Awhile back I saw a joke that when reading a newspaper someone had
difficulty distinguishing between the business section and the crime
section. These days, the politics section could cause similar
confusion. Recently I have wondered about the extent to which WMF and
the affiliates take steps to prevent conflicts of interest in
financial decisions.
I am not aware of any evidence of recent financial conflicts of
interest, but I think that taking steps to prevent and detect any
problems would be prudent.
For example, is there any monitoring of the bank accounts of board
members and executives to ensure that they are not receiving kickbacks
from companies that have contracts with the organizations? Also, are
there "cooling off periods" which contractually require that
executives and board members of WMF and Wikimedia affiliates not
become employees of companies that have had financial relationships
with their organizations until at least a few years after their
employment or board membership with the Wikimedia organization?
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )