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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.
And thus begins Wikipedia burning itself to the ground. Good job, deletionists!
So the context given by the wikipedia article on this guy is: "The appointment sparked controversy among Wikipedia editors due to Geshuri's role enforcing a no-poach agreement between several large tech companies."
So people are a little butt hurt. I don't see what this has to do at all with anything.
Do you have a page on Wikipedia about your experiment?
Got deleted.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The 'no-poaching' compact was an agreement among chief executives. I know someone will drag this down to Godwin's Law in a minute, but he was doing as he was ordered. Are people expecting him to go to Eric Schmidt and Steve Jobs and tell them that he wouldn't follow direction? If he did, he'd get the opportunity to join the keyboard punchers at Wikipedia Editorial.
Are there any other reasons that he shouldn't offer advice on a board of a non-profit company?
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
the board of directors at an organization (public, private, nonprofit) have an enormous impact. They do things like:
1) hire and fire the CEO.
2) Approve budgets, including layoffs
3) approve 5 year plans that detail where the company will be growing. Is it getting out of the wiki industry? doubling down on wiki? hiring a lot? changing editorial policies?
BOD does all of this, and a director has mucho powero.
Wikipedia's big weakness is that it is unreliable because it is consistently gamed by special interest groups, much like most of the media. As a result, its staff loves an opportunity to demonstrate publicly their commitment to fairness, because in reality, they have a lot to hide.
The fact that they don't clean their own house and have become an ego trip for the editors
http://www.theguardian.com/boo...
or the fact that they are useless for any topic with even a whiff of controversy
"You're all fired."
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Since you mentioned Godwin's Law and chief execs, simply following orders is not a justifiable. To paraphrase the exchange between Google and Apple: Wikipedia's editors needs someone to be very careful to make sure this does not happen again. Wikipedia's board needs to make a public example of this termination with the group.
Where's the Wikipedia page about the issue ?
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.
I support the inclusion of SystemD in Linux, Pocket in Firefox, I weight over 400lbs and masturbate to my little pony porn. I revert good faith editors all the time and delete articles with significant references as not notable. If you are a neckbeard Wikipedia wants you as an admin. We are only matched by private torrent tracker admins with our autism.
<sarcasm>
It's been reverted by some deletionist editor.
</sarcasm>
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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.)
2. A small number of vocal opponents from the social "justice" movement object for whatever reason.
3. This small handful of vocal opponents from the social "justice" movement starts some non-binding petition or other useless bureaucratic construction.
4. Social media is used to rile up a bunch of other people who normally wouldn't give a fuck about what's going on, but who still want to feel that they're "making a difference" or "changing the world".
5. Despite claiming that it's wrong to single out a person and direct animosity toward this person, since doing so would be bullying, we see these social "justice" supporters single out the person and direct animosity toward them repeatedly. Yet they pretend it's not the bullying they're supposedly so very much against.
6. Typically within a few days, some new minor and pointless incident will catch the attention of the social "justice" supporters. They'll forget about everything they were angry about in the past, and they'll focus on this new issue for a day or two, until the next outrage comes along.
7. Their petition has no impact at all.
8. Slashdot reports on this pathetically irrelevant issue that nobody sensible actually cares about, well after the people who were originally outraged have forgotten that they were angry.
In this case, the primary power of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Directors is really to administer the funds needed to operate the servers and to hire and fire the staff that runs those servers. There is a whole bunch of other staff doing what I think to be mostly make work projects to spend their donation money.
They gave unto themselves the authority to run roughshod over the editors and to arbitrarily change user privileges as well as to arbitrarily (at their discretion or due to a lawsuit) remove content from the Wikimedia projects (it wasn't even really approved by the community) and they also set up general policies for all of the various projects collectively. Running the server farm sort of helps give them an edge to be able to decide what goes onto those servers, so I suppose their power should be a given in that situation.
Editorial policies on the other hand are usually decided by community consensus and not by the board with often significant pushback when major changes happen without consulting the community. Since they don't hire and fire the actual administration and cleanup of the various wikiprojects or even deal with individual communities in a massive self-destruct mode (it happens from time to time.... that is the job of the stewards and those guys are elected by the community) they really don't deal too much with the actual content nor is there really any CEO like you might find even with other non-profit groups. The various units of Wikipedia report directly to the board, although the chair of the board usually acts in an executive capacity on a more day to day basis if needed.
The board could start locking the servers from write access or do other really stupid things, but that would just fork the projects and send the volunteers elsewhere. It is a sort of uneasy truce between the volunteer leadership and the board with regards to the real power of the board with a general presumption that the board is going to be doing the right thing most of the time even if on occasion they may screw up. In this situation though, the board members really govern a pretty small organization on the whole consisting of just the paid staff of the Wikimedia Foundation and not much else. It is rather prestigious due to the large number of volunteers who contribute to the projects though.
You've committed the Hipster Comparison Misdirection Fallacy.
This is a fallacy we typically see employed by hipsters/Millennials in discussions like this.
Here's how it works:
1. Somebody points out a real problem with an idea, a product, a person, etc.
2. Some hipster comes along, ignores the actual problem being discussed, and instead says, "But is $SOME_OTHER_IRRELEVANT_THING any better?"
3. The comparison is totally irrelevant, because we aren't talking about $SOME_OTHER_IRRELEVANT_THING.
4. Discussion of the actual problem at hand is derailed because now other people feel the need to point out that $SOME_OTHER_IRRELEVANT_THING is in fact better.
nice words, but i only need one: wrongsies!
Without a personal statement from Mr Geshuri about how he views the ethics of his own past behaviour on which to base my judgement, I can't see how this appointment can reasonably move forward.
I sure hope the employee severed for failing to break the law as directed worked this into a fat severance settlement.
wikipedia is already failing big time due to bias of entrenched editors from west.
So start a project to cover the history of the world from an eastern perspective, ideally in the english language, so I can read it, for another perspective. Or if its simply a better run more neutral wiki overall it'll pick up all the disgruntled editors over at wikipedia too past and present, and quickly send wikipedia to a footnotes of history.
Fixing the organization from the inside seems neither requisite nor even particularly desirable. The internet is a big place, if you don't like the 'governing body of an internet site' go and carve another site out and build it anew.
How is it wrong?
This may speak more about a possible personal failure to seek out the best sources of information than it does about the quality of our current day Slashdot web site, nonetheless, I saw this first on Slashdot. An old web-haunt of mine, drawing an increasingly rough crowd, has once again proved it's worth to me. With Wikimedia / Wikipedia being perceived by me to be one of the Internet's greatest enduring assets, and, this, despite it's shortcomings, any news concerning turbulence in those waters weighs greatly upon me. I will do what I can to follow up, and, act according to my perceptions and beliefs. My thanks to the OP.
They gave unto themselves the authority
Yes. this is what boards do. this is why they are so powerful and why appointments matter.
nor is there really any CEO like you might find even with other non-profit groups
Yes there is.
Editorial policies on the other hand are usually decided by community consensus
That could change at any time based on board decision. This is why boards are so powerful.
It got so big, it couldn't help but fail. Sadly this is seen in many large groups, commercial and non-commercial.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
... for people who earn 5 or 10 times as much as me, complaining that they don't get even more.
I find it hard to imagine that any sane person would actually want that job.
That's a mischaracterization. There is plenty of information on Wikipedia on British colonial wars and the effects of British colonialism, its involvement in slavery and human rights abuses, its consequences for the modern world, and its exploitation. There is an entire category devoted to "Famines in British India". There is also an extensive discussion ("Historiography of the British Empire") of how people have written the history of the British Empire over the years.
Or perhaps people like you will come to their senses and start taking a more nuanced view of history. According to modern standards, the British Empire committed horrible crimes against humanity, but not judged within its historical context. Furthermore, no matter how you view what the British Empire did, the fact is that it played an enormous role in shaping the modern world. Arguably, humanity, even the peoples it subjugated, would be far worse off today without the British Empire, just like Britain and much of Europe would be far worse off without the Roman empire and the massive changes it brought to Europe.
Are you kidding? We live in a CHRISTIAN society, and forgiveness has no place in Christianity!
That could change at any time based on board decision.
Not really. The decisions are made by the community except when specific legal issues have shown up which might shut the project down. One such example was the license change, and another was the specific policy requirement that each sub-project adopt a policy with regards to fair-use content or the lack thereof. Even in those cases, it was the community which made the final call with a whole lot of deliberation.
If they arbitrarily tried to change editorial policies on a whim, Wikipedia would simply die. The governing authority started with the volunteers and the board is something that was sort of grafted in later.
Yes there is
I suppose that is a matter of opinion on that position. She is in charge of the non-technical staff (the technical guys really do fit in a different category although I wouldn't want to cross this lady if I was one of the IT guys). It gets a whole lot more nuanced when you get into the gritty details and she definitely does not have any authority at all over any of the specific projects.
Yes. this is what boards do.
I suppose I'm saying that the board usurped authority that previously didn't exist and has gone above and beyond their original mandate for when they were created. The board members were never supposed to have the all power authority you are asserting here that they have and I suppose defacto is authority they possess.
It still doesn't stop the right to fork as exists in all open source projects though.
Oh, you mean you want a propaganda-platform for everybody? That will turn out well, I am sure...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This comparison is not hipster-specific. Almost everyone makes it. The truth is comparisons are useful when looking for ways to innovate and when making to sure that you are doing *comparatively* well, but they are not useful when looking for ways to see if you are doing *what you should be doing*. This is because a field as a whole can be taking the wrong approach. For example, a school can have students with better standardized test scores than everybody else and still not be teaching the students well.
You've committed the Hipster Comparison Misdirection Fallacy.
This is a fallacy we typically see employed by hipsters/Millennials in discussions like this.
Here's how it works:
1. Somebody points out a real problem with an idea, a product, a person, etc.
2. Some hipster comes along, ignores the actual problem being discussed, and instead says, "But is $SOME_OTHER_IRRELEVANT_THING any better?"
3. The comparison is totally irrelevant, because we aren't talking about $SOME_OTHER_IRRELEVANT_THING.
4. Discussion of the actual problem at hand is derailed because now other people feel the need to point out that $SOME_OTHER_IRRELEVANT_THING is in fact better.
You mean this? Or this?
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
read before replying.
what part of "minimal mention " in article on british empire do you not understand? and compare that article to other articles on other horrible regimes.
and why aren't links to articles on horrors( which i already pointed out do exit, before you, in my other comment here ) in main british empire article?
why not link them and try to maintain that link in future? and you will see entrenched editors removing and banning linkers. check the history page of article, as i said and history of talk page too.
face facts !
i already said in my other comment here , before your comment was posted ,
"even most of atrocities of britich empire have separate well cited individual articles but they are not linked ( and prevented from linking ) by said editors to the british empire article.".
and as i said, check the history page of the 'british empire' article and history of its talk page through the years . but perhaps you may prefer to live in denial. and see only the sun shining
You've just pull that figure out of your backside. Its a wild guess at the extra you MIGHT have made IF someone had cold called you AND you had an interview AND you got the job at a much larger salary than you're on now.
Hey - you are allowed to approach companies yourself you know or go via an agency. So get off your cross, you're not a victim here, you're a loser.
What exactly are the grounds for this?
The vote of no-confidence includes no info and the news link is particularly vague allegations of poaching.
Why yes. Yes they do.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The problem with wikipedia admins remains the immature teenage mind - emotional, irrational, quick to judge and slow to alter a judgement despite new evidence.
The comments of the Florence Devouard, a former chair of the foundation and someone whose career I have watched exemplifies this in some respects. I struggle to find the logic in her statement of "Please take my vote as a respectful record of my perplexity." FFS.
work in progress
Got deleted.
Violates WP:NOR and WP:PRIMARY
He effected a bored affect.
I recommend you do the same thing.
Yes, and I consider that to be OK; it is sufficient that those articles are elsewhere on Wikipedia, with "minimal mention" in the main article.
Yes, that was a service to humanity: most human cultures are simply not worth preserving. The Roman empire destroyed the culture of my ancestors, and I'm glad they did.
I disagree with the premise. Wikipedia lists the actions of all those regimes, including the British Empire, so the charge of "whitewashing" doesn't hold.
And criminal fascists and nationalists yearn back for the lost cultures of their ancestors. The Nazis built an entire totalitarian regime on political yearnings like yours.
Wikipedia is a private effort, and it is popular because people find it useful. If you don't like what it says, start your own effort. There are a whole bunch of alternative 'pedias like that.
Seems to me Wikipedia is edited by children, biased spiteful children. They'll do a "Speedy Deletion" on you if they simply don't like the person or entity you're writing about, despite having valid references and significant information. They themselves also "vandalize" in areas they think most Wikipedia officials may not notice. Wikipedia claims there are no designated "editors" or "monitors" in the Wikipedia site. But you just try to add a new article or edit an existing one... At least a couple editors (who were watching) will jump all over you, practically call you names, change your article around (a lot), then even threaten you that you'd "better not violate the site's protocol" again or you'll be banned from making contributions. This has happened to me more than once. Note: My contributions were right on point and inoffensive in every way. (Then they dare to ask us for donations!)