On 17/05/2008, Mike Godwin <mgodwin(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Thomas Dalton writes:
> "Trustees agree that that, during their
terms on the Board and for
> three years thereafter, they shall not, in any communications with
> the
> press or other media or any customer, client or supplier of the
> Foundation, or any of the Foundation's affiliates, or in discussions
> on community mailing lists, blogs, or other community forums,
> personally criticize, ridicule or make any statement that personally
> disparages or is personally derogatory of the Foundation or its
> affiliates or any of their respective directors, trustees, or senior
> officers."
>
> That explicitly bans all public criticism.
That is untrue. Note the use of the word "personally" (it appears
three times). The idea here is actually to *encourage constructive
criticism outside of personal attacks*. The idea here is not to make
someone who is selected for the Board the victim of personal attacks
from other members of the Board during their term of service and for a
limited period thereafter.
You've changed "criticise" to "attack" (and continued to use
"attack"
in the rest of your email) as if the terms are interchangeable - in my
view, they are not. If you consider all (personal) criticism to be an
attack, then clearly you're going to have a problem with it. I view
criticism as an attempt to improve things. If it's a person that needs
to improve, then the criticism will be personal. I think it's just as
important to encourage people to make constructive criticism about
other people as it is the encourage them to make constructive
criticism about anything else (really, I struggle to see how you can
criticise anything other than a person or group of people -
criticising what they do, rather than them, is just semantics).