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"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."
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."
there is fire. It seems that Mr. Jimmy Wales is the subject of a lot of news articles that don't paint him in a positive light.
Im all for it if the details of the purchase is added to the page.
Kevmar is a stand up guy. He speaks his oppinion yet heardly flames anyone, even when they do mock his spelling.
this post was brought to you by Kevmar for no charge
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
...I can't imagine that Jeff Merkey would be high on anybody's list. I'd like to the Wikipedia article for full details, but, well....
Citizendium can be the answer to many of these problems...
Also Wikitruth sheds a lot of light on ol' Jimbo Wales and his shenanigans
Here's to the crazy ones
am I the only one who's getting annoyed at any sort of unsavory behaviour being referred to as something-gate
We came,we saw, we kicked it's ass!
Perhaps the news articles reflect the increasing importance of WikiPedia, and the desires of some people to control it.
Quote from the Slashdot story: "Merkey filed a harassment lawsuit in 2005 against a number of people and organizations, including Slashdot."
Maybe someday Slashdot will be important enough that there are a lot of accusations.
So this guy is a power-hungry freak. Wow... did anyone not see this like a year ago, when Jimmy Wales was basically telling the world that he was here to save us all?
Hopefully he'll be selling timeshares again soon.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Jeff mostly just wants to be listened to. He can be grandiose and can get somewhat separated from reality.
Any article about Jeff on Wikipedia that relates events around Novell, SCO, and other stuff in 2005 would be a liability problem. I am not the slightest bit surprised that Wales had to re-write it. I don't think this has to be connected to a donation.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
MOD PARENT UP, of course.
The locking of the article for editing by senior editors only is a tad odd.
However, I don't know how common this is. If we are to assume innocence, then it might be that wikipedia was just trying to avoid being a location for mud slinging.
If not, then yup, it's a bit odd.
However, merkey has long been associated with wacko behaviour, so in this light his accusation could b viewed as no more than yet another attempt to keep his name in internet headlines.
Given the absurdity of his previous claims, I'm tended to lean towards this last possibility.
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
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.
People Talking in Movie shows.. people smoking in bed.. people voting republican.. GIVE THEM A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
Bruce Perens.
Most peoples' edits are anonymous on Wikipedia only to the most surface of observations. Even minimal digging can reveal an IP, and then the Virgil scanner can do the rest. Of course, there are a some folks out there that can purposefully hide their IP identity. But still, I wouldn't call Wikipedia edits "anonymity guaranteed"
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Look no further than this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3ARequests_for_comment%2FJeffrey_Vernon_Merkey2&diff=133328226&oldid=133327935#Dealing_with_Major_Financial_Contributors_of_the_Foundation_who_Edit_Wikipedia
He's long since lost any semblance of credibility.
Good for the occasional internet soap opera though.
However, I don't know how common this is. If we are to assume innocence, then it might be that wikipedia was just trying to avoid being a location for mud slinging.
If not, then yup, it's a bit odd. I don't have time to follow wikipedia closely anymore, but AIUI article locking has become fairly common over the past few years, as a way of stamping out edit wars.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Go to mr. Wales' blog, scroll right to the bottom and press the "powered by wordpress" link.
:P
I get "therightpills.com" (tested on 2 computers, so i doubt its adware). Has the self proclaimed dictator of history been hacked?
No kitty, this is my pot pie!
(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.
People Talking in Movie shows.. people smoking in bed.. people voting republican.. GIVE THEM A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
If you read the article closely, you'll see there really isn't a whole lot of fact, merely a bunch of accusations.
The thing that kept running through my mind as I read the article was that [citations were needed].
Bottom line: This article is definitely not NPOV, and none of the assertions therein have been substantiated.
Wikipedia is still one of the best bargains in the world. You get an amazing amount of valuable content for no cost. Should you use it as a sole source for a PhD dissertation? Of course not. Is it the best place to go if you're not a mathematician but would like a little background into combinatorics, are looking for some quick background into the War of the Roses, or want biographical data on the "father of alkali", James Muspratt, or the structure of the Dominant 7th chord? Fuckin' Aye.
When most of the conceptually anemic Web phenomena like Twitter are forgotten, Wikipedia will still be a valuable tool for people who want to look stuff up, and will be remembered for making the most of a brilliant idea and basically changing the way people use the Internet and facts.
Naturally, you're going to find twerps like Merkey who are pissed that the world doesn't recognize their brilliance and so get pissed at someone who they believe has garnered the adulation rightfully their own. Despite his best efforts and the insatiability of a zillion web news aggregators, Merkey will continue to be nobody.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Bruce Perens.
Anyway, having an entry on Jeff Merkey sure brings new meaning to "You get what you pay for".
Is this a sperm-bank conspiracy?
Who comes up w/ these buzzwords, anyhow?
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
Money is only one of any number of threats to the integrity of such an organization. People inside the organization subverting resources to their own ends, building little zones of control, and so on. You deal with them all the same way -- by operating as openly as possible. If people can see where the money is coming from, they can make up their own minds about its influence.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Gimme a break. Let's face it: Wikipedia is a forum board that's gone "legit", and out of control, with a proprietary fancy interface that doesn't happen to look like VBulletin.
The same problems of moderation, rewrites, bitching, whining, favouratism and hidden motives and agendas... all go on on Wikipedia, just as they do on lesser boards. The problem is, Wikipedia involves "real-world" problems, and affects people in very concrete ways.
I was recently involved in a tussle on a board regarding a female member being stalked by another board member. Through-out, the arguments were wide and ranging, but almost invariably involved the "virtual" world vs. the "real" one.
If people understood the implications of having such a widely-[mis]regarded source cited as a credible fount of information, and the impact that could have on the real world, I think we'd all be better off, and relegate this misbegotten site to its real impact: a forum that has blown to momentusly dangerous proportions, and taken its adolescent behaviour to the masses.
Let's not fool ourselves. It could be porn reviews, or celebrity photos. No... it's Wikipedia.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. ~~ Hunter S. Thompson
"Is it the best place to go if you're not a mathematician but would like a little background into combinatorics"
No. I've never read a maths article on wikipedia that wasn't written without regard to the ability of the average reader to understand it. Any time I try to read one I see an enormous chunk of long words, pages and pages of meaningless symbols and precious little explanation - whatever level they're written for, it's above me - and I have a degree in theoretical physics!
FGD 135
I don't think a change to BSD is anything the kernel team would seriously consider, though.
Bruce Perens.
> Nice of Jeff to give a donation, but stubbing down a bad biography is standard practice.
So you are saying that Jeff did give a donation? And I take it that the stubbing took place right afterwards?
Can you explain why, even the negatives about Jeff that can be well documented were removed?
> So it's really a non-story. We protect articles against people who want to write "WEE WEE WEE JACK IS GAY."
Was the stuff about Merkey really of that nature? I saw the original article, and it did not look like that to me.
If an article is deleted, all history, both of article edits, and discussion are fully deleted. so no, the past version wouldn't be in the history, if the article was deleted then rewritten.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
"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.
People Talking in Movie shows.. people smoking in bed.. people voting republican.. GIVE THEM A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
Because people might read one of his wild crazy posts about buying the Linux Kernel under a commercial license and want to know who that crackpot is :) Then they can find out that he used to work at Novell, allegedly stole trade secrets to form his own company, spent $4 million in the ensuing litigation, and founded his own Native American church in Utah so people can smoke peyote legally.
Well, people say this but the reality is that Linux has has two significant license modifications, Wikipedia has had one, and not all parties were contacted when these things happened. Many Open Source projects go through similar changes. Until you get a court case, it's not going to be 100% sure, but as far as I can tell right now, the absent, dead, etc. can't hold up the majority of the Open Source developers if they decide to make a change to their collective work.
Bruce Perens.
Jeff Merkey may very well be litigious, but in my experience, he's not a liar. Let's be sure to separate the two issues. Jeff first told me about being shaken down by Jimbo Wales for Wiki-protection money in November of 2007. We discussed it multiple times in the interim, until I first wrote about this situation last week on my blog, AntiSocialMedia.net. Over the months, Jeff's story has remained consistent and the facts as he describes them to me are easy to correlate with the historical record. That, combined with the recent revelations of Jimbo trading favorable article treatment for "female companionship", convinced me that I could confidently blog about this situation. It's my hope that now others, similarly extorted, will find ways to tell their stories.
Ah my bad, I wonder where that darn "Criticism" section keeps going?
foolish post period.
.01% arsenic, I suspect Wikipedia may be a mixture of bait (the article you mention) and payload - a few key facts buried, hidden, censored, whitewashed, etc ...
No one is suggesting that Wikipedia isn't a cool collection of link, and abstracts on mundane and sterile topics such as the canard you've trotted out here.
What people are suggesting is that Wikipedia is not what it claims to be, a neutral collection of verifiable facts, and is rather a collection of facts highly selected and censored, whitewashed, and otherwise secretly dictated by a few individuals for personal and pecuniary interests.
Rat poison is less than
Been There, got the teeshirt.
AIK
Agreed. Wikipedia's math pages are seemingly written by mathematicians to be read by other mathematicians. I've been taught enough math to falsely believe that I could follow a mathematical explanation but Wikipedia proved me wrong in no time at all. Wikipedia, in general, is a fast way to access information and follow information chains but in the particular case of maths it seems that dusting off an old uni book about the subject is both faster and way more productive.
This is exactly why pornographers and masturbators shouldn't be allowed to found anything.
After all, I am strangely colored.
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]":
Because anyone who worked for years in the tech industry and managed to confuse a kill file with an assassination list, in a lawsuit on the topic is a legend in his own mind^h^h^h^h time.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Woosh!
Buried in the article, and shuffled into other articles. In particular his farcical attempts to pretend others had no input to the creation of Wikipedia.
It's not this laughing-stock of a showman who worries me though, it's the muppet uber-wikipedians who mindlessly humour and support him. They're scary.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
2) I suppose anything that can be edited by more than one person could be compared to a "forum board"
3) What's your point?
I think it's always been a question of organization. If Wikipedia is able to organize, source and create a context within which more information can be placed than in any other source, it has tremendous value. If it falls down on those criteria, then it's just the Internet's stream of consciousness (which isn't valueless, but not nearly as valuable).
You, of course, get to decide how it's measuring up.