Wikimedia: Difference between revisions

'''Wikimedia Foundation''' is a private tax-exempt corporation (IRS 501) in the state of Florida, USA.

It was founded by James Wales, on the [[Wikimedia Board of Trustee]]s as "member for life".  As this demonstrates, Wikipedia has no [[independent board]]: three of the five members have association with [[Bomis]] in the form of being employed by the corporation, ex-employee or owner.   Wikimedia supporters claim that Bomis does not control the board.  However, arbitrary assertions and requests from Wales have been cited as an excuse for some frequent contributors, e.g. [[English Wikipedia User Secretlondon]] to depart the project, and challenging Wales' [[GodKing]] status is often cited as a major reason for peopel to depart the project.

Some believe that an [[independent board]] is a necessity to increase funding to a point where [[service outage]]s would end, and [[full text search]]

would work.

Supporters of the Wikimedia foundation claim that most longstanding participants in the [[Wikipedia]] project, i.e. those that have knuckled under to the [[sysop power structure]] already, have greeted the formation of the nonprofit with great enthusiasm.

Plans are in the work to set up nonprofit organizations in European countries to complement a global foundation.  Wales has given all rights and ownership in the Wikipedia name(s) to these foundations.

Many dispute Wales' contribution and neutrality. The much vaunted [[wiki ideology]] of "[[neutral point of view]]" is also very strongly criticized: "Though other editors ostensibly correct misinformation, there is no procedure to assure correction and when corrections are made, it can happen hours, days or weeks after the misinformation has been served and forked to readers and to other web services.

but it is apparent that he does intervene, e.g. [[English Wikipedia User Secretlondon]],

and influences others who do "dispute resolution" and also very often

the most [[sysop vigilantiism|heavily abused power]], especially when  

extended to so-called "[[trolls]]".

When Wales "chats" with other users they get a picture of how "Jimbo"

tends to see things and usually [[defer]] to this person who they see

as a [[GodKing|awe-inspiring founder]].  Certain [[sycophant]]s skew

issues towards the way "Jimbo" sees them.  None of this is unusual:

[[Group dynamics]] suggest that this cannot be avoided but staying concious about this kind of phenomenom helps to minimize the damage it does, the [[systemic bias]] it creates, [[groupthink]] reinforced.

Many participants in the [[Wikipedia]] and other [[GFDL corpus]] projects have raised concerns with the people and processes employed by the "foundation". They claim that it has structural problems and that is unlikely to ever outgrow these.  Most of the criticisms have to do with [[wiki management]] problems:

*Numerous claims that [[Wikipedia violates GFDL]].

*Numerous claims that Wikipedia's [[name space]] is [[EPOV]] and favours Wikipedia itself inherently, e.g. creating use of ISO language codes in [[mediawiki]] as if they are invocations of Wikipedia in that language, not simply references to "that page in that language".   

For example [[Wikipedia:fr:Commerce ]] or [[w:fr:Commerce ]] map incorrectly to the [[interwiki link standard]] name which is [[fr:Wikipedia:Commerce ]]:

*Other [[Wikimedia corruption]] charges, some of which involve benefits of running Wikipedia that accrue to the operators of a commercial search engine.  ''See [[link transit]] for various attempts to resolve this issue.''