Claims of corruption

N.B. there are certain evil trolls who assert that Wikimedia may not be corrupt. Take care while reading this page to not fall prey to their propaganda.

Wikipedia is the largest GFDL corpus access provider. It was usurped by Wikimedia in 2003. Since then it has been alleged to have become increasingly corrupt and unresponsive to contributors and users. 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";
• 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.
• technological escalation against Recyclopedia and threatened, according to some, against Wikinfo - attempted coverup with extremely selective event reporting in Wikipedia, false claims in article nominally about Recyclopedia but seeming to serve only to spread the story that did not include denial of service attacks with vandalbots
• users not consulted when user environment changes - suggesting only certain kinds or status of users "count"
• outing and concomitant libel based on echo chamber claims
• tolerance of extensive sysop vandalism
• tolerance of extensive sysop vigilantiism and contemplation of more serious developer vigilantiism
• ad hominem delete without due process, recently spread to Meta-Wikipedia
• ad hominem revert allowed to stand
• 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".

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

• 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.