Wikimedia: Difference between revisions
update regarding new evidence of Wales and Moeller's reprehensible (and possibly illegal) behaviour; removing flat lie that Wikimedia has an independent board - 3/5 are from Bomis! cut apologetics
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'''Wikimedia Foundation''' is a private tax-exempt corporation (IRS 501) in the | '''Wikimedia Foundation''' is a private tax-exempt corporation (IRS 501) in the state of Florida, USA. It was founded by James Wales. It has no [[independent board]], three of the five members, including Wales as member for life, being employees of [[Bomis.com]]. | ||
Wikimedia is funded by donors, and spends | 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. Some believe that an [[independent board]] is a necessity to increase funding to a point where such employment would be possible. | ||
There are no salaried employees at the present time, and no immediate plans to have any. | |||
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. | |||
Supporters of the Wikimedia foundation claim that most longstanding participants in the [[Wikipedia]] project have greeted the formation of the nonprofit with great enthusiasm, and plans are in the work to set up nonprofit organizations in European countries to complement the global foundation. Wales has given all rights and ownership in the Wikipedia name(s) and websites, as well as some hardware, freely and permanently. | |||
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. Bomis set the stage on which such misinformation can be presented. Bomis' CEO also states in interviews he hopes to profit from commercial release of a Wikipedia CD, which instead could provide revenue to advance the independant non-profit interests of the Foundation." This leads to [[Wikimedia corruption]] charges. | |||
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 - conveniently, they ignore the fact that these so-called trolls actually authored the majority of useful material here. [[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. Wikimedia may be a crime against openness. | |||
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]]. The people responsible for these policies (they were not decided but rather defaulted) have this bias in the extreme. | |||
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. So to use a label like <nowiki>[[Wikipedia:fr]]</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 French. | |||
*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 "Angela" agreed that "only the [[community point of view]]" should even be permitted on Meta, with every dissenter forced to reveal "their real name" to attach to positions that dissented. This of course would put these dissenters in positions of very extreme 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 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]] | *Allegedly planning 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]] | ||
Generally, 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. | Generally, 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. | ||