Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-09-26/News from Diff

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Knowledge equity "around the world" actually means 3/6 of the grantees are American focused on American issues and a complete ignorance of the Indian subcontinent. This is obviously because America is the most important and worst country in the world. Also pretty much everyone in the Indian subcontinent is brown anyways right?? So they must all love each other and are basically the same why would there ever be equity gaps between different communities over there that need to be remediated? After all skin colour appears to be the overriding factor, given that in America it is the number one separator between communities it follows that the rest of the world also has that exact same issue. I hope the WMF in the future switches to spending all of their money on America, after all, how else are they supposed to get street cred at their San Francisco parties? Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 03:26, 27 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I do understand what you are trying to say and I do agree as an Indian, but it sounds (reads?) like you are ranting instead of calmly explaining your point (but then again your mood is understandable given that it's been years). Tube·of·Light 04:01, 27 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• While I sympathize with Chess that much of what the WMF does these days plays very well in "woke" virtue signaling circles (the blurb for SeRCH Foundation checks all the boxes a San Fran PR person could ever dream of), I'm willing to give the organisation some of the benefit of the doubt here. The favoring of US organizations probably emanates some from practical concerns; the US nonprofit community talks to each other and there are interlocking boards of directors and staff connections, so making those grants was probably relatively easy, not to mention the WMF and Wikipedia have higher standing in the US (both at a common social level and among the media and professional nonprofit sector) relative to some other places in the world. That said, I think it is totally appropriate to push for more grants to different organizations and initiatives around the world, the foundation certainly has the money for it! I for one am excited about the grants to the Arab & West African investigative journalism centers. And on the whole, the end goal of these grants should be to produce more reliable secondary sources that can be used to build Wikipedia articles about undercovered subjects. I think that is cause for celebration! I hope the WMF will make sure of that. Chess' criticism of the focus on racial matters is fair enough in the sense that the WMF is tackling something from a very US point of view. Race and the challenges it can present vary across the world, and it many places it is eclipsed by more pressing social categories and concerns. -Indy beetle (talk) 10:42, 27 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• I'm not sure I understand the sarcastic part of skin colour appears to be the overriding factor ... it follows that the rest of the world also has that exact same issue given that, from the experience of people I know, across Asia and Africa there is often more overt colourism than in America, whether that manifests as a small amount of white people in the country experiencing immense privilege (South Africa) or discrimination against darker-skinned people in a country of more homogeneous race (India, Jamaica). I might say it's internalised prejudice as a consequence of European colonialism, but regardless of the cause, I have to say that Black, Indigenous, and communities of color around the world seem like a good focus for the WMF globally. — Bilorv (talk) 16:57, 29 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]