Third Sector: Why Wikipedia is charitable

Did we talk about this here? I can't recall seeing it discussed (and I hadn't read the article until today).

Interesting to read that again. I did query this with the WMUK board, who replied that Third Sector had got it wrong, and that Burchfield had been misquoted. Looking at it again, I don't quite see how he could have been misquoted.

I will get in touch with Third Sector. But in any case, I took the 'control problem' as the foundation of my complaint to the charity commission. There is clear evidence from the documentation obtained under FOI that the UKCC were concerned about this (hence the second letter of 26 September 2011).

Hmm, it is interesting to re-read this in the context of what we now know about the Wiki UK Ltd submission. I certainly didn't understand the sensitivity of the responses (including the deliberate omission of failed implementations such as flagged revision which demonstrate a failure to control).

And here is Mike Peel saying it is a misquote http://uk.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=...270&oldid=16269

Amazing that they are so confident that they should go on to ban me for asking further questions.

Update. I have emailed Kaye Wiggins at Third Sector, copying my own submission to the UKCC.

Did people manage to confirm that it was AvH who was the main author of the submission? Your reference to "deliberate omission" is interestign to me in that context.

He confirmed it to me.

True to his established type, then.

Utterly false. "Stringent" is defined as strict, precise, and exacting; or rigorous, constricted, tight. Wikipedia has no tight regulations ("anyone can edit") and its policies are far from "strict" (IAR) or "precise" (except for some of the manual of style). Wikipedia is constantly "manipulated" by vandals, copyright violators, POV-pushers, and various trolls. What's important is that the "stringent checks" put in place by Wikipedia often do not stop these manipulators until several years have passed or until the media catches on.



Careful my ass. Wikipedia, much less Wikimedia UK, cannot, does not, has not, and will not stop editors from manipulating their so-called "encyclopedia articles."

One of the things which struck me in the the Charity Commission's correspondence which you quoted earlier was this bit:

I have been editing Wikipedia since late 2006 and I can't say I've noticed any significant improvement since then in the processes available for removing vandalism and inaccurate material, or for improving articles. I didn't bother investigating further when I first read this, but on doing so just now I found that the Verifiability, Neutral Point of View and No Original Research policies were all put in place in 2003 and were already well-developed by the end of 2005. The Recent Changes Patrol seems to have been set up in 2004 and was presumably in full swing by the end of 2005. So what's the significance of the year 2005? If the processes in place were inadequate to "control information" in 2005, what are the measures that have been introduced since then to improve them?

This was precisely the objection I put together in my submission to the UKCC (perhaps I ought to publish this). The WMUK submission, written by Haeften has a narrative something like this: Wikipedia was slow to recognise problems with accuracy until the Seigenthaler incident occurred in 2005. After this date a range of ‘special measures and campaigns’ was introduced, and there were ‘step changes’ 2005-7. Now such material cannot now be added to the biography of a living person without either very reliable sourcing or being rapidly removed.

As I point out in my reply, this gets the chronology entirely wrong. I give a brief chronology of the three verifiability policies, which were implemented by 2003. And I give a number of examples of current biographies where errors, some of them extremely malicious, were not spotted by recent change patrol, or (by implication) by any other policy or control.

I sent a copy to WMUK but they have failed to respond, apart from (1) an email which I was mistakenly copied on, saying that the chronology was ‘boring’; (2) blocking me from their website (3) banning me from attending their meetings and publicly accusing me of harassment and intimidation. In the form I filled in for the UKCC, asking for ‘details of attempts you have made to get the charity to address your concerns’, I mentioned all this.

It’s as though WMUK are confusing the methods and thought process they use on the project, with the methods and process used in the real world to address issues like public scrutiny and due diligence and so on. I think they will find the real world is somewhat different.

Given all these checks and balances how did Johann Hari get to POV push for so long?

Shit happens, we all know that, and one fixes the problem when it does. But from a systems perspective that is never enough. One needs to find out how it was that the problem was allowed to occur in the first place, and then put in place processes to guard against it happening again.

In the case of Johann Hari: How did that happen, and what have they done to ensure that it doesn't happen again?

Looking at the block of Peter Damian on the WMUK wiki, I'm just, once again, struck by the naivete of the community. It's not surprising. Peter was blocked by The Land. The Land is Chris Keating, a director of WikiMedia UK.

I don't see any clue on the WMUK wiki as to the purpose of the wiki, nor as to rules about participation. There will be some level of presumption that if the WMUK hosts an open forum for discussion, which might be presumed to exist to advise it, it will follow some kind of due process. For a member of the board which is to be advised to unilaterally block and censor criticism is organizationally naive. It happens, to be sure, because people are people. But it's not what sophisticated organizations do, not if they have unity among members as a goal.

Is Peter Damian a member? It appears that participation in the WMUK wiki is not restricted to members. IP editing is allowed.

The WMUK is used largely to announce WMUK activities and develop organizational documents. It would not be inappropriate for editing, then, to be limited to a restricted membership. What's offensive here is the appearance of an invitation and of open discussion, when, in fact, it may be highly restricted according to the whims of a director of the organization.

The directors of WMUK are elected by the members at general meetings. "Members" are organizations or individuals. Representation by proxy is allowed. There is a prohibition against the rights of members being restricted without formal approval of the Directors, and removal of rights is subject to appeal to the membership.

Each member *and each organizational member* gets one vote.... The obvious possible problem is not addressed.

There are a number of organizationally naive provisions in the Articles. For example, the Articles have the chair of a meeting making certain decislons considered binding. That's far from tradition; rather, chairs make ad hoc decisions which are *always* subject to appeal to the membership, normal rules of procedures cover all this in detail, so a common standard implementation will include reference to some standard body of procedural rules. Instead many naive organizations tend to re-invent the wheel, and, big surprise, they often fail to understand the consequences and range of possibilities.....

In any case, election of directors is by the method usually called Approval At-Large. This is a method that can be maximally distant from proportional representation, if there are factions involved. It is required, ordinarily, that each director get majority approval at the electing general meeting. A dissident faction can easily, even if representing almost a majority of members, nevertheless not gain any seats. In a way, this is similar to the way that administrators are elected on Wikipedia, with the addition that only so many are elected at a time.

It is not uncommon for nonprofits to be structured in similar ways. The procedures confirm and strengthen the entrenched power of the existing "leaders." The ultimate result is a certain weakening of the organization, but this is not normally perceived by the entrenched. After all, it's only troublemakers and rebels who are excluded.

Approval is quite a decent method for single-winner elections, but single-winner elections are, in my view, inappropriate where the goal is representation of membership. It's better to elect a Board (or in a larger organization, an Assembly) with good proportional representation methods, and let the Board hire servants. I.e., officers.

A for-profit stock corporation would never use Approval at large, because it cedes too much control to the majority at the time of the election. Rather, stockholders can choose directors if they have enough shares ("votes"), either individually or through cooperation.

Are you a "member" of WMUK, Peter? If so, they are violating the Articles if you are excluded without the process specified in the Articles. To be a member, I believe you must have paid the membership fee, given as 5 pounds. If you are a member and are improperly excluded, you would have, I suspect, grounds to sue over it. There are some restrictions on the directors:
So, Peter, if you were a member, were you given the required notice, and were you or your representative allowed to address the meeting of Directors?

I notice that attendance at the AGMs is on the order of eight to ten members. Given that proxy voting is allowed, if the procedure is followed -- and it's incorporated in the Articles -- it's possible for a rather drastic revolution to take place if someone does their footwork. They could replace the entire Board of Directors in one fell swoop.

It's obvious that if proxy voting is allowed, the naming of proxies should be encouraged, so that as many members as possible name proxies. That isn't ordinarily done, and this leaves the organization vulnerable to proxy solicitation, and the common response to it is to disallow proxies. After all, "we" can't allow "them" to take over.

Delegable proxy would be crackerjack for representation at an Annual Meeting, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Those who run these things (notice that it's the same handful of people in attendance at every Annual Meeting, for the most part) don't want to lose control to the "ignorant masses."

I read all your posts this time, Abd. (Actually, I often do). Very useful and interesting, except I am not a member, so it's OK, in one sense, to ban me.

Maybe you should join. What do the bylaws say about accepting or rejecting member applications?

The only condition http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Membership is that members agree not to bring WMUK into disrepute. I might have a problem with that, although WMUK doesn't seem to have any problem with bringing itself into disrepute, in a number of ways.