When It Rains, It Pours: Lila Tretikov and Oliver "Ironholds" Keyes Leave the WMF

Well I was dead wrong - Lila did not get her "standard three years" to exit, they gave her the boot on February 25th, though she will stay until March 31st. Jumping ship two days earlier, Oliver Keyes posted his snippy resignation letter on the Wikimedia-1 email list; his last day will be on March 18th. Jimmy Wales is trying to play white knight/Champion of Wikipedia by flying into San Fran and rallying the troops, but he is quietly dumping the blame on Tretikov ("we are hopefully entering a new era of stability and productivity" - i.e., trying to make that dysfunctional mess work was too much for Jimbo's cronies.)

                                                         Jimbo to the rescue!

Things are finally coming to a head: the drop in editors has prompted the creation of a secret search engine either called "Discovery" or the "Knowledge Engine" (that Vice Motherboard article in the above link claims that Dr. James Heilman was canned for trying to leak documents proving the SE project was a reality.) The (unpaid, volunteer) editors are happier sock hunting, wiki-lawyering, and accomplishing other timewasters than curating this massive collection of stuff into a halfway-decent encyclopedia. The general consensus is that the WMF is rudderless and bobbing around on a massive sea of cash. Wales has divorced himself from the day to day running of Wikipedia, so it has no real driving force. Either Wikipedia grows into something more useful than it is, or the entire thing dies from insularity. In any case, Coren is probably beside himself with joy.

Ironholds

I can't beat Encyclopaedia Dramatica's article on Keyes. Hell, we barely wrote about the guy when he was at the WMF; he was one of those "get around to it" projects that is now obsolete. What we can say is that he used IRC (internet relay chat) to fight wars he shouldn't have started and created enemies he didn't need (like Badmachine.) I'm certain he will hang around Wikipedia forever, either inside the website under a sock or on IRC as himself, and Wikipedia deserves him.