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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.
Do you have a page on Wikipedia about your experiment?
No-poach agreements only hurt employees.
I wouldn't want to have someone complicit in illegal anti-trust activities put in a leadership role in an organization I had anything to do with either. I don't put this in the category of "butthurt", which is a word, if I must call it that, typically reserved for petty, squabbling nonsense. Not that this doesn't apply to Wikipedia editors in general, at least from what I've heard, but this appears to have some merit at first blush.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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 guy was involved with big money and for big corporations. He might not have the best mindset sit at the board of a charity. Some time ago the Mozilla foundation sold itself to the advertisers. Nobody wants another disaster like that with the WMF, which is so much more relevant to everybody. I have no opinion on the guy but I find it great that the editors check that the board of trustees is actually composed of people who can be trusted.
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.
Id guess that:
A - A lot of wiki-bureaucrats and wiki-lawyers are of the tech-professional persuasion
B - This guy masterminded a deal that probably had the net effect of suppressing high tier tech-professional wages significantly.
I imagine there's significant core of senior editors who have yet to succumb to the temptations of paid and / or political editing and are still operating under the delusion that wikimedia should be operated as a non-profit for the benefit of all mankind. Appointing a certified corporate slimeball to the board is going to make maintaining that fantasy through the medium of selective ignorance just a little bit harder.
The guy was involved with big money and for big corporations. He might not have the best mindset sit at the board of a charity. Some time ago the Mozilla foundation sold itself to the advertisers. Nobody wants another disaster like that with the WMF, which is so much more relevant to everybody. I have no opinion on the guy but I find it great that the editors check that the board of trustees is actually composed of people who can be trusted.
I used to try to contribute edits to Wikipedia complete with sources only to find that people that spend an inordinate amount of time on the site roll-back my edits for reasons that were never justified. So while on the one hand I may not like people that look at no-poach agreements favorably, on the other hand, screw those involved with Wikipedia that have overinflated opinions of themselves and their position.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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
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.
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 have mixed feelings. Our society is supposed to believe that people can improve themselves and we should (eventually) forgive people. More importantly the people responsible for this are really Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt, how many of these wikipedia voters are running macs and iphones?
So people are a little butt hurt. I don't see what this has to do at all with anything.
Employees of those major companies were blacklisted from seeking work at other major companies.
They would still get through the hiring and interviewing process, but then they would get automatically and systematically rejected with no reason given.
The least we can do is to blacklist him from positions of importance. This guy is a criminal. You don't put criminals in charge of organizations that you care about.
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.
Our society is supposed to believe that people can improve themselves and we should (eventually) forgive people.
Sure. They guy who just got out of jail for mass-murder can cut my lawn. He can manage the local Wal-Mart. He can teach English-as-a-Second-Language classes to orphan refugees. Just... maybe let's all agree that "passenger airline pilot" isn't the job for him.
Point I'm trying to make is that while second chances are a Good Thing, it's also very reasonable that some bridges are forever burned, and a different way to cross the gorge needs be found.
"Oh no... he found the
Sure. They guy who just got out of jail for mass-murder can cut my lawn. He can manage the local Wal-Mart. He can teach English-as-a-Second-Language classes to orphan refugees. Just... maybe let's all agree that "passenger airline pilot" isn't the job for him.
So you're agreeing its fine that he's a member of the Wikipedia board because he wouldn't be in charge of hiring?
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.
What makes it petty squabbling nonsense is that it has nothing to do with his role at wikipedia. It is just base attack on an employee because people dislike them personally.
If what he did was illegal, they should be writing letters to the government, not trying to prevent him from ever working again.
Wikipedia needs to ban all these editors, because it is illegal to try to blackball somebody from an industry because you don't like what they did in a prior job somewhere else. They're attempting to overstep the authority of their roles in a way that violates the rights of the person they're trying to have cast out. Their removal is necessary to restore wikipedias reputation, because their actions are blatantly biased in a way that is caustic to open participation.
Maybe the guy is a [bad person], I don't know. I do know in this case that other [bad people] are attempting to violate his rights.
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.
If he is a criminal, let a court of law decide —unless you want a drumhead instead.
I think the issue is more about trust. He has been shown to be complicit in immoral decision making when put into a position of power.
As a member of a Board of Trustees he'd be in a position of power involving potential moral decisions and the vote shows that he has yet to regain that trust.
It's not like the guy will be out of a day job and I'm sure there are plenty of other people that the Wikipedia editors would support.
It doesn't hurt that it's just deserts without any lives actually being harmed. From what I have read, he has disrupted other lives far more significantly than this will impact his own.
Wikipedia needs to ban all these editors, because it is illegal to try to blackball somebody from an industry because you don't like what they did in a prior job somewhere else.
And how are they trying to blackball someone from an entire industry? From what I can tell they're just trying to get him removed from what is essentially an executive board. The guy still holds a job at Tesla Motors anyway.
They're attempting to overstep the authority of their roles in a way that violates the rights of the person they're trying to have cast out.
Do what now? What rights are being violated? Had you read anything and not jumped to a knee jerk reaction, you'd see that they clearly understand what they're doing has zero legal weight. If you had a "bad" boss and the "majority" of the "workforce" got together to go above his head to have him removed, or at the very least their concerns heard, I'd say that's a great thing. This doesn't mean anyone has to do as they ask, you know.
Maybe the guy is a [bad person], I don't know.
Yes, that much is obvious. You just don't know anything.
I do know in this case that other [bad people] are attempting to violate his rights.
Do you know that? It seems to me that it's already been pointed out that they have no power to violate his rights in this context. I also wonder why you feel that people shouldn't be allowed to voice their opinion of dissent uniformly.
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.
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.
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
More like "You've been reverted." Pretty ironic it's happening to Wikipedia itself.
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.