Editing Wikimedia

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

Generally, its critics point to Wikimedia as a classic [[insider culture]], and '''''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.  

This article explains why, and why [[precedent]] and rules decisions from '''Wikimedia''' can't and shouldn't apply to [[Consumerium:Itself]].  The separate article [[Wikimedia corruption]] explains how Wikimedia fails to work in fulfillment of the [[wiki mission]] of [[w:Wikipedia:Itself|Wikipedia itself]].  

==board status==
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.

==funding==
Wikimedia is funded by donors, and spends most money it receives as donations on providing hardware for [[MediaWiki]] sites such as [[Wikipedia]]s and [[Wiktionary|Wiktionaries]].  There are no salaried employees at the present time, and no immediate plans to have any at present levels of funding.

Bomis.com donates all the bandwidth needed for Wikipedia and its sister projects.

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.

==Claims of funding used to support MediaWiki software development==
Some claim 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 - the software is "funded" like all other [[Free Software]], by volunteer donations of labour.

==Assets==
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.

==Wikimedia's bias==

Many dispute Wales' contribution and neutrality.
As recently reported at [[w:Talk:Fallujah]]: "His work under the title "God King" for several years encouraged new Wikipedia leaders to use cult-like language that discouraged opposition to his views, and to disparage those who offer counterveiling policies. Bomis's owner Jim Wales set the direction away from a peer-reviewed encyclopedia, and presents as a primary pundit against the feasibility of reviewed encyclopedias in numerous interviews." This much is factual and verifiable. Less clear is the impact of this policy, which "driven by Bomis' desire for rapid development, made Wikipedia more available to those who present election-time and war-time misinformation." Obviously this has become an issue in a US election year when there is an ongoing war in [[Iraq]].

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.

During election or war-time propaganda campaigns, a few hours of misinformation can be useful, but this possibility of disinformation cannot be avoided in [[wiki]]s.

Jimmy Wales claims to try to stay out of dipute resolution 
and remain "neutral" as much as possible "so as to not influence editorial decisions,"
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 
[[block IP]]s for "[[vandalism]]".  This is 
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.

==Wikimedia's response ==
Wikimedia supporters cite as one of the greatest difficulties that Wikipedia has faced maintaining an open and welcoming culture in the face of repeated attacks from "vicious" [[trolls]], such as the ones that they view as beginning to "plague" [[Consumerium:Itself|Consumerium]].  Conveniently, they ignore the fact that these so-called trolls actually authored the majority of the useful material at [[Consumerium]]!

== failure or success ==

[[Wiki management]] issues are complex and difficult, and there are many lessons yet to be learned.  However, to invent a pet label for "heretic" or "dissident" and use that to compel or enforce an existing [[community point of view]] violates every principle of an open project. 

In contrast, supporters point to the "incredible success of Wikipedia" as an excellent model for any community organization.  Wikipedia faces far greater challenges than any single-purpose community such as consumerium, because by design, it draws from a very broad range of ideological backgrounds, and must be welcoming to them all.  

Consumerium, or other narrow-purpose projects, will likely find a more homogeneous user base, thus making [[governance]] decisions much easier.  

Detractors point out Wikipedia's consistent refusal to accept any end-user-driven quality criteria, lack of [[vocabulary]] control, relative slow growth of its [[Simple English]] project, which has been sabotaged to the point of being useless for [[translation]], leaving translators defaulting to complex full English, which necessarily carries a degree of serious English [[culture bias]] - sometimes called [[EPOV]].  

==Wiki management and policy criticism==
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:

*Treating 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 �quitable]] or [[w:fr:Commerce �quitable]] map incorrectly to the [[interwiki link standard]] name which is [[fr:Wikipedia:Commerce �quitable]]:

::It is not up to the service to decide what languages to serve in, nor is it up to the service to decide how to carve up space within that language - that's up to the language itself.  Not only that, but the name of the service is itself expressed in a language:  Hawaiian and Greek, combined using English rules of [[proper noun]] formation.
Other [[Unicode]] character sets make this problem more poignant:
So to use a label like <;nowiki>[[Wikipedia:ch]]</nowiki> is to impose the English word "Wikipedia" first - only if you understand this in English are you then to be allowed to go on to read in Chinese.

*Promoting its own [[community point of view]] as if it were actually a [[neutral point of view]].  Under this policy, sysops are guilty of ignoring [[systemic bias]] questions, and letting [[sysop vigilantiism]] and [[sysop vandalism]] occur freely against outsiders, to the bizarre extremes of assuming that the Wikipedia mailing list consensus on legal issues overrules the best legal advice of actual qualified legal experts, or citing [[echo chamber]] assertions in [[Wikipedia]] articles as if they were true.

::Recently, on [[m:|Meta-Wikipedia]], Users [[Erik Moeller]] and 
[[Auntie Angela|Angela Beesley]] agreed that "only the 
[[community point of view]]" should even be permitted on Meta, 
with every dissenter [[use real names|forced to reveal "their real name"]] 
to attach to positions that dissented.  This of course would put these dissenters in 
positions of very extreme [[vulnerability]] and weakness.  
Moeller even advocated openly on the [[Wikipedia IRC channel]] that Wikimedia should have thugs on call in every country to make sure this point of view was enforced by violence. This led to complaints about him [[w:User_talk:Jimbo_Wales|which you can read here]]. More importantly, the idea that '''''systemic bias is something to be enforced, not balanced''''' has taken root, thanks to advocates of [[sysop vigilantiism]] - who were destroying and damaging essays presenting alternative views even in advance of discussion of this policy point.

*Allegedly planning (certainly discussing open whether) to modify its contributor agreement to make Wikimedia the contributor's copyright infringement agent. This would pose some potential threat to the open content status of Wikimedia projects, by letting Wikimedia use a legal bludgeon to shut down even legitimate mirrors on the basis of even minor inconsistency with the GFDL in places where Wikimedia itself may be arguably inconsistent.  At the moment it requires some degree of consensus before that could happen, since a fair number of contributors would have to sign up for any legal action. Eliminating that hurdle would significantly increase the potential for locking up the content.  See [[w:Wikipedia:Submission Standards]]

*[[Libel chill]] employed as a tactic to silence critics, including those who have raised simple legal issues re the [[GFDL]] and [[charitable status]], which any contributor or citizen has a right to do.

*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.''