Talk:Claims of corruption

142, please provide specifics and references for these claims.

Most are now attributed or otherwise verified. Blanking this page just proves there is no answer to some claims other than "yes, these claims are true, and Wikimedia just wants to libel chill them away"

Doing so for new claims; However, since lies, libel and echo chamber fraud are freely spread on vile mailing lists run by Wikimedia without any such specifics or references, it might be abusive to require such documentation from their opponents; most specific references are in the sub-articles using the most infamous Wikimedia clowns as the universal bad example for how not to do wiki governance.

Is being blocked in China evidence of corruption? hm. Trolls would say no, but, sysop power structure would have to respect China's power structure and their pet sysops who are their friends in fascist power plays. - hail to the red faction!

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• no independent board free of influence from Bomis.com - although "two of the current trustees don't seem to be active Wikimedians", those being sock puppet votes of Jimbo Wales: his employees at that corporation.

1. Jimbo no longer works for Bomis, thus he has no employees at Bomis
2. Michael Davis never worked there
3. Only Bomis employee on the board is Tim Shell

What absolute nonsense - Wales *OWNS* Bomis. And Davis has shares too apparently. This is a fairly transparent and bogus attempt to create a false front organization. And again, what are they hiding? Surely they realize they're doing something wrong, if they're quitting and pretending to set up these structures.

Ok. Ownership naturally leads to some power over current employees, but may I remind once again that it is not true that two of the independent board members work for Bomis.com, only Tim Shell works there

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How about this: [1]

"Mayer said: "At Wikipedia the authors and administrators of our content enforce the GNU FDL by searching for infringes and contacting them. At first we use a friendly form letter, then a more sternly worded letter, and finally a very stern letter. Usually this works, but some web sites are still in breach - we are still trying to figure out what to do with them".

It turns out that Wikipedia.org keeps a list of all its "mirrors and forks" here.

He continued: "I'm one of the Wikipedia administrators who informed WordIQ that they were breaking the terms of our license by not providing a link back to the Wikipedia original and not mentioning that their copied version of our articles were licensed under terms of the GNU FDL. After some time they did finally provide the link-backs and the mention/link to the GNU FDL that we were asking for."

He added: "At Wikipedia we use a very liberal interpretation of the GNU FDL in order to make it easier for people to copy our content"."

This is laughable. Wikipedia itself is in constant GFDL violation, and the license does *not* require "links back to the Wikipedia original", it requires access to the source text version of the article, which Wikipedia itself does not provide to all users.

What articles does it not provide the source for? (r3m0t)

There are many IP addresses from which the current article source is not retrievable. This is a "technical barrier" to its retrieval and is specifically forbidden by the GFDL.

Also, the source of a protected page is not retrievable from ANY IP address, and it is often exactly these that people would want to copy and begin to evolve in some other place. This is an attempt to claim a monopoly on the edits of very controversial pages and prevent people from exercising their right to fork off.

here is a list of all the sites they bully and harass into making themselves the centre of the GFDL corpus universe.

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the following was added under

• false claims added to Wikimedia article here, and true claims removed

Note that most false claims here have been made by 142.177.X.X who seems to be on a personal vendetta on Wikipedia for banning him for persistent non-encyclopedic edits in the past

This is itself a false claim. Almost all material contributed by the 142 range has remained in the encyclopedia and passed several ad hominem delete tests - that is, many people agree it belongs. Whatever issues there are with this material, it's not it's lack of encyclopedic relevance. Whenever 142 or similar material is removed, it's almost always ad hominem revert or ad hominem delete, that is, there is no valid reason to remove it at all, and requiring its removal is simply sysop vandalism.

Furthermore, the "vendetta" is beyond anything personal at this point, and includes whole factions such as the Wikipedia Red Faction, and even some sympathetic sysops who we do not name so they will not be targetted.

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Developer payments are considered corruption by some. Obviously Erik Moeller is trying to get paid for doing whatever damage he wants to MediaWiki with charity money. It is not clear he will succeed at this damaging and being paid to do damaging.

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It speaks to the credibility of this page that there is never any response to it except denial and censorship. Lies are told about trolls, and the Wikipedia Red Faction is censored off the entire net, everywhere, by the sysop power structure (woops forgot to add that), but no one ever responds substantially to allegations.

Question: If James Wales, Daniel Mayer, Tim Starling, Erik Moeller were all kicked out, would the rest of the project stabilize and solve its corruption problems? Or is fated to be run by the likes of Angela Beesley and her friends? If so then where will the default GFDL corpus access provider come from?

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Attempts to rename this page "unsubstantiated claims of..." are bogus. Most of what is alleged is actually rather easy to substantiate. For instance all you have to do to see a GFDL violation is try to retrieve source text of a single article from a blocked IP. It's obviously true that a search engine company like Bomis can use data on which articles are most popular - it's up to them to prove they AREN'T using it for advantage. And you can find most of the rest of the stuff in the vile mailing list archives. To demand "substantiation" for this kind of obvious observation is abusive.

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Moved issues with developer vigilantiism and others without official status:

• appointment of Tim Starling as "developer liaison" presumably to ensure that any features to reinforce sysop power structure will be high priority, and those that would distribute more power to users would become low priority

Participation here somewhat mollifies these concerns, however, Starling retains some IP range blocks that are evidence of usurper status.

• Erik Moeller nearly appointed to some "special" status after losing an election, permitted to engage in frequent pro-Wikimedia libel activities, e.g. at Webby Awards, and also engaging in libel chill, e.g. describing trolls as engaged in libel against Wikimedia for simply telling truth.

how can one libel an organization whose sole purpose seems to be libel? Hmm.

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Is it actually acceptable to simply remove Erik Moeller and Daniel Mayer publicly? Will those subjected to libel by these people actually back off if they are publicly removed and Wales apologizes? Or is Wales, himself, the ultimate problem, due to his history as a GodKing and so on?

Trolls are unlikely to all agree on this. Perhaps the debate on a negotiated settlement between trolls and Wikimedia should be very public.

If Consumerium Governance Organization brokers such a deal, its prestige will rise, and it will effectively be more trusted than Wikimedia by defn.

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Just for the record (in case our friend 142.177.X.X - alias banned English Wikipedia user EntmootsofTrolls alias Mediator alias Enforcer etc. etc. - attempts to censor this information), here's the full text of Jimbo Wales' mailing list post of 1 May 2004:

[Wikipedia-l] Reponse to troll The Enforcer

Jimmy Wales jwales at bomis.com

Sat May 1 14:25:14 UTC 2004

One of our frequently banned users is making a variety of legal and financial accusations that I wanted to respond to early and firmly lest any of these things take root in any way shape or form as reflective of reality in any way.

1. First, the Wikimedia Foundation is currently in full compliance and more with all legal requirements for filings, etc. It is my intention that we remain so, and that indeed, we are proactive about doing whatever is necessary to go above and beyond what is required of us in terms of organizational transparency, etc.

I am always eager to hear suggestions for improvement in this regard.

2. Second, there are no plans of any kind to release a 'for-profit' version of the Wikipedia, for the separate benefit of me or Bomis or any other company that I own, control, work for, etc. We *will* be working to release Wikipedia on CD-ROM, in paper format, etc., but these will be projects *of the foundation*, carried out with perfect consistency with our nonprofit mission.

Such efforts will necessarily and properly involve the work of for-profit publishers, but of course any contracts entered into will be to the benefit of the Wikimedia Foundation.

3. There are no current plans for salaries for anyone. In the future, I do intend that as we grow, we will become a large organization patterned after the National Geographic Society, the International Red Cross, and so on. This will eventually necessitate employees, etc. But for now, any suggestion that I am personally trying to get money from Wikipedia is beyond ludicrous.

It is commonly thought that I'm a wealthy person, but I'm not really. I'm a very committed person who drives a 4 year old Hyundai and lives in an ordinary middle-class American home in an ordinary neighborhood, while spending far more in the last 5 years on my dream of a free encyclopedia than I have on my own salary, none of which, of course, is derived from Wikipedia in any way.

I do this because it matters to me. There are lots of ways to spend money in life, some frivolous, some meaningful. To me, doing something meaningful is the best reward.

4. As of June 1, 2004, I am resigning as CEO of Bomis, and my partner Tim Shell will take over that role. This is primarily to reflect the reality of the situation, which is that I spend virtually all my time on Wikipedia and non-Bomis work. But it is also in part to further emphasize and underscore the fact that the two are unrelated. Bomis's ongoing provision of free hosting for the Wikimedia Foundation as a gesture of appreciation of "giving back" to the free software community whose software has helped us to do so much is not going to change. But that ongoing gift is the only relationship between Bomis and Wikipedia, period.

5. One troll has suggested that the Wikimedia Foundation needs to disclose something about it's relationship to Bomis. This is a classic propaganda technique: to demand the disclosure of some shadowy secrets, with ominous overtones, when there is actually nothing to disclose. I am happy to answer any questions that anyone has about it, but there's not much to say.

While I was a futures and options trader, I founded Bomis partly as a sideline hobby. It was eventually successful enough for me to retire from trading and do it full time. The company rode through the dot-com boom with good times and bad, and has always prospered enough to provide me with a decent living.

I eventually became consumed with the passion to create a free and freely licensed encyclopedia, and started to spend money on it. In the early days, I thought of it as a possible business venture like RedHat. Nupedia was an expensive failure, Wikipedia was a big success.

But through that process, it became apparent that in order for Wikipedia to achieve it's full potential it needed to be owned by a non-profit organization. I promised then to give it all away to the non-profit organization, and I did. I did so fully and completely and with no regrets. My reward will be a Nobel Peace Prize, ha ha.

Why has Bomis funded Wikipedia? Because my partners in Bomis shared my vision and let me do it. Bomis had servers, technical employees, etc., and was the original owner of Nupedia/Wikipedia. The transition was natural and spontaneous, and that's where things are today.

6. I have said before that although there are no plans for it at the current time, and no need for it, it would please me greatly to have the Wikimedia Foundation grow into a large enough organization that it would be sensible for me to accept a salary for running it. If and when that time comes, of course my compensation will be decided according to the standard practices for charitable organizations, i.e. through a vote of the other members of the Board of Directors, and in accordance with the advice of an independent outside compensation agency.

In short, if anyone has *any* questions or concerns about legal or financial matters, I ask you to please write to me privately and express those concerns openly and honestly, so that I can resolve anything of this sort to everyone's satisfaction. If, after you've talked with me privately, you find that you have any remaining issues that you don't feel I've addressed, then by all means I encourage you to go public with your complaints.

That's my biggest problem, really, with what this troll is doing. He's issuing a lot of lies (anonymously of course) and insinuations, attempting to make a public stink, rather than honestly and simply raising the issues with me in an appropriate manner. I don't actually fear any actual legal action, because in order to file a legal action, he or she would have to reveal his or her true identity, which would then enable us to finally take legal action to permanently ban them from the website, as well as providing an opportunity for me to file a libel claim against him.

Anyhow, really, I wanted to say all this because I want you you all to know my keen interest in openness, transparency, fairness, etc. I want to do whatever I need to do to make sure that the Wikimedia Foundation is looked to as a shining example of how a nonprofit should be run, with tight attention paid to expenses, good stewardship of donor money, etc.

--Jimbo

"honestly and simply raising the issues with me in an appropriate manner" is actually not possible since Wales has a policy of outing those who offer any criticism, and actually attaching bogus labels to their names like for instance "criminal" or "liar". Besides no one needs to discuss the GFDL with Wales, or ask his interpretation of it - he is not a lawyer and is not qualified to say what is reasonable interpretation, and with a pet board, he is certainly not committed to actually asking independent board opinions of any matter - so the upside of talking to him is zero, the downside considerable, and the trolls are doing the right thing to just continue to ignore him as much as they can and make note of all his legal errors for later eradication of Wikimedia in court. There is no reason in the world to have any conversation with this guy, and still less given this:

"...to finally take legal action to permanently ban them from the website, as well as providing an opportunity for me to file a libel claim against him. "

libel chill of the plainest sort, and a clear message: 'complain to me or any authority directly, and you can expect court orders issued against you once I have your name on paper'

the above says all it needs to say, and proves autocratic GodKing behaviour and total contempt for open content or its quality or completeness