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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."
-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
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
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.
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.
It's a conspiracy by gate manufacturers to get everyone so sick of it that we stop using it.
Gate-gate!
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
[Citation needed]
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!
What like Bill-Gates? Watch the positive moderation flow...
So, instead of hearing from the horse's mouth, you'd rather hear from the other end of the horse?
Bruce Perens.
Bruce Perens.
He's long since lost any semblance of credibility.
Good for the occasional internet soap opera though.
(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.
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.
Anyway, having an entry on Jeff Merkey sure brings new meaning to "You get what you pay for".
Likewise, the governor of New York is being called to resign because he allegedly saw a hooker. This has nothing whatsoever to do with his ability to govern the state, but sharp political rhetoric is being flung about nevertheless. The Bill Clinton affair also springs to mind.
All this means is that Jimmy Wales has some political opponents who are willing to fight dirty. He might be no saint, but Wikipedia seems to be doing pretty darn well for the most part. Your comparison is wildly off the mark. If a politician sees a hooker, that has very little to do with his ability to govern the state. If Jimmy Wales takes money to edit an article on Wikipedia, then this goes directly to the heart of Wikipedia.
The second part is devoid of any logic. If, for example, TheRegister publishes such damning accusations, then (1) that does not make them "political opponents" (Are you seriously claiming that Wales has "political opponents"? I think the editors of TheRegister just can't stand him; that has nothing to do with politics). Second, it doesn't "only mean they are willing to fight dirty". There are quite a few possibilities, and four of these possibilities are: 1. They fight dirty. Or 2. They are mistaken. Or 3. They are exaggerating. Or 4. They are exactly on the mark.
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
"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.
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]":