Wikimedia

Revision as of 04:07, 16 February 2004 by 142.177.103.144 (talk)

Wikimedia is a private "foundation" in the US run by Jim Wales. In fact, it is a corporate entity. It has no independent board, no legal charity status in any country, and seems to spend money it raises on a small clique of people mostly involved in "fixing" the inadequate mediawiki software (which does not even support full text searches in the Wikipedia project).

It provides mostly bad examples for the Consumerium Governance Organization, which would do well to avoid all the pitfalls it is falling into. See 142.X.X.X/Tim_Starling for a starting list of these, and references to potential solutions that 'Wikipedians' ignore and censor, many of which are longstanding sore points at Meta-Wikipedia, e.g. m:regime change.

Many specific people who participate in Wikimedia are also a problem. They should be excluded from Consumerium as anything other than ordinary users, as their participation and propaganda leads directly to many or most of the problems Wikipedia has. See 142.X.X.X/Angela for one notable example, where a usurper engaged in sysop vandalism at Simple English Wikipedia had to be driven off by trolls for simply not seeing the long term impact of her own actions on that project. Some of these people simply by their tactics, e.g. spun death threats as pioneered by Daniel Mayer and exploited by RickK, subvert due process, degrade wiki management, and cause a wiki-based information service to lose integrity. It's worth noting that Mayer was actually the one to register "wikimedia.org" and define its mandate. With people like this guiding the foundation, it can only collapse.

Finally, the software problems should be considered carefully when choosing wiki code for beyond the R&D wiki phase. Mediawiki is not suitable if full text search is required, extension to requirements set by something other than the current Wikipedia social club is required, and if integrity of the overall software development process is required. MoinMoin has these...