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Wikipedia Editors Revolt, Vote "No Confidence" In Newest Board Member (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes with news about an editor revolt at Wikimedia to remove Arnnon Geshuri from the foundation's board. Ars reports: "Nearly 200 Wikipedia editors have taken the unprecedented step of calling for a member of the Wikimedia Foundation board of directors to be tossed out. The Wikimedia Foundation, which governs both the massive Wikipedia online encyclopedia and related projects, appointed Arnnon Geshuri to its board earlier this month. His appointment wasn't well received by the Wikipedia community of volunteer editors, however. And last week, an editor called for a 'vote of no confidence on Arnnon Geshuri.' The voting, which has no legally binding effect on the Wikimedia Foundation, is now underway. As of press time, 187 editors had voted in favor of this proposition: 'In the best interests of the Wikimedia Foundation, Arnnon Geshuri must be removed from his appointment as a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation Board.' Just 13 editors have voted against, including Wikimedia board member Guy Kawasaki.
BTW, do we know what his salary at that "non-profit" company is?
Just that the Wikimedia Foundation is swimming in more money than they can spend. Part of that is due to really stupid non-profit laws that prevent setting up a trust account (which can be done by donors... just not the non-profit) to save the money for a rainy day, but also because they get a whole bunch of money flowing their direction too.
As a result, the Wikimedia Foundation has a whole bunch of make-work projects to ensure that they remain "non-profit", but that just bloats their staff size too. As can be seen, I'm not too impressed with how the money is being spent as well since I think better uses of that money could be used.
Actually, the board of directors for a non-profit is arguably the most critical component, and having a bad director can have major consequences. Board members have fiduciary duties, usually summarized as the "three Ds". A quick summary is as follows:
Duty of care: Board members are expected to actively participate in organizational planning and decision-making and to make sound and informed judgments.
Duty of loyalty: When acting on behalf of the organization, board members must put the interests of the nonprofit before any personal or professional concerns and avoid potential conflicts of interest.
Duty of obedience: Board members must ensure that the organization complies with all applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations, and that it remains committed to its established mission.
(Source)
In this particular case, the "duty of obedience" is a real concern given the new board memeber's history of violating anti-trust laws through non-poaching policies. For example, while those tech companies involved in the non-compete scandle had enough cash on hand to pay for the settlement, the impact to Wikipedia could have been much more substantial.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
This guy got hired on as one of Jimmy Wales picks. There are two members of the board who are picked by the community, but unfortunately Jimmy Wales set up the foundation in such a way that he could still control the board and do whatever he wanted to see happen. The end result is that the board can incestually (meaning being accountable from nobody but themselves) select new board members upon their own whim. That is precisely what happened here with this board appointment.
There is the right to fork as is the case with all open source projects, but that is really the only real power that the Wikipedia editors have in this situation other than to complain to the two community board members and see that their one limited voice can be heard on the next election for those positions. The Spanish Language Wikipedia did fork several years ago due to some disputes with the top leadership of Wikipedia (particularly the top admins in that language edition of Wikipedia), but that is far enough in the past that the root causes and resolution have nothing to do with the current situation.
I nearly forked one of the sister projects a few years ago (with widespread support in that sister project), and in hindsight perhaps I should have followed through with the effort too. The really odd thing is how Jimmy Wales offered web space for the fork too. I suppose it just matters how the Wikimedia Board deals with this situation to see if enough editors are finally going to be so completely fed up with the current leadership direction to create that fork or just roll with the punches. Stuff like the Libre Office fork of Open Office is a good example of how such a fork can be successful.
Same here. I also found that articles not being squatted on, I don't need to add references to make a simple edit; nobody checks them anyways.
It is vastly more likely that an edit is rolled back because somebody wants to control an article's message than that it is rolled back for being incorrect, biased, etc. Those all do also happen, no mistake about it. But they're less common than just mindless "no, I already re-wrote that section last year you can't reword it so that it matches the more authoritative article."
So now my policy is, I check the talk page; if there is any discussion in the last couple years, I put in my two cents there (or not) and don't try to actually edit anything. If an article is such a backwater that there is little or no talk text, then I just boldly correct whatever it is, and that correction will likely persist for years.
This fits all of the traits of a typical social "justice" angerfest:
1. Somebody does something that's actually quite minor. (Somebody gets appointed to a position of power. Or somebody mentions the word "dongle" to a friend. Or a police officer defends himself against a violent attacker who happens to have a different skin color.)
The no-poaching agreement in which he was complicit cost me, personally, > $480,000.
There are about 20,000 members of the class in the recently settled class action suit.
You do the math, and tell me how again "quite minor" fits into it... Hint: it comes out to just under $10B, if my claim was about median.