The Movement Charter Drafting Committee’s responses to the community feedback

This is a summary of the Movement Charter Drafting Committee’s responses and next steps based on the feedback from the community consultation. For detailed responses to specific comments, see the full feedback doc.

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General response

• Readability and clarity: The MCDC is implementing a number of revisions in reaction to comments about the clarity of language, including:
  • Adding a glossary with definitions to terms seen as ambiguous in the feedback.
  • Adding notes explaining the intentions for translators behind certain passages that seem difficult to translate according to the feedback.
  • Implementing many suggestions for simplifying terms and sentence structures (see the detailed response for more).
• Enforcement: The questions about how the Movement Charter will be implemented, and on the consequences of not adhering to it, will be addressed in a later chapter about “amendments and implementation” (for more, see: the Movement Charter outline).
• Making pages editable: The MCDC is chosen to propose the drafts, others making changes can confuse people and misalign all the translations prepared. Community members are welcome, though, to copy the texts and make alternative versions with proposed changes.

Preamble responses

• Paragraph 1: Further explanation of the Movement Charter and the Wikimedia movement will be added in the next drafts, with a more clear paragraph structure.
• Paragraph 2: Terms like “members”, “participants”, “entities”, and “wikis” will be defined or further clarified in their use.
• Paragraph 3 (including question based on Wikimedia Foundation Legal’s feedback): The description of the Wikimedia projects as “largely self-governed” will be retained in the next draft, but other proposed rephrasing will be implemented. The term “knowledge repositories” will be reconsidered.
• Paragraph 4 (“infrastructure”): The paragraph will be significantly rewritten based on the recurring feedback about its current ambiguity and difficulty.

Values & Principles responses

• Potentially missing principles: The drafting group is going to re-assess the Movement Strategy principles and consider what may be missing. The Movement Charter principles aren’t intended to be a duplication of those, but to complement them, as well as to highlight principles that are relevant to the purpose of the Charter.
• Introduction: Emphasis will be put on clarifying and paraphrasing various parts in the next draft, including the movement’s approach to knowledge as “fact-based”, which was a recurring topic in the feedback.
• Subsidiarity: The terms of “Subsidiarity” and “Self-management” will be specifically defined.
• Accountability: The term “Accountability” will be specifically defined and expanded upon.
• Resilience: The term “Resilience” will be specifically defined and expanded upon.

Roles & Responsibilities responses

• The drafting group will take in mind the feedback on the intentions statement and the overall topics of roles & responsibilities when moving ahead with their drafting work. Some more particular responses to questions and possible topics to cover are included in the detailed response.
• The drafting group is looking into how to use visuals and tables to make the upcoming July draft understandable, practical and accessible.

Other responses may also be found by referring to the Frequently Asked Questions page (the questions in which are all based on the community consultation). Some detailed responses are also available in the full community feedback.