It is time for Jimbo to resign from the Board of Trustees and give up all implicit rights and privileges regarding Wikipedia, including the right to appoint members to the Arbitration Committee, his administrative privileges, and his membership on private Wikipedia mailing lists. Until that happens, I propose that Wikipedia Review initiate a petition at www.thepetitionsite.com asking the Board of Trustees of Wikimedia Foundation to dissociate from Jimbo Wales.

Example 1: I've been libeled by Jimbo. He sent an email to Editor & Publisher that they published online on December 1, 2005. I have never spoken to Wales in my life, to this day. He did not try to help me with my bio at that point. He's basically lying in his statement to E&P. I would not speak to him if he called me, because I don't trust him and I'd want everything he has to say in writing. He asked if he could visit me in San Antonio in December 2005, or alternately, he offered to pay my way to Florida for a visit. I declined to respond. He offered to visit me in San Antonio again in early 2007. I declined again. I did not then, and do not now, consider anything he says to be reliable. The Wikimedia Foundation has enough problems without Jimbo's association with Wikipedia. His email to E & P about me:



Example 2: In an interview with Ellen Fanning on April 1, 2007, on the SUNDAY program on Nine Network in Australia, Wales blamed Seigenthaler for the problem with the bogus bio. He states specifically that the Seigenthaler incident is not indicative of a general problem with Wikipedia. According to Wales, it was Seigenthaler himself who created the Seigenthaler problem, because Seigenthaler chose to write about his experience in USA Today. Wales thinks the whole thing is "amusing." Listen to this 2-minute MP3 file.

The Rachel Marsden scandal, which led to the revelation that Wales has been irresponsible with his Foundation expense account, is merely the latest in a pattern of behavior that threatens the existence of the Wikimedia Foundation. The petition should invite signatures from those who have resolved not to donate until the Foundation takes remedial action with regard to Wales.

I think if Jimbo is to go, then you have to be thinking about the entire board who are compromised by their failure to be able to control Jimbo's excesses and idiosyncrasies. Obviously, Jimbo is the easy target, but the rest of the board are Jimbo-enablers. In WakiWikiWorld, being an enabler is a more heinous sin than the real thing.

Who, excluding members of this board (purely to save their embarrassment you understand!), would you want running WMF? The starting point would have to be some strong characters that could take on the community and reform the system rather than sit back and leave the powers that be enough rope.

You make some good points. I think, however, ridding themselves of Wales would be an excellent start. Remember given the history of the organization many on the board owed their being in that position to Wales. Being on the Board of Trustees of a non-profit that operates a top ten web site is well over their "pay-grade". Not that they are stupid or evil, just in over their heads. I think Wales wanted it that way. I often refer to this as weak by design. It is hard to stand up to a Sole Flounder under these circumstances.

But by now some members of the B/T have been functioning in this role for a number of years. If they would show Mr. Wales the door there might be some hope. They would also need to leave behind the arrogant "cult of amateur" and show props for normal non-profit practices and ways of doing business instead of making things up as they go along. They could benefit also from rigorous board development and training, which is readily available from established non-profit advocacy and technical assistance groups.

Hillary Clinton? She may have some free time soon.

Petition?

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/petition/123508124

(dammit, there's a misspelling. This site is extremely slow and unreliable, and I can't find any way to edit the title. Arrgh!!)

Example n: Violating wikipedias core principle of neutrality, unfairly impugning the professional reputation of Larry Sanger in a manor that prevented Larry from defend himself (exposing the foundation), shameless COI, using a secret invitation-only pool of administrators to do his dirty work. Jimbo Found Out, Jimbo Fired Up

Thanks for your enthusiasm, but I personally prefer to wait until there is some consensus from moderators and admins on Wikipedia Review that they want to sponsor this petition. If WR is the listed sponsor, and if it becomes a significant effort, then WR is in a position to get some media exposure for its sponsorship. This will, in turn, help increase our traffic to this Board. There's one heck of a lot more information on WR about Wikipedia than can ever be conveyed within the confines of a simple petition or a single news item. Many people out there might find this additional information to be educational.

From the standpoint of contributor to the project, Jimbo has for too long occupied the space where a leader should be.

Maybe Florence should resign too. She is guilty of trying to spin the Associated Press:

I believe that having WR sponsor the petition would guarantee its failure. Most Wikipedians will oppose any idea that originates on WR, regardless of its merits, because they don't want to align themselves with an "attack site." Pressure for Wales to step down needs to come from the general public and within WMF/Wikipedia.

That meme is fading fast.

Agreed, but I don't think we're quite there yet. WR wanting Jimbo gone doesn't mean much; Wikipedia wanting him gone is a different story.

Really, the best thing for him to do would be to gracefully bow out, citing a desire to focus his efforts on Wikia. If he doesn't see that, then the board needs to offer him some encouragement.

NOOO! If you want to end secret prisoner detention and torture, you want to get a president who once was held as a POW and tortured where Geneva rules were ignored. This brings it home. So-- does anybody doubt that candidate McCain would end GITMO? Oh, wait, wups, he wouldn't. http://jobsanger.blogspot.com/2008/02/cand...mo-inmates.html. Golly I guess people can have double standards.

So, you never know. I'd hoped that the best reason to keep Jimbo on, is that he, more than anybody likely to replace him, KNOWS at the GUT and personal level what kind of trouble Wikipedia's present BLP policy causes, and is therefore the mostly likely of anybody at WMF to do away with it completely, and replace with the paper-encyclopedia standard [as for dead guys, even I don't disagree that WP can expand notability].

But again, who knows? The ability of human beings to be hypocritical exceeds the power of comment, sometimes. McCain apparently thinks the people at GITMO aren't like you and me and, well, him. When Hilary "it takes a village to raise a child" Clinton had to pick a school for little Chelsey, she got a private one, not a public one. When questioned about this, the Clintons said: "What we do with our child is none of your business." Well, no kidding. That's sort of how everybody feels, don't you know? Argghh.

When JFK was about to embargo all trade with Cuba, it occured to him that his favorite supply of cigars was about to be cut off. The day before it took effect, he sent his aides out to buy thousands of Cuban cigars-- enough to last him for many, many years (turns out he never needed them all, but that's not the point). The point is about people in power who don't think the rules should apply to THEM (or their friends), and simply are incapable of putting themselves in the other guy's place.

Sociopaths, we call these folks. Psychopaths have no empathy for anybody, and are quite rare. For sociopaths (way more common), empathy is there, but just very selective: My blood relatives and sex-partners are special; everybody else is just animals-- just props for my world. This is a socially formed condition, and is not unlike what happens with kittens and most mammals when they don't get proper interaction with other species during the socialization window time. See The Godfather for the purest form of this-- a tribal feud-kin type mentality that must go right back to our primitive tribal beginnings. It's probably in our genes. So good luck, WR. This is the same old story that happens everywhere there are people.

-- Milt

Pretty much any user-contributed site could be termed
an 'attack site', due to the nature of user-contributed
sites. However, most 'attack sites', unlike WP, aren't
on top of Google or pretending to be encyclopaedias.
Most of them don't go so far as to send jack-booted
violent thugs after people, either, unlike WP.

I agree with Daniel, I think a petition (sponsored by WR) is a wonderful idea.