More things I can see in a quick review:

• The Product and Technology departments have been combined into "Product and Technology"
• The Architecture team has been disbanded
• The Performance team has been disbanded
• The Technical Engagement team has been disbanded

Broadly more than 70 people have moved somehow on the org chart as a result of the 2023 reorg of Product and Technology and it seems that none of that is reflected in https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/.

There are people listed on that page who left the Foundation in October 2022. I assume this also means that there are a quite large number of people who are not represented on that page at all.

Poke. Any plans to work on this soon?

There are people listed on that page who left the Foundation in October 2022.

Sounds like it's a year out of date.

Whoever might be responsible for this in WMF, I do not think that they necessarily follow this task or use Phabricator...

I’m sure there are some editors willing to write an article in the register, or a similar site. Seems that that’s the only way that that side of the organization springs into action…..

Previously: T231483: There should be a complete and up-to-date public staff list

Hey everyone, sorry for the delay in responding—it took a bit for this task to make its way to our team. We are working on getting an updated staff listing and org structure as part of a larger project to overhaul the Foundation’s overall presence on Meta. The project, which is being led by the Movement Communications team (the team I’m on), is about building a better front door to the Foundation’s work. It’s based on a longstanding ask from community members for us to clean up our org structure as well as team and department pages (including staff listings) in a way that will better connect you all with the information, resources, and support you need from the Foundation. Take a look here to get a sense of what we’re working on.

Soon we’ll have templates and demo pages live that you can test out and give feedback on. The pages will have a much more straightforward navigation, which will make the org structure more clear, will contain the critical information and links about each team and department, and will feature staff and their contact information prominently. As part of the suite of pages we are also developing new resource pages to link out to grants, capacity building and other things people want, along with a much more straightforward contact page that will allow people to get in touch with the Foundation on any topic, in any language, and have their question triaged and responded to within a set amount of time. If you're familiar with it, it's via our answers@ workflow.

One thing I should mention is that, while the staff listing will be kept up to date by the Movement Communications team going forward, the listing will not include every single staff member. There are some roles that are not appropriate or safe to list publicly, and we have the legal obligation to protect identities in some cases. However, most roles will be included and of course leaders and community-facing roles will be there. That way, the Foundation can ensure that you all have access to the people you want to connect with while also upholding our legal responsibility as an employer. I'm subscribed to this task so let me know if you have any questions!

Thanks Chris for that info and for your team's work on this. The Meta-Wiki presence project sounds like a great project that should improve community relations. Couple quick questions:

• Is there still a plan to update https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/ (rather than just putting it all on-wiki, for example)?
• Approximate timeline for https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/ to be updated? Two months maybe?

Thanks a lot. Looking forward to your feedback.

@CKoerner_WMF. I fully understand @Aklapper's 'Whoever might be responsible for this in WMF, I do not think that they necessarily follow this task or use Phabricator' but this does now look like a positive step forward. A correct and up-to-date display may help to dispel many of the conspiracy theories surrounding the WMF's Staff & Contractors .

I do however wonder why it's necessary to reinvent the wheel while the principle of a corporate and political organigram has existed for 100s of years and is displayed on the wall in the lobby of most organisations.

Indeed, nobody wants such a chart to include every one of the staggering number of 700+ employees, contractors, and office cleaners, but what is needed is an accurate depiction of the main actors in community-facing roles among all the CEOs, CTOs, presidents, senior vice presidents, vice presidents, senior principle that, senior vice principle, officer, senior officer, chief this, manger of that, and the rest of the Game of Titles.

Through constant reshuffles and revolving doors, ties get lost and the valuable and painstakingly built up collaboration with WMF teams on important issues often gets abandoned.
Fingers crossed that something will come of this..

In T344479#9391878, @Novem_Linguae wrote:

Thanks Chris for that info and for your team's work on this. The Meta-Wiki presence project sounds like a great project that should improve community relations. Couple quick questions:

• Is there still a plan to update https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/ (rather than just putting it all on-wiki, for example)?
• Approximate timeline for https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/ to be updated? Two months maybe?

Thanks a lot. Looking forward to your feedback.

Yes, the plan is to update the Foundation site once we have more of our work in place on Meta (like actual departments moved over). The page on wikimediafoundation.org will still exist, but will not be a full list of every staff member (for the same reasons noted above).

As for a timeline? I'd say give us three months to make some notable progress. As you can imagine this involves a ton of internal coordination to get up and running :)

In T344479#9392373, @Kudpung wrote:

but what is needed is an accurate depiction of the main actors in community-facing roles

Exactly why we're doing this work. We're also making it so that even if we aren't clear for some reason on who does what, folks can hit the "Ask us a Question" button in the navigation and someone on our team will get you the right person. Our answers@ workflow is a feature that hasn't been as predominant or clear in the past.

Through constant reshuffles and revolving doors, ties get lost and the valuable and painstakingly built up collaboration with WMF teams on important issues often gets abandoned.

Yes! Our work has been in trying to remove the need to "be in the know" and have the privilege of knowing a specific individual. That's great for people who can go to Wikimania or speak English as a primary language or have been around the movement for a while, but for newcomers and other folks, it's really hard to find somebody and get in touch. So we're trying to make it more consistent and more clear. As you said, fingers crossed!

FYI, this issue of a stale staff/contrators page came up organically in this conversation around the Annual Plan:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2024-2025&diff=prev&oldid=26823520

Reiterating the issues I pointed out:

• The page does not reflect the fact that the VP of Product Design Margeigh Novotny left in September 2023
• There is currently a Wikimedia Foundation "Future Audiences" group (setup in May 2023?) but it does not show up on that chart.

I wonder why the page is even up any longer ? If you don't update it, just remove it (which would be bad, but at least more honest).

It's unfortunate because this was a concern when the decision was made to host on external Wordpress rather than using our own wikis. Maybe we could consider going back to an internally hosted fishbowl wiki where we can all help updating things.

I imagine T&C has an onboarding checklist and offboarding checklist that is done each time those events occur. Perhaps updating this page could be added to those checklists?

In T344479#9838881, @Novem_Linguae wrote:

I imagine T&C has an onboarding checklist and offboarding checklist that is done each time those events occur. Perhaps updating this page could be added to those checklists?

I was told it’s on there. They just don't want to do it.

Thee have been many complaints about the state of the page internally inside WMF as well, every time we are reassured that a new staff page is coming any day now, then nothing happens. The last reassuring update was in January. No one ever explained why this is so, but at this point I'm assuming that the inaccuracies on the page are being preserved deliberately, hopefully for a good reason, and advising anyone who asks not to rely on it. Even a certain Director hasn't managed to get their entry corrected.

FWIW, there are two of me on the list: https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/#technology

I also asked multiple times about issues of this page and when the new version will be up over the past two and half years but no progress.

@CKoerner_WMF The new project seems like a well intentioned good start, but will it ever get done, or will it become a perma-debate on what to do, like most WMF projects? As I said six months ago already: Fingers crossed.

@Ladsgroup The Technology sub-section 'Site Reliability' has a staff of 37 making it the the largest single section in the entire WMF. What do they all actually do? Do they even know each other?

@Kudpung Have a look at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Site_Reliability_Engineering, which has a better list of the team members (there are several sub-teams) and explanations about what they do. Most teams on the tech side of WMF maintain similar pages on MediaWiki.org (although usually smaller :) ), and they're more up-to-date than the staff page.

@matmarex Thank's for the heads up. I now fully understand the importance of that group.
However, it is clearly a classic example of how the (semi)official 'Staff & Contractors' Wordpress site totally fails in its mission to be both informative and navigable. Instead, It just creates more confusion.

In T344479#9840639, @Kudpung wrote:

'Site Reliability' has a staff of 37 making it the the largest single section in the entire WMF. What do they all actually do?

Check out these links:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/sre/

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/project:operations/puppet+status:merged

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Server_Admin_Log

Hello all, I have an update to share with you. Well, a few actually. Back in March we shared an update that the first high-level pages have been updated/created on Meta-wiki. I didn't share that update here so sorry if you missed it.

Second, we have another update. Four departments have been updated to include descriptions, contact information, and team members on Meta-wiki as part of the front door work. Please have a look at our update on Meta-wiki.

Third, @SCampos-WMF is working on updating the staff listing on the Foundation site. She just updated four teams on the staff listing page yesterday: Office of the CEO, Finance and Administration, Product and Tech and Legal. There's a different audience there so conversations are being had on who to list for the remaining departments.

Last, but not least, we've also created a new org chart based upon our front door work. Something we've been working on since, checks notes, December! (collabwiki link) As noted in our most recent update, this won't list every staff member, but it will be most of us in community-facing roles and leadership folks. We're also dedicated to keeping this up to date (and it's on-wiki which should make it easier for anyone/everyone to help keep it up-to-date).

@CKoerner_WMF Thank you so much for this new org chart Chris, and anyone who assisted with it (I see it was dropped into a wiki page in a single edit). Now that it is editable Wiki, markup everyone can fill in any gaps, links, and links to it from WikiMedia project pages.

There are several sections on the meta org chart with just "TKTK". What does that mean?

Yay transparency. Thanks @CKoerner_WMF!

• org chart page on meta
  • How do you read the org chart? It kind of looks like a copy of the wikimediafoundation.org staff and contractors page. That's fine if it is. But if it isn't, can you explain the difference?
  • I see a Director of Engineering in the Advancement section. Possible error?
• https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/
  • Nice job adding the directors/VPs to Product & Technology. That's very helpful.
  • TODO: The entire Product & Technology department teams and employees are missing except for the directors/VPs.

Nice to see some movement on this ticket. Thanks again. Looking forward to more updates.

In T344479#9849061, @Pppery wrote:

There are several sections on the meta org chart with just "TKTK". What does that mean?

Ha! I should have spelled that out. It's a bit of imprecise language meaning "to come"

In T344479#9849195, @Novem_Linguae wrote:

Yay transparency. Thanks @CKoerner_WMF!

• org chart page on meta
  • How do you read the org chart? It kind of looks like a copy of the wikimediafoundation.org staff and contractors page. That's fine if it is. But if it isn't, can you explain the difference?

Personally I'd suggest using the TOC. It's a listing of debts alphabetically. Leadership is folks who are Directors or above. The rest individual contributors.

It's not meant to be an exact copy. The Meta-wiki listing is focused on community-facing folks, while the intended updates to the foundation site are for external audiences (donors, press, etc). So they'll be a little different and might even change more over time.

• I see a Director of Engineering in the Advancement section. Possible error?

That's Greg. :) He's in Advancement and helps run the Fundraising tech team. Tech folks keep most of their documentation on MediaWiki.org and we'd like to bring the same "front door" consistency there in the future.

• https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/
  • Nice job adding the directors/VPs to Product & Technology. That's very helpful.
  • TODO: The entire Product & Technology department teams and employees are missing except for the directors/VPs.

Yeah, it's a big department and like I noted they have most of their work on mediawiki.org. On our list to tackle, for sure.

Nice to see some movement on this ticket. Thanks again. Looking forward to more updates.

Appreciate the kind words from you and others. This has been a big project with lots of moving parts. Research, design, information architecture, stakeholders, legal and safety, and wrangling the dark art of MediaWiki templates! I'm really happy that we're doing this and am looking forward to continue to improving the transparency and trust. Big thanks to @SCampos-WMF and Nadee for being a big help along with my colleagues @RAdimer-WMF, @elappen-WMF, and @Jay-A2K. Oh, and @LMccabe and @MPaul_WMF for making the connections across the org to get this to happen.

Thank you for working on that!

Great, thanks for creating a public org chart! We have really missed that.

Good to see some progress

It might be an idea to provide a key to the job titles and their hierarchy. These terms without a context - especially for community-facing positions - could be meaningless outside the US:
Specialist
President
Vice President
Senior Manager
Manager
Senior (...)
Chief Officer
Officer
Senior Director
Director
Staff (...)
Principal (...)
Lead (...)

Per T202188#10278333 this task might be resolved?

In T344479#10462245, @Aklapper wrote:

Per T202188#10278333 this task might be resolved?

That's indeed somewhat resolved but also needs updating too. E.g. Mat is no longer with WMF but his name is in P&T: https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/#product

It's much less out-dated though. Thank you!

Is the idea that https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/ is just managers now, and everyone else is at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Product?

On the one hand, de-centralizing this information across multiple pages instead of one page like it was before might be a downside.

On the other hand, getting a lot of this moved on-wiki may make maintenance of it and keeping it up to date a lot easier.

Wouldn't you still need someone to publish new hires _somewhere_ to be able to update on-wiki? Does that "snitch" IRC bot not effectively catch the edits anymore?

Other very capable folks are now handling all of this. However, as one of the folks involved with the very long discovery and discussion phase of what has been implemented, wanted to offer some context from my POV being involved in earlier stages of both the org website and wiki side of this change.

Having our essentially "one-person web team" - already responsible for many things - also tasked with managing a 700+ list of staff in one place is far easier said than done. And to my knowledge, not really a feat really anyone has achieved (I have been sent lots of examples of nonprofits with long staff lists - but when I reach out to those orgs - they acknowledge them either being very outdated or in reality only a percentage of staff...and ironically wind up asking us what changes we are making as they are usually considering changes as well). Additionally, the audience of this website (primarily external), as it turns out, are just not interested in a 700+ list of names anyway.

The people now listed on the org website are people who for reasons determined by their departments and Comms, are the most "public facing" folks in that department - which generally means people in leadership roles, or people uniquely engaged in media/donor/partnerships work.

The audience most interested in a more complete list are generally (although obviously not always) people within the community. The staff's internal HR systems provide staff with the information that they need (much of which cannot be safely shared or even legally allowed to be done in any sort of public platform) - so they are not an audience for this list. Shifting the public lists to community spaces is just a better use of our channels. There is also more nuance to who gets listed publicly than I suspect people recognize, and there has in reality not been a "fully complete public list" since the very early months of the org as safety and legal considerations have never really allowed for that. So there has never been a simple "dump a list from one system and plug it into another" solution (even with use of flags, etc. - just doesn't wound up being that simple in actual execution) And that required nuance sometimes requires knowledge of individual circumstances which are tricky to share with people outside of a person's manager and very specific HR folks due to privacy/laws (and the small group with access to that information already have overfull plates of responsibilities - so not a simple matter of having them do it instead).

The notion of having "one big list" was one thing when we were ~250 or even ~400 people, and when the org website was not really be used as a primary channel to a targeted audience. So matching the new scope/audience of that site - AND scaling up to ~700 while continuing to be able to respond as needed to various changes like new hires, departures, safety concerns, etc. cannot be done nearly as effectively as allowing each department and team's managers and engaged wiki editors on their team to maintain the lists for their own teams/department. Certainly, it COULD be done with enough resources (I mean basically true of any idea), but as with everything in our world - we have limited resources and need to balance them. Investing the staff resources necessary to do "one big list" just does not really balance well with the relatively limited gains that method vs. new method provides - which has other benefits over old setup. That is effectively why one of the outcomes we have been working towards with the new Meta-Wiki front door for the Foundation has been shifting these to more team/dept specific community spaces where we can also provide context on who you may actually want to contact/why/when/etc.: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation

There is still work to be done, and improvements to be made on this setup - and we will take input and lessons learned and apply them as we continue to evolve our on-wiki presence and Foundation website.

Hey @sgrabarczuk.

How are you? I hope you're having a great week.

I notice that you recently blanked and redirected (BLAR'd) the page https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Product&oldid=7754014 to point to a page with less information, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation/Product_and_Technology

Would you please consider restoring the old page and helping to get it updated? I think that would be better than providing less information. The new page doesn't have a list of teams, doesn't have a list of product managers, and (especially important) doesn't wikilink to the various teams. Wikilinking to the various teams is important because those wiki team pages are now the place to see each team's staff.

Don't forget that volunteers don't have access to OfficeWiki, so it's important to some of us to maintain public staff lists that properly document the various teams and managers.

Thanks a lot. Looking forward to your feedback.

Seconding this comment. It seems to be going in a direction of less rather than more publicly accessible information which is what we need here.

Hey, yeah, I admit, maybe I didn't think this through. I've restored the previous version.

Just to clarify, I wanted to point to a page that provides up-to-date information. On https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation/Product_and_Technology, there's a link to the annual plan with a list of all hypotheses for this quarter: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2025-2026/Product_%26_Technology_OKRs#Q1.

Thank you Szymon. Much appreciated.

The saga of a staff and contractors page has been dragging on for a full two years now and actually since long before @Novem_Linguae took the initiative to open this ticket.
A year and a half ago I wrote:
//@CKoerner_WMF. I fully understand @Aklapper's 'Whoever might be responsible for this in WMF, I do not think that they necessarily follow this task or use Phabricator' but this does now look like a positive step forward. A correct and up-to-date display may help to dispel many of the conspiracy theories surrounding the WMF's Staff & Contractors .

I do however wonder why it's necessary to reinvent the wheel while the principle of a corporate and political organigram has existed for 100s of years and is displayed on the wall in the lobby of most organisations.

Indeed, nobody wants such a chart to include every one of the staggering number of 700+ employees, contractors, and office cleaners, but what is needed is an accurate depiction of the main actors in community-facing roles among all the CEOs, CTOs, presidents, senior vice presidents, vice presidents, senior principle that, senior vice principle, officer, senior officer, chief this, manger of that, and the rest of the Game of Titles.

Through constant reshuffles and revolving doors, ties get lost and the valuable and painstakingly built up collaboration with WMF teams on important issues often gets abandoned.
Fingers crossed that something will come of this..//

But it appears we are back at square 1 again. Surely the HR department knows who it has hired, or fired, or who has left and can pass these details on to those responsible for communication.