look into it, so
they just pretended they couldn't see the emails and delayed it again and
again. In the end, we gave up communicating with AffCom and started to
develop community activities such as parties instead of asking for AffCom's
recognition.
This is one of the reasons why I think that the Foundation, encouraged by
some people, has finally gone after us at WMC - we are finally clear of the
Foundation, and we can finally give up all our illusions about the
Foundation and focus on the development of the mainland wiki. In order to
set up a branch of the Wikimedia Foundation in mainland China in accordance
with the NGO Management Law, we would need, let's say, the Foundation's
business license on the US side and other documents. With AffCom's
efficiency of only answering one email in a few weeks, how long would we
have to wait? According to the original plan, we were caught in the middle
of the Chinese government and the Wikimedia Foundation, and we had to serve
both sides, meeting all the rules and regulations of the Foundation, such
as "the user group must be established for one year", "the user group must
be recognised before it can apply for a chapter", and so on, as well as the
business licence required by the Chinese government. Now that we are no
longer connected to the Foundation, we can do whatever we want.
This is one of the reasons why we have such a problem with the Foundation
and AffCom, because so far it has been the Foundation that has stuck us,
been inefficient, and refused to give us the materials we need, while the
Chinese government has never come out to stop or harass us. We would like
to blame the Chinese government for the NGO Law, but the problem is that
the foundations don't even give us the materials, so we don't even have a
chance to complain to the Chinese government. If our plan to set up a
branch organisation had been rejected by the Chinese government, then we
would have accepted that we had at least tried, and we would not have been
so hostile to the Foundation.
Another thing in Maggie's 'statement' that we must point out right now is
that it refers to what we at WMC are doing on the Chinese wiki as
'community capture' (community capture). Maggie uses the Croatian Wikipedia
as an example. The Croatian Wikipedia, as is typical, is full of entries by
neo-Nazis and the like because of community issues. I'm sure you know that
the Japanese Wikipedia entry for "Nanking Massacre" is called "Nanking
Incident (1937)" instead of its Japanese equivalent "Nanking Massacre".
What? And the Japanese wiki entry for "Nanking Incident (1937)" doesn't
even have a picture of Chinese people dying. The Croatian language is even
worse than that.
But the problem is that I still don't understand how we "seized the
community". "Taking over the community" is one of the key accusations
against my WMC in Maggie's "statement". As I understand it, they think we
are hijacking the community, that we are in charge of the whole community,
and that we are "canvassing" (the term "canvassing" appears repeatedly in
Maggie's "statement" and in the "warning emails" of those who had been
"warned" by the Foundation for no good reason).
First of all, thanks to the Foundation for the lift. Before the Chinese
wiki was blocked from mainland China in 2015, the last valid statistics
showed that the Chinese wiki was split between mainland Chinese editors,
Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, each accounting for about a third of the
editors and visitors. We at WMC are called the Mainland Chinese Wikipedians
User Group, and it took more than a third of the people scraped from the
sky to allow us to dominate the community? I don't even know how WMC does
it. I was in a hurry to write this open letter, so I didn't have time to
delve into it, but I was under the impression that the number of "neo-Nazi"
editors in Croatian must be more than half, right?
The Foundation (and the people behind it) are still making the same old
accusations against the WMC, but it is clear that because the WMC has
always considered those unfounded accusations to be worthless, they assume
that the WMC has no grounds to refute them. The accusations of "canvassing"
against the WMC in Maggie's "statement" are pure nonsense. Leaving aside
the fact that "canvassing" has long been in line with Chinese Wikipedia's
guidelines, and was only officially banned earlier this year - how does
your foundation come to control something that is not even banned by local
guidelines? Furthermore, what evidence do you have that canvassing actually
happened? Because of irregular voting results? And should I show your
foundation a few examples of other user groups and chapters that we at WMC
think are canvassing? (Save that for the next open letter.) Maggie's
"statement" and some of WMC's editors perpetuate this accusation of WMC
canvassing as if they were extreme Republican supporters who voted for
Donald Trump in last year's US presidential election. At the time, they
were screaming "Stop stealing [votes]!" at polling stations because they
thought the vote was abnormal, but in fact it was Biden who won those
states. But the problem is that the mob that broke into the US Congress on
6 January succeeded and Trump was re-elected.
These people who scream about democracy are the most anti-democratic of
all. In their eyes, it is only democratic when the vote goes their way, and
when they vote for a candidate they don't like, they are told to "stop
stealing".
The administrators who were removed and banned across the board were all
elected through a formal, democratic process. Some of them had been
administrators for several years, only for the Foundation to suddenly come
out and remove their administrator privileges. Is the Foundation saying
that these elections several years ago were unjust? Why is the Foundation
dragging its feet on removing the rights until now? Has the Foundation seen
evidence of the use of stooges and real-life puppets? Why did the
Foundation, for some of them, only de-prioritise and not ban the whole
area? Is it because they are "close, but not too close" to the WMC? And in
that case, what is the practical purpose of removing their access? Is it to
force them to have a "fair" election again?
The Foundation and the people who started this fiasco can fabricate all the
evidence they want that we are canvassing, harassing, etc. They can say
that they only target WMC as an organisation and users who are, by their
supposed standards, closely associated with it. But no matter what they say
on the surface, the real target behind them is the mainland wiki community
as a whole, not us, the WMC, and anyone who doesn't listen to them will be
beaten up. I know that there are many people in the community who are not
happy with the WMC, but what I am about to say is not about whether you
support the Chinese government or not, or how you feel about the WMC. If
you are a person of conscience, you will not agree with what the Foundation
is doing.
One, the Wikimedia Foundation has an annual budget of $100 million. In at
least the past five years, the Foundation has never spent a single penny on
mainland China. Nor has the Foundation ever provided mainland editors with
wall-wall servers, wall-wall tutorials, mirror sites, and any other tools
that could be implemented outside of China that would facilitate their
editing (you may have heard that Google, Microsoft, and other companies
have no walls in their Chinese branches), despite the fact that the NGO
Management Law states that the Foundation cannot fund activities inside
China; the Foundation has not taken the initiative to adapt its servers so
that they can bypass the GFW blockade ; nor has the Foundation made any
fixes to the MediaWiki software to improve its operational processes so
that editors can contribute via a proxy server. Although the Foundation has
a number of lawyers, they are probably too busy raising money or dealing
with US politicians. This is because, as far as we know, the Foundation has
never had a lawyer study the NGO Management Law to see if there is a viable
path in the Chinese policy environment. Let me repeat: the Foundation's
annual budget is $100 million. Zero dollars of that is spent on the Chinese
community.
Secondly, knowing that Wikipedia is being walled and that there may be
difficulties with contributions from mainland Chinese editors for "white
left" reasons, there is a user group called WMC that is active but not yet
recognized by AffCom, and it is unlikely that the Foundation and AffCom are
unaware of WMC's existence. The contact details of the WMC have also been
publicly available on the site page. However, the Foundation is outwardly
"concerned" about mainland users (just read Maggie's "statement" and the
statements made by Foundation staff in public, but without being held
accountable for what they say), but never in any way concern for mainland
users. We at WMC have never received an email from the Foundation or AffCom
asking us if we need any help with our situation. One email came from them
asking "I heard that the wiki is being walled in China, are you having any
trouble? Do you need any help?" I'll count them as having made an effort.
Thirdly, users who use proxies to edit the wiki may encounter a bug known
in the community as "auto logout", which we suspect may be related to the
handling of proxy IPs in cross-project bans and cross-site cookies. This
bug is likely to be encountered by one in five newcomers to the mainland.
Now the bug is at a level where no one cares about it at all, and it does
not even have the triage needed to fix it as a first step.
Fourth, roughly twelve hours have passed since the first foundations acted
and this open letter is being written. During these twelve hours, from my
own investigation and from reports and communications from other users, it
appears that all known users who have been locked out, debarred, or
"warned" for unfounded reasons were not aware of this news in advance, nor
have they been contacted by the Foundation. I don't care how you do it. I
don't care how you conduct your so-called "investigation", you don't have
any solid evidence, you don't even give people a chance to explain or
debate, you just cover everything up as much as you can. The Foundation
does not consider in any way whether the people who reported and submitted
the so-called evidence behind the scenes have any conflict of interest with
the WMC, or whether their political ideology is so "Hong Kong-independent",
"Taiwan-independent" and "anti-communist" that they need to suppress the
WMC, which is politically neutral in terms of policy, but whose editorial
team is actually biased towards supporting Beijing. I need to point out:
these people, whether they are de-prioritised or region-wide locked, are
better at writing entries and countering sabotage than at wheedling and
sniping.
Fifth, according to my rough statistics, according to the ranking of
admins' activity on XTools, the top thirty active non-robot admins (meaning
those who handle site affairs and other site contributions) on the Chinese
wiki ranking, ten, or one-third, have been de-privileged or domain-wide
locked. One-third! And four of the top ten most active administrators have
been de-prioritised. This includes the most active admin from Hong Kong,
"Buggy Fly". What are you going to do about the site administration mess?
The Chinese Wikipedia is not a small project, and the amount of work it has
to do and the amount of work it has to do is considerable. What is your
foundation going to do about it? Have you researched it before you go
ahead? Have you considered the consequences?
At the end of the day, I'm sure there are some newbies, especially those
who have just made dozens or hundreds of edits, who want to ask: "If the
Foundation is so uncomfortable with the mainland community, why are we
still writing a wiki?"
What I want to say to you is: you are the future of the mainland community.
We write about the wiki because we agree with the idea of sharing and
opening up the wiki, and we write for your home town, your profession and
what you love, not for the WMC or the Foundation. Tell everyone with your
practical actions that the mainland community is not made of clay, and the
more they suppress, the more we resist. It is time for you to stand up for
yourself. Fight, fail, fight again, fail again, fight again ...... until
victory!
In closing, I, on behalf of the Wikipedians User Group and the Wikimedia
community in mainland China, would like to shout out to the Wikimedia
Foundation: our door is always open, and it is your foundation that is not
willing to talk to us. If there are problems, we can discuss them; if there
are misunderstandings, we can clear them up. If you want to discuss issues
on an equal footing, we are ready to do so. We all have a weighing scale in
our hearts. You are doing it, the community is watching.
On Tue, Sep 14, 2021 at 7:05 AM William Chan <william@wchan.hk> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Of course I am not from WMCUG, but they issued a statement regarding the
> series of serious office actions:
>
> https://qiuwen.wmcug.org.cn/archives/390/on-wmf-office-action-zh-1/
>
> Of course there is an archive.is link so as not to , you know, they may
> just take down:
> https://archive.is/EE6AD
>
> Interesting to see if they really translated this to English.
>
> Regards,
> William
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