Over the next year or two, I'll be making some irregular (certainly no more often than 8 weeks apart) posts where I try and test the corruption, or otherwise, of Wikimedia's top brass.

As I'm trying to make this, er, slightly scientific, today I experimented with a control case: The obvious troll.

The plan was perhaps best summarised by a respect admin who, I think, mistakenly emailed me:



After my block (the unblock requests are visible here, whilst some other discussion on Jimbo Wales' talk page is still available at time of writing) I emailed Jimbo Wales about it.

The succinct, predictable, and entirely reasonable, given the context, response was:



This experiment serves as the control. I have some ideas for more sophisticated attempts to secure favours for funding, but I would be interested in hearing other ones by private message.

Watch this space,

UV

Won't they just assume that any future attempt to gain adminship through unorthodox means is yet another part of the experiment, and therefore must be coming from you?

I have my own ideas about how Jimbo & Co. are going to eventually try to "cash in" on WP... Admittedly, it's taking longer than I thought, and they're being a lot more creative about it than I've given them credit for.

Who says I'm going to be trying to gain adminship

This isn't a fully scientific control, but it's better than no control at all...

....Just to play Devil's advocate (and to prove that I'm hopelessly cynical), what proof do we have that WP hasn't given big donors admin. tools before in exchange for their big checks? ....and maybe this is why Der Jimbo is squirming a bit about this?

...I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't already happened...and this "big donor" knows it....and that's why he's bringing it up in public....

Seems unlikely, given I made the posts and I certainly haven't given the Wikimedia Foundation anything...

Okay, well that's that...but if you've ever worked in not-for-profits, you learn very quickly that people will only give money in exchange for something. Sometimes this "something" is prestige, social standing and the like....sometimes it's a bit more "concrete"...I wouldn't be surprised if big donors have been given the tools before...

That is what I suspect too. I'm trying to find out just how blatent I can be about it.

Could be. Jeff Merkey certainly lobbied hard for that, didn't he? More discretion would have served him better, I suspect.

I think people would notice if random accounts got sysopped without an RfA.

Edit: And even if they had the entire board suddenly support someone's RfA, unless they have a fair few edits and all the usual requirements they're not going to make it. So paying would be useless anyway.

Besides, it's not hard to vandal revert for a bit and kiss ass of all the popular people for a few months.

They can make anyone an admin without either an RFA or it showing up in the logs, you know.

Oh of course, but you think people still wouldn't notice? It all depends what you do with the account, I suppose. But I really doubt the Foundation would be that stupid as to risk another PR scandal.

Should the WMF be selling indulgences, like the medieval Catholic Church?

Or they could just give you an inactive admin's account...



I don't see why not, after all it's not as though Wikipedia claims to be led by a God-King, is it?

If they make you a steward, does that show up?

It just depends how they do it. They can just change some flags in the database manually to do effectively *anything* and it won't appear in the logs.

Yeah they could but if the admin acts like HighInBC and gets constantly involved in the administrative noticeboard and all the controversial stuff from day one and does it all the time then people wonder who he is.