"Safety & Inclusion" mostly isn't DEI-related. It's mostly about protecting Wikipedia against legal changes, and protecting individual volunteers from lawsuits.

maybe the point of your 'understanding of DEI initiatives may not be their understanding of DEI initiatives/investments' could do with a bit more highlighting in the heading TLDR summary, as it imho is a major caveat on whether this answer "supports" the headlines being thrown around atm or not.

@Mark, I'd love to see your comment about the "Safety & Inclusion" budget category sourced and expanded into another answer! I don't know where to start looking for a further breakdown of that category.

Good answer. One point of clarification: The WMF, generally speaking, does not employ people who directly edit Wikipedia (with extremely rare exceptions). They do a lot of outreach, workshops, etc., but the wiki is not written by them or their employees. The mention of "safety" is also suggestive of the T&S team, which does things that look a little more like traditional moderation.

"We need more articles on underrepresented parts of the world" seems to be the same statement as "we'd like to sell more products overseas," yet we would not call the latter a DEI initiative. Can you explain why you just accept the claim that Equity in the budget is a part of DEI as it's understood, when Wikipedia itself explains it as increasing coverage in other nations?

@MichaelW.: Selling things overseas is usually about money. There is no profit to be made in writing articles about unrepresented parts of the world, or encouraging others to do so.

@Kevin yes is there is: most of Wikimedia’s money via from Wikipedia, and almost all of that is donations from readers etc. That’s a really clear profit motive to increase readership.

@Tim: If that's really what they are attempting to do, then they are doing an atrocious job of it.

@tim Your argument makes no sense. You're claiming that Wikipedia's attempting to increase readership donations by greatly increasing the number of unpopular articles. That's literally the exact opposite of what they would do if that were their goal.

@Kevin So, the fact that SE asia has a lot of money but little donations to Wikipedia is actually an example of seeing an untapped market. To tap an untapped market, the first step is often to find out what you are missing and provide services that untapped market would want. Only after you have provided the key services would you expect a revenue stream to appear. Thus, improving SE language and historical information could easily be viewed in this light. For Africa, there is a lot less money to be chased; but in the medium term (20 years) this could change.

@barbecue unpopular to write =/= unpopular to read

@barbecue What Tim means is that while it's relatively easy to get people to contribute to, say, the exhaustive list of Friends episodes and summaries, but getting an expert to weigh in on the role of grubs in the maintenance of the biosphere of the Amazon Rainforest can be more difficult because the latter are harder to find and they tend to be busy, but the information is no less important.

@Tim Maybe not directly, but there's a correlation. Which is more important? Taylor Swift or Nematodes? Economically? Nematodes. In terms of scientific value? Nematodes. In terms of impact on people's daily life? Nematodes. Page views? Taylor Swift.

@Shadur-don't-feed-the-AI I have no problem with the importance of the info. My point was simply that how important the info is is unrelated to how popular it is, and if the goal is to increase donations, more emphasis on obscure and niche subjects is the worst possible approach.

@barbecue Good thing that Wikipedia's goal isn't to increase donations then is it?

@Shadur-don't-feed-the-AI Let me state it more clearly. If the goal of INCREASING UNPOPULAR ARTICLES is to increase donations, that is not going to be successful. I did not at any time say they have NO goal of increasing donations. I only said that that goal is not relevant to a push to improve participation in less popular topics which do not already have a lot of support from contributors. That is ALL I am saying.