Sorry, Yaroslav, but while I mostly agree with facts you’ve presented here, I don’t think
that your words are «non personal» since you’ve had long-term personal conflict with
Vladimir Medeyko and few other members of Wikimedia RU. Your view on their activity can be
your view, but saying that their «main (or even exclusive) activity was to raise money to
pay salaries to the functionaries» publicly with no real backup of your words can be
considered as slander.
This situation is, of course, terrible, because while Vladimir literally ruined Wikimedia
RU with his actions (he was the only person who’ve made financial reports and he was
making it awfully bad that lead to many consequences such as refusal of most sponsors to
continue the cooperation) and was always busy for personal contacts for weeks, he was not
working on WM RU problems, but was making his own project while few other WM RU members
was literally digging through a big pile of problems in the organisation. Month ago I’ve
had a long talk on this with Stas Kozlovsky (who, AFAIK took the president’s place now)
and have seen much of success in overcoming most of concerns. I hope that under new
leadership chapter will resume it’s productive work despite the fact that it is one leg in
the foreign agents list.
Пятница, 26 мая 2023, 0:13 +06:00 от Yaroslav Blanter
<ymbalt(a)gmail.com>om>:
This story made some headlines in Russian-language media, and I guess it could be of
general interest here.
Vladimir Medeyko, who has been the president of Wikimedia.ru, the Russian chapter of WMF,
since its foundation in the 2000s, announced yesterday that he is starting a Russian
Wikipedia fork [1]. The media on the payroll of the Russian government, which for a long
time were saying that Wikipedia is an anti-government and anti-Russian project and must be
blocked in Russia, supported the initiative, commenting that this is exactly the start of
a pro-government encyclopedia which would replace the Russian Wikipedia.
Wikimedia.ru, whose main (or even exclusive) activity was to raise money to pay salaries
to the functionaries including Mr. Medeyko was suddenly pissed off and held a meeting
yesterday. Before the meeting, Mr. Medeyko said he does not see a problem with his
actions, however, being in danger of getting expelled from the chapter he resigned and
quit the chapter.
The Russian Wikipedia community, which knew that Mr. Medeyko supported the Russian
invasion of Ukraine, and which was critical against his activity on advocacy for his paid
editor friends, was pissed off as well.[2] He first responded that he has taken the only
correct decision, and everybody else eventually would understand why the decision was
correct. However, later he resigned his admin flag, was blocked indef, and now has an
arbitration case pending against him. The discussions are ongoing whether having a chapter
in Russia at all is now beneficial, however, the chapter was for many years totally
disconnected from the community anyway.
I could add my personal perspective, since on- and off-wiki activity of Mr. Medeyko was
one of the reasons why I stopped editing the Russian Wikipedia in 2011, after having
served two terms as an arbitrator, and never came back, but I do not think this is
important at the moment.
Best
Yaroslav
[1]
https://habr.com/ru/companies/ruwiki/articles/737260/
[2]
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0…
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