[WikiEN-l] Former Wikimedia employee was a felon.

[Andrew Gray]

On 15/12/2007, Christiano Moreschi <moreschiwikiman at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:

> Someone there must have known - the COO can't just vanish to jail
> and no one on the staff/Board knows anything - and they neglected
> to tell you. That's the other story of incompetence here ...

Wait, wait, wait.

You seem to be assuming the Foundation *had* to know about her
extracurricular activities, but this seems to be a misplaced
assumption.

Let's look at the story again, shall we?

----

First off, her past history. This is the stuff that a background check
would have picked up - one doesn't seem to have been done. Fair dos,
criticise them for that, you can consider it unfortunate or
unforgivable according to taste. But if you don't do it, you don't
pick up anything, however odd it may be...

(I am assuming she didn't tell them. I would be quite bemused if she
had and they employed her regardless)

Secondly, her time at Wikimedia.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/13/wikimedia_coo_convicted_felon/page2.html

* "Four months after Doran's hiring, on May 20th, she was arrested ...
paid a $5,250 bond and was released that same day."

So here's our first incident. Looking at the calendar, May 20th was a
Sunday; it all happened on that one day; if she didn't tell anyone,
how would the Foundation have known? I know this is all a matter of
public record, but that doesn't equate to "people get told about it" -
I'm sure *my* HR department doesn't scan the local paper every week to
find out if I've been caught doing something.

* An incident where she was stopped by immigration sometime in June

Details entirely unclear; maybe they knew about it, maybe they didn't.
Even if they did, there's no reason they would know the *content* of
the interview.

* "On July 4 ... the Wikimedia Foundation passed a private resolution
concerning Carolyn Doran, and she was soon removed from the official
Foundation staff list"

['soon' = on the 10th]

* "A month later, she was arrested and jailed by the Pinellas Park,
Florida police after a warrant was issued by the sheriff in Loudoun
County, Virginia. ... This November ... she was extradited to
Virginia"

It seems that the 'carted off to jail' happened a good month after she
*stopped* being WMF's COO. It doesn't strike me as desperately
surprising that they didn't know about it - keeping tabs on the
whereabouts of your ex-employees a month after they've left is very
nice, and all, but not really required!

----

The rest of it seems to boil down to "when we knew about it we could
google and find confirmation!" Well, bully for you. How many of your
current colleagues do you regularly google to check on their criminal
pasts? If the answer is more than zero, um, this strikes me as a
little worrying...

We can legitimately criticise the hiring practices here, and I
certainly won't argue with you doing so. But to think that Wikimedia
somehow failed to notice an employee being sent to jail is just mad -
it's something even the original article isn't claiming!

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk