When I first raised concerns about AL2’s conduct to my manager, her response was problematic and felt hostile, and things only got worse after that. In my opinion, my manager continued retaliating against me for raising my concerns until she eventually fired me.

In the several months before and after I was fired from WMF, I’ve heard from many current and former WMF employees about going through similar retaliation and bullying experiences. Other former WMF employees who experienced bullying or retaliation at WMF have significant obstacles in coming forward and testifying about their experiences, ranging from severance packages conditional on non-disparagement to hesitation to revisit traumatic workplace bullying, to fearing reputational damage (this fear can be realistic or not, but either way, to the person experiencing it, it presents an obstacle to speaking up). I am very lucky and privileged to not have as many obstacles. The retaliation and bullying I experienced was much less severe than what some of my former colleagues went through, so it is much easier for me to write about it. It worries me that others are still facing similar or worse treatment at WMF. I hope that unionizing at WMF will help protect my former colleagues from such treatment.

I’ll describe my retaliation experiences here, to serve as anecdotal examples of problematic retaliatory or bullying behaviors by WMF management, and note how they connect to the experiences of other ex-WMF staff, keeping the details of other people’s experiences vague. By sharing my experiences, I am not trying to portray myself as a victim, I know that other people had it worse. Rather, as I said in an earlier post, my goal is to shed light on and provide some evidence of systemic problematic conduct by WMF management.

In my opinion, my manager pursued retaliation against me for raising my concerns through the following avenues:

  • toxic work environment
  • workplace gossip about me, resulting in obstruction to my work and damage to my professional reputation at WMF
  • fabricating a case for firing me, through false claims and misrepresentation of my initial complaint, of my workplace conduct, and of my work at WMF
  • firing me for a false reason

These categories are not mutually exclusive and have a lot of overlap. For example, defamatory workplace gossip also contributes to a toxic work environment, and it may also be used to fabricate a firing case against an employee, because colleagues misled by the gossip could provide negative feedback about the employee as a result. I think this overlap was very present for me and some other former WMF staff. But because the problematic conduct by WMF management is so pervasive, it can feel all over the place and overwhelming when I or others try to describe it. It brings to mind the expression “death by a thousand cuts”. So, I find it helpful to group some of the problematic conduct I experienced into these categories, to give my descriptions some structure. These categories help me organize and describe my own negative experiences in a way that connects them to persistent problematic patterns described by others.

I have a lot to say about each of these categories, so I’ll cover the toxic work environment in this post and leave the other categories for later.

Toxic work environment

After I raised concerns about unethical conduct to my manager, she started making claims and remarks about me to me that felt unfriendly, were unconstructive for work, were distracting and disruptive. Some of them seemed unnatural, like a contrived performance for HR documentation that was meant to make my manager look good on paper while casting me in a negative light. This happened mostly during our weekly 1-1 meetings, so most of the time there were no witnesses.

Claims that I became less engaged at work

My manager told me that I was less engaged with work. When I asked her for specific examples of the work I was less engaged with, she did not provide any examples. Instead, she said I was being difficult and changed the topic of the conversation.

The only kind of reduced engagement at work I could think of was that, after seeing how my manager responded to my raising concerns in good faith about unethical conduct, I decided to stop sharing non-work-related personal information with her and preferred to stick to talking about work instead. I did that as a precaution because I became concerned that my manager might use any personal information I shared with her to cast me in a negative light in her documentation of our conversations. My manager already did that once when responding to my concerns, in a way that was very disturbing and offensive to me, so I was just trying to protect myself from more of it.

At WMF, I encountered many colleagues who kept conversations to work topics only, and I had great working relationships with them, so I did not expect that sticking to work-only conversations with my manager would be reprimandable as my reduced engagement with work.

Negative comments about my facial expressions

My manager started making negative comments about my facial expressions, mainly saying that my facial expressions mean that I don’t like something or disagree with something. These comments were neither friendly nor welcome, nor accurate, and they sounded derisive. The facial expression in question was just me thinking about the project or question that my manager asked about, my thinking face. I tried to explain that I was just thinking and not passing judgment with my face. I found it quite disruptive to have to fend off such comments while trying to think through the work questions I was asked. This happened many times. At some point, my manager did this in a meeting with another colleague present, directing the negative comments about my facial expressions to them and seeking their agreement, as if it was a fun, shared joke or something. The colleague was not interested in joining my manager in this behavior, and the meeting felt a bit awkward. After that, my manager stopped this behavior.

These comments felt hostile and were disruptive to my work, but they weren’t particularly offensive to me. Of course I’ve heard worse before. But at some point my manager was making them so regularly that I started expecting them, like that was my work environment now, and it felt quite toxic and like subtle bullying. It felt strange and disappointing that this was now my reality at WMF. I figured that reporting it to HR would probably just make things worse, so I didn’t.

I was not going to mention this specific experience because it’s kind of embarrassing, but then I saw this note from a former WMF employee about WMF management bullying them by ridiculing their mannerisms. Despite that note being 5 years old, a lot in it has resonated with me, in terms of both my own much more recent experiences at WMF and the experiences others shared with me.

I agree on a lot of the vaguer things Harej said in that note as well (some of them I hope to cover in more detail in a future post), but the most specific and detailed callout they made was about WMF senior management bullying them by ridiculing and mocking their autism-related mannerisms. How Harej was treated was terrible, wrong, and unacceptable for an organization like WMF. I am grateful for Harej’s courage to speak up about it.

I think that my broader experience with unethical conduct by WMF management, as stated in this blog, supports Harej’s point about rampant bullying by WMF leadership. And I think that sharing my more specific experience with my manager making derisive comments about my facial expressions corroborates Harej’s statement of their experiences of being bullied for autism-related mannerisms. Together, my and Harej’s statements suggest that WMF management has been bullying and ridiculing subordinates for their mannerisms for a long time and with no meaningful accountability.

Five years is a long time, far too long to leave such issues unaddressed at WMF. In those 5 years, besides holding the individuals responsible for the conduct accountable through disciplinary action, specific guidelines, rules and accountability measures to prevent such conduct could have been added to the WMF Staff Handbook, reasons why WMF staff struggles to report such incidents could have been researched and addressed, and appropriate anti-bullying training for all WMF management could have been provided, evaluated for effectiveness, and updated as many times as needed until it is actually effective. Whatever anti-bullying training is currently in place at WMF, it is clearly not enough to get WMF management to stop bullying their subordinates.

The last sentence in Harej’s note is this: “And if others speak up because of me I hope it will be worth it.” I am speaking up here in part because of Harej’s note.

Continued pressure to practice curiosity

After my attempt to raise my concerns about unethical conduct to my manager didn’t go well, I did not bring it up with her again, hoping instead to find someone else to report my concerns to, separate from the influence of my manager and AL2. But my manager kept bringing it up in our weekly meetings. When she brought it up, she would tell me the following:

  • that I must “practice curiosity” about my concerns
  • that, by refusing to address my concerns about unethical conduct with her or AL2 (or with HR in the presence of her or AL2), I am not “practicing curiosity”, which is a core WMF value
  • that I am not upholding WMF values

When this would happen, I’d tell my manager that I am planning to talk to either HR or someone else separately and try to steer the conversation back to work topics. Once or twice, my manager responded to this by saying something like “sure, talk to whoever you want”. It sounded derisive to me. It sounded like my manager was very confident that my report would be treated by HR in a way that would be favorable to her. This apparent attitude seemed consistent with what I was hearing from my WMF colleagues about going to HR with reports like mine: best case scenario, HR will do nothing; worst case scenario, I will be fired, pushed out of WMF, or otherwise punished. It seemed more and more like there was no clear and trustworthy way to report my concerns at WMF.

The “reset our relationship” meeting

My manager asked for a meeting to reset our relationship. I agreed (not that I had a choice, obviously), trying my best to assume good faith and hoping that this conversation would be at least something other than more demands for me to “practice curiosity” and faulting me for not upholding WMF values. It wasn’t.

This meeting mostly consisted of my manager telling me that I am not practicing curiosity, that my failing to practice it goes against WMF values, and that all WMF employees must uphold WMF values. This was repeated multiple times. My manager then proceeded to tell me that we (her and I) have the same values, repeating that multiple times in a row. It was oddly cult-like. Imagine your manager sternly repeating at you “we have the same values” over and over again. It was weird and intimidating.

I’m not sure what the purpose was of my manager saying to me that we have the same values over and over. I am guessing that perhaps I was expected to say yes to that. I don’t think I could say yes to that, because many of my manager’s behaviors I described in this blog are not in line with my values. I thought that I couldn’t say no either because it looked like that would get me fired, so instead I asked if we could focus our “reset our relationship” discussion on our work.

To me, it seemed that the point of this meeting was for my manager to document a staged performance where she came across looking very positive on paper, and I came across as an insubordinate troublemaker who brazenly defied WMF’s values. On paper, I would guess that this meeting and my manager sounded lovely: we had a disagreement, my manager asked for a nice-sounding meeting to “reset our relationship”, I was given a choice to attend it and agreed, and my manager focused that discussion on the nice-sounding notion of “practicing curiosity” and the need to uphold WMF values. How nice. And then, on the same paper, I would guess that I came across as a WMF-values-defying scoundrel, who once again refused to “practice curiosity” as demanded, doubled down on failing to uphold a core WMF value, and was otherwise uncooperative in the face of such niceness. That was not the reality of it, at least to me. The meeting felt tense, hostile and intimidating from the start. I was hoping it would be an open-ended discussion, but it was not: my manager only focused on the “practice curiosity” thing and my failure to uphold WMF values. I definitely did not feel like I could say no to having this meeting. I seriously doubt that the goal of this meeting was to reset our relationship, given that it was just more of the same old “practice curiosity” thing, but at a higher dose and in a weirdly cult-like format for some reason.

My manager accused me of having a thought that I failed to report to her

Yep, it’s as weird as it sounds. My manager said that I had a thought that I didn’t tell her about at the time when I had that thought. We had a very strange and tense conversation about it. When I asked her for details on what that thought was, she said that she had it documented that on a specific date I said something like “I thought we’re not continuing work on the program-officers-facing version of the EIR tool” in reference to AL2 saying that I should have prioritized her over working on the EIR tool version for program officers. It seemed like my manager documented what I said at that time, so she probably has an exact quote of what I said. She said that this quote, especially the past tense of the “I thought” part in it, proved that I had that thought earlier, and I didn’t tell her about it when I had that thought. I didn’t really know what to say to that. I seem to have committed some sort of a thought crime.

I said that I didn’t recall deliberately withholding thoughts about that project, and I asked for examples of how that impeded work. I asked that because the work I had that thought on was scheduled roughly for the upcoming Apr-Jun 2025 quarter, and this accusation came before that quarter started, so my unreported thought could not have blocked any related work at the time. My manager did not provide examples of any work that was impeded by my unreported thought. She said something along the lines of I was being difficult, or she didn’t want to argue, and switched the conversation topic.

This exchange made me feel surveilled. It made it apparent that things I said were being recorded to be used against me, likely making a case for firing me.

I had no idea that thinking could be so dangerous at WMF. It looks like I’m some sort of a thought criminal. According to my manager, I failed to report a thought to WMF management, she has documented proof of my failing to report that thought, and therefore that proves something. It proves something, alright, just not about me.

Looking back, this seems pretty funny, but it wasn’t at the time. It was so bizarrely Orwellian. Besides, I must confess that during my time at WMF I definitely had way more than one thought that I failed to report to WMF management.

Some common threads

Based on what I heard from former WMF colleagues, many of them have experienced similar toxic workplace practices from WMF management. I think the following are some common threads among their experiences and mine.

The “practice curiosity” practice

It seems to me that the “practice curiosity” practice has become a classic hit or a well-established tradition for WMF management, long before I joined WMF. If WMF employees disagree, dissent or question something about WMF management, it is highly likely that they will be told to “practice curiosity” by WMF management (unless those employees have high status at WMF). If the employees continue dissenting or questioning, then WMF management will badger them with the “practice curiosity” practice until they give up, leave or end up fired. My experiences above provide concrete examples of such “practice curiosity” badgering, and so many of my WMF colleagues shared with me that they too were told to “practice curiosity” when they disagreed or questioned WMF management.

In my opinion, WMF management’s “practice curiosity” practice is not congruent with the notion of curiosity. That’s just not what curiosity means. Perhaps it would be a good idea for WMF management to read the Wikipedia article on curiosity (it’s really good!).

I think that the “practice curiosity” practice at WMF is a form of dissent suppression. When someone dissents or asks an inconvenient question and their voice gets suppressed via nice-sounding “practice curiosity” statements, it is dissent suppression. When used this way, the “practice curiosity” statement is just a convenient, nice-sounding phrase that is used as a tool to enforce dissent suppression. The same thing can be done with any other positive value, like “practice kindness” or “practice candor”. This tactic works because of the power differential, and not because any actual curiosity is involved in any meaningful way. Based on my experience, the goal of this tactic appears to be to stop the dissent, and not to have an open-minded, curious exploration or discussion of anything. When I was told to “practice curiosity”, I was also explicitly told that the expected outcome of me “practicing curiosity” is my agreement with WMF management that no unethical conduct happened.

Based on what I heard from my WMF colleagues, the “practice curiosity” practice is systemic problematic conduct by WMF management in and of itself, and it also enables other problematic conduct by WMF management, because it effectively prevents accountability for WMF management. If a WMF employee tried to hold a WMF manager accountable, like I did, they would likely be told to “practice curiosity”. If they persisted, then they’d probably go through similar things that I did.

My understanding is that WMF management has been using the “practice curiosity” practice against WMF staff across multiple teams and for multiple years, which makes it systemic. In my opinion, it was used to suppress, bully and gaslight many WMF employees, including me. It is a terrible practice. It is dishonest, it lacks integrity, and it is a form of abuse of power and trust. I am very disappointed that WMF management practices it, systemically, at such scale, and with no accountability for it. I hope that WMF management stops practicing the “practice curiosity” practice against WMF staff and the Wikimedia movement community.

Free rein to bully subordinates

To me, it looks like WMF managers have free rein to bully subordinates, to the point of absurdity.

Besides the “practice curiosity” thing, my manager repeatedly made negative comments about my thinking face and basically accused me of a thought crime, among other things. There was no one trustworthy I could turn to for help, certainly not WMF HR, because while some of my WMF colleagues told me HR would not help, others told me that HR was actively participating in gossiping about me. That’s bananas.

According to Harej’s note, multiple persons in senior WMF management bullied and ridiculed them for their autism-related mannerisms. That’s unhinged.

Other WMF colleagues shared with me stories of other bullying behaviors by WMF management, including intense micromanagement, crossing work-life balance boundaries, negative gossip, work obstruction and, of course, the “practice curiosity” practice. That’s not good for WMF: it impedes work and damages employee morale and work culture.

It’s been at least 5 years between Harej’s and my bullying experiences, and we worked on different teams. This shows that bullying by WMF management spans many years and teams. It is systemic.

Stress from workplace bullying is a significant long-term hazard to both mental and physical health of employees, and its repercussions are likely to persist beyond the time of employment. It is very real harm, and it is mean, cruel and unnecessary to subject WMF employees to it. Bullying by WMF management needs to stop.





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