An alert faculty member at the University of Santa Clara sent us this notice of the upcoming conference, to be held on May 15.

It looks like it may be a quasi-debate between Mike Godwin and a Wikipedia critic by the name of Carl Hewitt:

Carl Hewitt is an Emeritus Professor of MIT who was unceremoniously banned, primarily for daring to edit his own biography.

Ironically, Mike Godwin also admits to having edited his own biography.

Hewitt sets forth the somewhat tedious details of his initial complaint here.

The Guardian carried a story about his banning. I personally invited the journalist who wrote that story to answer her critics here, but she declined to respond to my invitation.

She's been brainwashed, alas.

Apparently Mr. Godwin has "bowed out" of this event:

http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/focus...pedia-panel.htm

...and I guess it was too late to replace him, since it's only two days away. Hard cheese on them - it's not much of a "panel discussion" when you have just one guest and one moderator...!

So I wonder why Godwin ditched? Is he too busy with WMF damage control these days, what with the Erik Moeller story and all the porn-related stuff? SCU isn't that far from San Franscisco, so I'd assume it isn't a travel-related issue, unless he was called away to Singapore all of a sudden.

According to Valleywag

http://valleywag.com/390155/wikipedia-lawy...-of-ethics-talk

"But in the face of a groundswell of criticism of Wikipedia — that its frontman, Jimmy Wales, is corrupt; that its executive director, Sue Gardner, is power-mad; and that its deputy director, Erik Möller, is dangerously out of touch with potential donors' views — Godwin has remained silent."

Let's be clear, the idea that a representative of Wikipedia would appear at a forum to discuss "ethics and values" seems so incongruous that in retrospect, Godwin's probably made a safer choice by staying away.

Indeed, the University would have had to set aside 40 minutes for pure, sustained laughter once audience members started to put these elements together.

Hmm. I can see why he wouldn't want to get ambushed over the Erik Moeller allegations, but you'd think he (and they) would have come up with at least some sort of excuse - not having one just leads to speculation that they're clamming up to protect themselves from angry mobs. (Ironic though that may be.) Then again, people will probably think that no matter what they say, so saying something will just lead to additional speculation that they're lying, too.

One of the Valleywag commenters kinda-sorta hinted that Godwin may now be realizing that he made a Bad Career Move in taking the WMF job, which I could certainly agree with. If only he'd spent some time on Wikipedia Review beforehand, we might have talked him out of it!

Time to bathe the chickens.