"DonorGate" Is Latest Scandal To Hit Wikipedia

MSTCrow5429 writes "In the latest of a long train of scandals to hit Wikipedia, the Sydney Morning Herald reports on an accusation that founder and Wikia President Jimmy Wales traded a multi-thousand dollar donation for an article re-write. Jeff Merkey, formerly of Novell, claims that Wales approached him in 2006 and said that for a fee, Wales would personally see to it that the article on Merkey, which had cast him in a negative light, would be re-written in Merkey's favor. Merkey claims that after he donated $5,000, Wales followed through on this quid pro quo. The Wikipedia edit history does indicate that Wales wiped out the article on Merkey, and then personally re-wrote it. The SMH reports that Wales has called the allegation 'nonsense.'" Merkey filed a harassment lawsuit in 2005 against a number of people and organizations, including Slashdot. Slashdot was removed from the suit on 2005-07-20.

Update: 03/12 00:39 GMT by KD : Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh provided this official statement: "Current allegations relating to Jimmy Wales soliciting donations for the Wikimedia Foundation in order to protect or edit Wikipedia articles are completely false. The Wikimedia Foundation has never accepted nor solicited donations in order to protect or make edits to a Wikipedia article — nor has Jimmy Wales. This is a practice the Wikimedia Foundation would never condone."

Comments

Re:wikipedia not a wiki?

[Herschel Cohen]

Not if it is locked, as stated at the end of the article.

Following his decision to erase Merkey's entry and start over, Wales placed it under his "special protection". Protected entries can only be edited by Wikipedia administrators.

Jeff Merkey is banned from Wikipedia

[adam613]

Jeff Merkey got banned from Wikipedia for making legal threats. I'm not terribly surprised to hear he's making accusations like this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Jeffrey_Vernon_Merkey&oldid=148079940

Jeffrey Vernon Merkey: Whackaloon

[SirFozzie]

Let's not forget this was the person who wanted to buy Linux because the GPL would be its doom, so he could re-issue it under a Cherokee license.

This is the person who demanded that all homosexuals recuse themselves from dealing with the ArbCom case the last time he was banned from Wikipedia.

He demanded special treatment the last time he was on there, because he was such a big donor. (didn't get it mind you, but he wanted it, real bad).

This is a person who:"In 1998, the Fourth Judicial District Court of Utah found that Merkey "regularly exaggerates or lies in his comments to others about events happening around him. It is as though he is creating his own separate reality" (From SCOFacts)

JVM is a smart guy, no one denies that.

But he's also nuttier then a fruitcake.

Re:Jeffrey Vernon Merkey: Whackaloon

[JoshuaZ]

SirFozzie's obersvations are absolutely correct. If anyone cares, here is a link to where Merkey claimed he was being subject to persecution because he was heterosexual and demanded that any gay ArbCom members recuse themselves from the case: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Jeffrey_Vernon_Merkey/Workshop&oldid=147695621#Motion_to_Recuse_Self-identified_Gay_Arbitrators . Merkey made repeated legal threats against the English Wikipedia and editors there. When he was blocked repeatedly for such threats he then switch his tact to claiming that unnamed other individual associated with the Cherokee tribe would sue Wikipedia if Wikipedia did not conform to his definition of who counted as Native American. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Jeffrey_Vernon_Merkey/Proposed_decision#Jeffrey_Vernon_Merkey as well as http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Cherokee&diff=prev&oldid=131420490 , http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Cherokee&diff=prev&oldid=136934917 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Cherokee&diff=prev&oldid=136932731 . He went so far as as to make his own template (now deleted) to place at the top of article See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion/Log/2007_July_12#Template:NativeWarn http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Cherokee&diff=prev&oldid=131434937 The claim that he is making in this case is particularly interesting because he tried repeatedly to claim earlier in a (now deleted) essay that if Wikipedia blocked any user or IP addresses for making personal attacks, legal threats, or any other behavior that that would result in any donor being able to sue the Foundation. He made other related claims about donors having special rights (I don't remember the precise details. I'll try to see if I can track down a copy of the essay). Thus, the claim that he is making now is well within the unique way that Merkey views Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. That by itself is strong evidence against Merkey's viewpoint. There is the serious additional issue that frankly $5000 isn't that much to the Foundation nor is it that much to Jimbo Wales who is independently wealthy. The idea that the Foundation or Jimbo would be influenced by a donation of that size is laughable. Overall, Merkey is crazy and is once again making claims that are divorced from reality.

Re:He also tried to buy Linux, didn't he?

[Bruce Perens]

Didn't he also offer to pay $50,000 if they'd BSD-license Linux or something?

Uh-huh. He vastly underestimated the value of the code and the difficulty of getting that kind of license change done. Most folks took the offer as an insult.

I think he also filed an anti-GPL lawsuit

That was Daniel Wallace.

But it's Jeff Merkey

[Anonymous Coward]

He's long since lost any semblance of credibility.

Good for the occasional internet soap opera though.

Re:wikipedia not a wiki?

[SirFozzie]

(fair notice: I am an administrator on Wikipedia, same nick)

There's two types of protection:

Semi-Protection: Where all anonymous editors (those without accounts), and those whose accounts are less then four days old (I believe) are kept from editing these articles. This is to prevent someone from registering a new account, and going on a vandalism spree.

Full-Protection: What the JVM article was for a while. That means only administrators can edit the article. This is GENERALLY used only for short periods, where vandalism/edit-wars are too great. This is generally to make the folks take it to the articles talk page and hash things out. In GENERAL (not saying every circumstance, or what have you), when an article is full-protected, the only edits that are done, even by administrators, are either to remove vandalism, material that violates Wikipedia's policies on the Biographies of Living People (Libelous material, etcetera), or things that have full consensus on the talk page.

Once tempers cool down, the article is unprotected. The problem is: There's a great amount of people who take great pleasure in poking Mr. Merkey with sticks, just so they can get a reaction out of him (the Yahoo SCO Message Board took great pleasure in trying to drive him insane, for example). In the ArbCom case that Mr. Merkey was banned from Wikipedia (again), three of his main annoyances, were also banished.

In this specific case, I can understand why the page was full-locked for a while, because these people were taking great pleasure in their attempts to make JVM lose the plot.

Re:Where there is smoke....

[CatherineCornelius]

This is the only Slashdot account I could remember at short notice (all the other ones are lame Ian M Banks ship names). My name is Tony Sidaway and I've been a Wikipedia editor about three years.

Like the "Jimbo ordered people to fix Marsden's bio" thing, this is a non-story. Jimbo has frequently taken the initiative in stubbing down crappy articles and asking editors to start afresh. Good practice. Nice of Jeff to give a donation, but stubbing down a bad biography is standard practice.

The reason for temporary protection (locking the article to stop edits by some users) is given by Wales as "an attempt to keep trolling to a minimum during an experimental rewrite" which is pretty sensible.

One thing that does look very odd is that the protection was not removed until this story broke. We're as partial to kool-aid as the next guy, so we do tend to defer to him perhaps more than he would like. :/ But this did NOT stop anybody editing the article, and I'll explain why.

There are two main modes of protection on the open source mediawiki software on which Wikipedia operates, usually called semi-protection and full protection, and in addition to that, protection applies to both editing and renaming/moving (because a common form of vandalism used to be to rename an article to something nasty). In the edit summary of Jimbo Wales' edit timestamped 20:58, 23 May 2006 , you'll see "[edit=autoconfirmed:move=autoconfirmed]". This indicates normal semiprotection ("autoconfirmed" users are those who have registered a username and waited about three days--there's nothing more to it than that--no vetting, no human intervention at all). So anybody patient enough to wait three days could edit that article.

So it's really a non-story. We protect articles against people who want to write "WEE WEE WEE JACK IS GAY!" all the time and this is precisely the mode of protection we use for, say, "George W. Bush"

Any Wikipedia editor with an account over three days old could edit that article for the whole of its post-Jimbo existence.

Re:Did you have to white-wash everything negative?

[SirFozzie]

"BTW: you never mentioned whether wikipedia accepted a donation from Merkey - or one of Merkey's sponsors."

That's because I have no particular knowledge whether Merkey is a donor to the Wikimedia Foundation, other than JVM's words. I am an administrator, but last I checked, there was, I want to say, about 2,000 of us (administrators) on the project. So, there's people who are in the know about various things, but I'm not one of them.

I did comment on JVM on some of the previous steps prior to the Arbitration Committee(as I said, there's no doubt that there is a bunch of folks who travel around trying to troll JVM into losing his cool, but to be quite honest, it doesn't take much prompting, as you can see from some of the other posts that have surfaced.

And as for the whitewashing, well, first off I didn't do it, or review it at the time, but the rules in general, are that on BLP (Biography of Living Persons) articles, if information is contested, or controversial, and it's not highly sourced, it comes out of the article, and should not be added back in unless it's properly sourced. While usually a request doesn't get Jimbo's attention straight out, it's not uncommon for intense scrutiny to be focused on an BLP article by a cadre of volunteer editors who answer complaints by people or companies via email about their article (it's called the OTRS system), where they consider information to be incorrect. Sometimes, when a vast majority of the information in the article is either incorrect, or presented in a biased manner, it requires a total re-write of the article, which may have happened here.

Again, I'm not trying to say what did, or did not happen, I'm just trying to explain how things should work. Whether it is how it works in practice, as well as it does in theory, is something I won't venture to guess on.

Merkey v. Perens et al.

[petrofsky]

Bruce Perens wrote in Slashdot comment #22722890: "Jeff Merkey filed suit against me, and against PJ, some years ago. His family eventually convinced him to withdraw the suit against me, I don't know how his suit against PJ was resolved."

I (Al Petrofsky) was also a defendant in that case, Merkey v. Perense, et al., No. 2:05-cv-521-DAK, D. Utah, filed June 21, 2005. You can find full details here: http://scofacts.org/merkey

Merkey voluntarily dismissed his case against Pamela Jones. In the written dismissal notice he filed with the Court, he said that he was dropping it in favor of "pursuing criminal prosecution in the various states these offenses occurred". Needless to say, I am not aware of any such criminal prosecutions ever taking place.

The above comment, that Merkey's "family eventually convinced him to wihdraw the suit against" Perens, is the first I've heard of there being any involvement by Merkey's family in Merkey's decision-making in the case. At the time, Merkey wrote an entry on his website, which he later filed with the court, stating that he was dropping the action against Perens in exchange for Perens having allegedly made a written statement about "a large number of written attacks with violent connotations made against [Merkey]":

PLAINTIFF JEFFREY VERNON MERKEY'S EX-PARTE MEMORANDUM IN SUPPORT OF MOTION TO CONDUCT EXPEDITED DISCOVERY

... 11. Bruce Perens approached Plaintiff and negotiated setttlement of his claims in exchange for withdrawing his false and libelous comments, and adminishing Linux and OSS members for posting death threats on the public Internet, and was dismissed from the complaint without prejudice. (Exhibit 4)

... DATED this __20___ day of July, 2005.

... Exhibit 4

Bruce Perens Dismissed without Prejudice from Federal Action 2:05-CV-521-DAK

Wednesday, July 06 2005 @ 06:30 PM MDT

Contributed by: Admin

We are pleased to announce settlement has been reached between Mr. Bruce Perens and Mr. Merkey relative all claims and causes of action arising from Federal Lawsuit 2:05-cv-521-DAK filed in US District Court in Utah. All claims and causes of action have been dismissed relative to Mr. Perens as of this date.

On a personal note, Mr. Merkey applauds Mr. Perens courage, candor, and demonstrated leadership in addressing these issues.

Mr. Perens has issued the following public statement regarding the litigation and this statmeent is posted here pursuant to an agreement between the parties.

STATEMENT OF BRUCE PERENS

"You may have noticed that Mr. Jeff Merkey has filed suit against a number of net entities and I. Mr. Merkey subsequently offered to withdraw his claims against me if I would issue a short statement. Of course I was concerned that his request could be an attempt to suppress my right to free speech on the net, but it turns out that the statement that Mr. Merkey asked for contains nothing I would not want to say.

Several people who have my sympathy are still being sued. I feel that my removal from the case will only hasten its demise, and I need to spend my time on important fights rather than this silly one.

I have made some statements regarding Mr. Merkey's relationship to SCO and Canopy Group that he would like me to clarify. He sold certain assets of his company to Canopy Group some time ago, but did not go to work for Canopy or SCO. Mr. Merkey has expressed a very strong disdain for both companies.

I subsequently suggested in public statements that Mr. Merkey work to cultivate his people skills in engaging and interacting with others, which is something he himself has admitted needs improvement. Subsequent to making these public comments, I oberserved

Re:Merkey v. Perens et al.

[Bruce Perens]

Hi Al,

It looks like I owe you an apology. FYI, my phone number is 510-984-1055, it's on my web site too. You are welcome to call any time if you have questions or complaints, as are all in the community. It rings in my home and office. It doesn't accept calls when we would be asleep.

I am surprised that the thing actually got one hearing. I never knew. Obviously the fact that you were involved at all is absurd, that a Magistrate would suggest that sort of judgement against you is highly absurd.

That looks like the statement I made. I haven't run "diff".

At the time the lawsuit was filed, I asked Slashdot's company and Novell for help. No help was forthcoming from either company. This worried me more than anything about the case, not because I needed help that much, but because those companies were willing to let their community down that way.

I had some advice from Larry Rosen, who felt that the case was bull, and that nobody was really threatened. If I had known that you would be threatened to the extent you were by the Magistrate's statement, I might have acted differently. But in the end, Larry was right - nothing came of the case.

My main reason for getting out of the case was that in a fight as stupid as that, everybody looks stupid. Walking away was the only respectable action, in my opinion at the time.

Jeff Merkey's family thought it was stupid too, and pressured him to stop, and he approached me and settled. I gave him a statement that did not compliment him and did discourage the folks on Slashdot who really did talk about physical violence. Remember, this was at the hight of the SCO stuff, and tempers were high. Sure, the talk about physical violence was inflated and taken advantage of by anyone who wanted us to look bad in the press. But the reality is that if you don't want to look bad for that sort of stuff, you have to make sure that you and your friends are not doing any of it at all. My comment was effective at stopping that stuff.

Jimbo Wales problems now stem from the Wikipedia's growing pains, the mistakes that any leader makes when going from nothing to high visibility, the fact that various entities would like to see Wikipedia tarnished, and just the fact that his and Wikipedia's profile is high enough that gossip about him gets web hits for news sites. I've been there. IMO, his worst problem is nothing to do with this, it's the fact that Google looks as if they might do their best to screw Wikipedia and get something that they own, and that carries their ads, in its place. We've never really seen Google turn against an Open Source project before, this will be interesting if it really happens. IMO, Google would lose.

So, you must be angry about all of this. I'm sorry. I didn't know.

Bruce