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

[Thomas Dalton]

On 17/12/2007, Nathan Awrich <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dalton, perhaps you could consider leaving off the direct bickering
> with the general counsel about legal issues (or present your
> credentials and... a cogent argument)? My experience has been that
> confidentiality agreements are not unusual for senior officers
> resigning under a cloud but not one that forces legal disclosure.
> Additionally, even in the absence of a confidentiality agreement there
> are limits to what employers can disclosure about former employees and
> the circumstances of termination. (IANAL, however).

Good work completely ignoring my point... I agree it's not unusual for
profit making companies. If WMF was a standard company, there would be
no-one with any real interest in the facts of the case outside the
foundation, there would just be the media and general public. However,
the WMF is not a standard company, it has hordes of volunteers with a
very real interest is what goes on inside the foundation. Keeping
things from those volunteers is a serious matter and requires a much
better reason than "that's what everyone else does".

There may well be other restrictions on disclosure, but people in the
foundation have been using confidentiality agreements as their reason
for not revealing the facts of this case, so I think it's safe to
assume they could have at least disclosed a few more details had they
not signed the agreement.

As for things that can be put in place in the future - I do have one
idea, I just need to do a little research to work out if it's
feasible, and if it is, I'll start a new thread proposing it.