Jimmy Wales Faces Allegations of Corruption

eldavojohn writes "The SFGate site has up an article noting that Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is facing allegations from multiple quarters accusing him of abusing his power. Several people apparently claim he used the foundation to pay for personal expenses, including reimbursement for a $1,300 dinner for four at a Florida steakhouse. Accusations have also been made indicating that he edited the Wikipedia entry of political commentator Rachel Marsden, a woman he was seeing, at her request. In the case of that allegation, Wales replied that 'I acted completely consistently with Wikipedia policy. I did the right thing: I passed along my work to date for other editors to deal with, and I recused myself from the case.'"

Comments

Re:Like Volkswagen

[ajs]

So we've Godwinned a thread that talks about Jimmy Wales "evil plot" to take 3 people out to an expensive dinner and edit his date's user page.

Really? That's what we're going to accuse him of? And with hitler references, no less?

Sad.

What's really sad is that when we talk about the head of SCO or Microsoft, we require much more evil before we start throwing rocks than we do for Google or Wikipedia, both of which have contributed more to Open Source than the vast majority of their peers and frankly made the world just a little bit more useful in their wake.

Abusing Power

[AZScotsman]

Gee - what good is having power if you can't abuse it every once in a while?

Another Conservative Down

[Doc Ruby]

KJimmy Wales is a "Conservative", the extreme kind called a "libertarian" (though there are plenty of libertarians who aren't "Conservative", Wales is the kind of libertarian who call themselves "Objectivists" ). Objectivists subscribe to the ideology put together by Ayn Rand that selfishness is the primary, the only virtue, the only possible way to see the world as it truly is.

Objectivism makes for some great fictional novels, like the allegories Rand wrote to tell people about the Objectivism she made up. But selfishness in that extreme is a pretty good excuse for corruption. Ask a Conservative about it.

BTW, doesn't Fark have an entire category of corruption and other stupidity called "Florida"? Seems inevitable that the embezzlement would take place there.