Hello, Danny!
Actually, as Wikipedia grows it requires help in
oversight no less than it
does in operations. A large organization entails legal and financial
responsibilities. If we are sued, for whatever reason, we cannot simply throw another
server at the person suing us.
I agree entirely. And as our legal problems grow, it is equally
essential that we make an important distinction. It is the distinction
between law and ethics. It is entirely possible to act utterly immorally
without violating any law; and in fact, many of the most immoral acts in
history have been protected by unethical laws.
Furthermore, laws governing the Internet in particular are not static
structures; they are ever-changing both in civil and common law
jurisdictions due to the power of interpretation and precedent, and an
organization with substantial financial assets is more than capable to
influence legal decisions to its advantage (and, eventually, even the
process used to create laws).
Wikimedia, as an organization, must therefore cherish, preserve and
maximize its core principle of openness. In this process, lawyers are
servants to the community and not the other way around. Lawyers must
never dictate how the organization is run. The Board, elected and
thereby empowered by the community, and the committees, open and
representative, must instead consult the lawyers to seek ways to further
our mission.
This is a quite important statement, as the interpretation of law is
something that is treated by many with a sort of grudging respect few
other professions enjoy, and it is easy for lawyers to eloquently make a
case, since that it is their job. That lets them quickly gain influence.
Lawyers, also, will be inclined to be extremely cautious and overly
protective in their legitimate desire to minimize harm. An organization
run by lawyers would naturally evolve into a closed, corporate,
inflexible structure full of rigid procedures that impede the work of
both paid employees and volunteers.
Such an organization will be entirely incapable of dealing with the very
real challenges we have set ourselves. We have set these challenges the
moment we have decided to accept projects like Wikibooks: free textbooks
for every person on the planet. Wiktionary: all words, all meanings, all
languages. Wikisource and Commons: free media of all types. Wikinews:
free news presented from a neutral point of view. And so forth.
If we are serious about these goals - and some of the others we may set
ourselves, including a subset of Jimmy's "10 things that need to be
free" <http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2005/08/jimbos_problems_1.html> -
then we cannot allow ourselves to turn into the non-profit equivalent of
AOL. Those who live by the sword, perish by it. If we compete like a
corporation, we will lose like a corporation, we will be replaced by a
corporation.
In our 5 years of existence, we have not even managed to achieve that
one goal we have been talking about from the beginning: stable versions.
Wikipedia 1.0. Let's not even begin to talk about "every single human
being on the planet". This is not because we have been too open, but
because we have been too closed, and highly atypical in our
organizational model even by standards of the typical non-profit. No
matter, mistakes happen. The only unforgivable mistake is not to learn
from the last one.
Yes, there are legal questions to be answered. But they are questions,
not answers, and they are not as difficult as you may think they are to
deal with. When I proposed Wikinews on this very list, I still remember
the feedback I got. "The legal problems we're going to have with this
will make this a nightmare! We can not shoulder this responsibility!"
It was these words of warning which inspired me then to come up with a
very complex review process that was used initially on the English
Wikinews to ensure that we did not publish libelous claims. And it was
after Jimmy's intervention that I decided to get rid of this process,
which turned out to be disastrously inefficient, especially without
special tools. Have we had any major legal problems with Wikinews since
then? Nothing we couldn't handle, in spite of about 15,000 articles
published so far.
And let us not forget Wikipedia itself. We all remember the major media
campaigns of the last year. Scrambling for answers, some quick and
questionable countermeasures were taken. But let's be honest. If we had
consulted a team of lawyers before starting Wikipedia to tell us whether
this could become a libel issue, we would have never gotten past 10,000
articles. Maybe we would still be at Nupedia's 30. Let's be careful not
to break our processes from the top, but instead, let's try to improve
them from the bottom.
So, let me repeat. The goals come first. The legal problems are solved
to achieve these goals. And legal advice must, always, be taken with a
great deal of skepticism, and if possible, solicitation of alternative
answers. Yes, sometimes it may even be a good idea to utterly ignore it
and take whatever risk is gloomily predicted. When talking to a lawyer,
it is often good to know beforehand what you _want_ to do, or they will
only tell you what you _cannot_ do. The fairly unhelpful legal study
commissioned by the German chapter is an example of that.
The English Wikipedia alone currently has more than 850,000 registered
users. Among them: students, physicists, architects, photographers,
musicians, nuclear engineers, businesspersons, historians, computer
scientists (loads of them), comedians, midwives, soldiers, judges,
ethologists -- I could go on, but you could just check [[List of
occupations]] yourself and pick some randomly. This eclectic mix of
people is an asset that we _must_ utilize if we are to come even close
to achieving our goals.
Our goal, then, is to build a global network of human beings to
revolutionize knowledge on all levels of society, through businesses and
institutions and individuals, establishing cooperations and partnerships
numbering in the thousands, receiving financial support from
foundations, institutions, businesses, governments and individuals of
several million dollars every year to further our mission.
And this is only possible if we empower individuals.
Now, there are perfectly reasonable ways to institute measures of
control, such as consensus processes and voting and multiple
organizational layers, before potentially legally problematic endeavors
are undertaken. As long as we avoid bottlenecks caused by single
individuals being equipped with extraordinary decision-making power, we
should be fine.
To, out of fear, not build and develop a culture of openness in our
organizational processes, would be disastrously wrong and kill Wikimedia
before it has even started. Instead of following old models, Wikimedia
should _set_ a model of what an open organization could be. In fact,
ideally, I would like to see us publish an "Open Organization Manual" on
Wikibooks or elsewhere, collecting our experiences and recommending
workflows for non-profit organizations that have worked for us.
Funnily enough, it is one of our partner companies, Directmedia
Publishing, that is experimenting with publishing as much information as
they can about their company and their upcoming products and strategies
openly on a wiki - wiki.directmedia.de - and that has been fantastically
successful at working with both volunteers and employed professionals.
They are, after all, the makers of the German Wikipedia DVD, whereas we
still do not have an English one or seem to be much closer to this goal
than one year ago.
I doubt that Directmedia is as open as it could be, but when our
for-profit partner companies are getting the better of us when it comes
to openness and participation, we should start seriously reconsidering
the ways we do things.
And let us not forget, finally, that a lack of openness can bring out
the very worst in people: the lust for power, control, and money. Pure,
unadulterated greed. As an organization that gets its money from small
donations by people all over the world, we have a non-negotiable
responsibility to make sure that our donated money is spent wisely and
efficiently, and transparency is the best to prevent corruption and
unnecessary centralization. As an organization, we have to answer to the
people who pay our hardware and employees' salaries. When someone asks
one of us: "What do you do with this money?" Our answer should never be:
"None of your business!"
I therefore will state here, again, my hope that the forthcoming
organizational changes will be debated in an open manner, and that they
will empower the greatest number of individuals possible to turn
Wikimedia into the incredible success that Wikipedia has been so far.
Sincerely,
Erik