Claims of corruption

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    Revision as of 05:41, 7 September 2004 by 142.177.77.107 (talk) (clarifying claims seemingly disputed but somehow never actually answered to, or objected to, just censored - hmm could there be NO ADEQUATE RESPONSE to these?)

    Wikipedia is the largest GFDL corpus access provider. It was usurped by Wikimedia from the actual GFDL corpus contributors in 2003.

    Since then it has been alleged to have become increasingly corrupt and unresponsive to those contributors and users, and to be serving the agenda of its sysop power structure instead. Evidence of Wikimedia corruption includes:

    structural corruption

    • many GFDL violations notably re attribution and access to source text and all improvements. See text liberation for more on this issue
    • no actual end user (as opposed to "developer" or "sysop" or "editor") rep on the "board";
    • no independent board members not affiliated with operations - the usual definition of an independent board is one that can judge operations objectively thus does not participate in them, operating as an avenue of appeal for any such decisions
    • Wikimedia Foundation not consulted when legally important decisions made, e.g. in response to Wikipedia being blocked in China, which is the biggest issue it has ever faced, the Jimmy Wales unilaterally "hereby authorize Andrew Lih to make a statement on our behalf", based on usual happy NPOV talk. This was less than one day after the "election" of Wikimedia Board of Trustees who evidently had no opinion that mattered, on this all-important question.
    • release of carefully guarded MediaWiki bot code - used as a vandalbot for technological escalation against Recyclopedia and threatened against Wikinfo - post facto, attempted coverup with extremely selective event reporting in Wikipedia, false claims in the Wikipedia article nominally about Recyclopedia but with no mention of denial of service attacks or vandalbots that were the actual proximate cause of it becoming unusable
    • users not consulted when user environment changes - suggesting only certain kinds or status of users "count"
    • solicitation of donations beyond Florida state lines - this violates US federal law which states clearly that only federally-registered charitable status entitles an organization to make such solicitations; an issue debated on the Wikipedia mailing list but overruled by legal expert Jim Wales as per usual
    • outing and concomitant libel based on echo chamber claims
    • tolerance of extensive sysop vandalism by almost the entire sysop power structure
    • tolerance of extensive sysop vigilantiism and contemplation of more serious developer vigilantiism
    • ad hominem delete without process, recently spread to Meta-Wikipedia
    • ad hominem revert allowed to stand, threats of IP blocks against any who reinstate them for whatever reason (including the fact that they are just correct)
    • U.S. and U.K. centric editorial policy, set by people who speak only English
    • total censorship of Wikipedia Red Faction - not even history now visible due to intimidation of this group
    • attempted libel chill by labelling contents of this page "slander".
    • several attempts to revert these claims without answering to them, proving there is no adequate response

    recently dealt with

    • withholding of information regarding link transit at Wikipedia which would be very useful to editors, but also quite profitable for a search engine like Bomis; several attempts to raise this issue have been suppressed; in September 2004 User:TimStarling did some code to start to deal with it.

    individual corruption by officers

    • Wales intimidating English Wikipedia User Secretlondon and sending email to chill her editorial point of view and become pro-American like Mr. Wales
    • libel chill by Wales, attempting to silence critics of his decisions and appointments, or even just those who point out GFDL violations by Wikimedia, e.g. accusing people who say Wikipedia violates GFDL as being guilty of libel against Wikimedia on the Wikipedia mailing list
    • Daniel Mayer was appointed to the position of Chief Financial Officer on July 4, 2004; this individual is hardly credible as a reporter of facts or a guardian of any principles, given his long standing participation in echo chamber and libel pit activities; it strongly detracts from credibility of Wikimedia and Wikipedia when such a person is in charge of the books

    For issues with developers and others without official status, see Talk:alleged Wikimedia corruption.

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