Wikimedia
Wikimedia Foundation is a private tax-exempt corporation (IRS 501) in the US founded and mainly run by Jim Wales aka Jimbo.
It has no independent board, no legal charity status in any country, and seems to spend money it raises on providing hardware for mediawiki sites such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary.
Some claims have been made that part of the funds it raises is used to support development of the mediawiki software (which Consumerium R&D wiki is running on). According to Mediawiki developers these claims are not true and they are receiving no money from Wikimedia.
Many longstanding participants in the Wikipedia project have serious problems with the people and processes employed by the Foundation. As a volunteer organization, it probably has growing pains, and it's unclear if it will outgrow these, gain an independent board, or other attributes of a responsible nonprofit. Most of the criticisms have to do with wiki management problems on which there is little well-understood practice.
Specific issues on which the "Foundation" has taken positions favourable to Bomis.com or detrimental to the GFDL text corpus as a whole:
- Refusing to release Most Clicked Links information on any Wikipedia, even the small ones, where tracking this information would be quite simple, and would assist authors in supporting real end user interests. It appears that this information is withheld specifically for the use of Bomis' search engine development.
- Releasing only very limited page visit information - likewise of much use to Bomis internally.
- Including self-serving claims regarding a nonexistent requirement to "link back to Wikipedia" when GFDL'd materials that have appeared there are quoted. The GFDL has no such requirement but the XML dumps from Mediawiki add language that implies that it does. In fact, the GFDL
- Not supporting the default standard wiki URI that Wikipedia itself uses, in Mediawiki releases to other parties. This makes the URIs of non-Wikipedia pages more difficult to remember and impossible to recall offhand, and shifting with each mediawiki release. Since Wikipedia's don't likewise shift, this makes it almost certain that Wikipedia pages will be linked to, not those other pages.
- Treating use of ISO language codes in mediawiki's interwiki link conventions as if they are invocations of Wikipedia in that language, not simply references to "that page in that language".
- Banning, harassing, attempting to "out" and permitting (if not deliberately attempting) framing users who point out any of the above. This sometimes reaches the bizarre extreme of echo chamber assertions being cited in Wikipedia articles as if they were true.
- Promoting its own community point of view as if it were actually a neutral point of view, ignoring systemic bias questions, and letting sysop vigilantiism and sysop vandalism occur freely against outsiders. This sometimes reaches the bizarre extremes of assuming that the Wikipedia mailing list consensus on legal issues overrules the best legal advice of actual qualified legal experts (witness James Day and Jimbo Wales debating).
It is a classic insider culture. It is not a good model for Consumerium Governance Organization or any other nonprofit entity that is actually trying to serve users and disadvantaged people and other living things.