Seven years ago Alex Roshuk, a lawyer who was also one of the first Wikipedians, decided to bare his soul about the project he was no longer a part of. He did so on a blog with only two posts. Below is the second one:
"When I first became aware of Wikipedia sometime in 2002 I did not fully
realize the potential it might have offered. It took me until the late
winter of 2003 to begin to appreciate the option I had to contribute to
a collective work. At first I just started writing or editing a few
articles and slowly, after a few weeks I began looking around at
various user and talk pages and I began to discern that there was a
definite community forming. I learnt the names of individuals like Mav and others. There seems to be a few
people who must have been spending an enormous amount of their time on
Wikipedia (which I calculated based on the amount of time I had spent).
I began reading the archives of the mailing lists (really there was one
main list at that time) and started making comments about things
relating to copyright, mostly the issues of fair use which popped up
quite often on Wikipedia and the issues relating to page histories and
copyright infringements (something that I think most people really did
not understand). What I began to glean from these early reviews of the
Wikipedia database that what was being offered was a truly transparent
opportunity to work as a community. As a Canadian and communitarian I
saw the possibility of people working together even on their disputes
as many of the early discussions on Wikipedia (mostly on the wiki
called meta that was distinct from any of the other encyclopedia
projects and designed as a place of debate) that there were healthy
transparent debates going on between Wikipedians. I found this
refreshing and I found the talk of transparent governance on the
mailing lists also refreshing. Being a jaded New York and litigation
lawyer I really did not have much faith in the world in general any
longer.
So I volunteered to help with some legal tasks. I helped
Jimbo pull together some information regarding the organization's
application for tax exempt status (which was supervised by Jimmy Wales)
and I spent time discussing the options of making Wikipedia a
membership or non-membership board controlled organization. What we
came up with was compromise solution based upon the need for input from
all the volunteer editors (whom we also called members) to reach up to
the top of the organization's board of trustees. I convinced Jimbo to
put a dispute resolution mechanism into the board structure (that was
not the same as the arbcom and mediation committee structure that had
been developed on the mailing list to deal with editorial disputes) and
I think Jimbo had an appreciation of the need to have an organizational
feedback mechanism to deal with member disputes or management issues.
While
it was true that some of the structure aspects of the bylaws (which
were submitted to the IRS) were never implemented by the Board (who was
originally Tim Shell, Michael Davis and Jimmy Wales) it was clear that
there were members because the organization had several elections. I
personally don't think these elections were valid because no proper
notice was given to the many members who were eligible to vote and the
only people who did vote — I believe — were mostly administrators who
were active. I actually never voted on these "elections" because I did
not know about them. I had never received any notices of these
elections (even though I monitored my email from the foundation)
because I don't think any email was ever sent to the "members". How
these people got elected I will never understand because Jimbo and his
appointed CEO Brad Patrick announced in 2006 that there had never been
members of Wikipedia or Wikimedia. Suddenly with the appointment of Mr.
Patrick all the openness of Wikipedia's early years had disappeared.
What
was the reason for this? I cannot be sure but when I looked at Brad
Patrick's talk page and various information about Wikia, Inc. (the for
profit start up that Mr. Wales created after starting Wikipedia) I
discovered that what was going on was that Mr. Patrick and his law firm
had been hired by Mr. Wales to start Wikia, Inc. and help it get
venture capital funding (Mr. Patrick was an associate in a top
corporate law firm). It seemed that his law firm decided that Mr.
Patrick was not needed at the firm and that he would better serve the
legal interests of the partners if he was appointed a paid employee of
Wikimedia Foundation Inc. Strangely enough he became both the CEO and
Corporate Counsel even though there is a clear issue of conflict of
interest that was never addressed.
What really started making
me upset was that Jimbo Wales had stated on the foundation mailing list
that sounded like was part of the discussion to hire Brad Patrick. About a year earlier I suggested that he might talk to someone locally in St. Petersburg to act as
standby in case someone filed a lawsuit against Wikimedia Foundation not hire a full time lawyer. Mr. Patrick was not very
forthcoming about anything he was doing in the foundation even though
Jimbo had promised that Mr. Patrick would be working with all us
volunteer lawyers to continue to do what we had done in the past.
Nothing of the sort ever happened. The private lawyers mailing list
became dormant (until six months later when I tried to discuss my
dispute with Wikimedia on it and I was kicked off the list by Eric
Moeller because I was "hurting" the foundation by being critical about
it.
This is exactly the problem. Around the time that Mr. Patrick
became CEO and General Counsel (two jobs that I believe are
fundamentally incapable of being handled by the same person)
communication really stopped happening in the "internal" wikis of
Wikimedia (this was also the point that Angela Beesley resigned)."
(5 Dec 2007, on the defunct freewikipedians.org.)
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More abuse of Wikipediocracy, talking about ancient Wikipedia article tags, Eastern European politics, and pointless "naming names" sessions to come.....
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