On 21 March 2014 13:23, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
We will update the wiki page at https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedian_in_Residence/Harvard_Universi... with more information and details. I encourage others to participate in this as a collaborative process.
Thanks Erik.
For everyone: following up on Erik's e-mail, the WMF has done a postmortem of the Belfer situation, which I've just posted at the link from Erik above. Suffice to say here that we implemented the Belfer Wikipedian-in-Residence project with editing as a core activity of the WIR role, despite internal and external voices strongly advising us not to. That was a mistake, and we shouldn't have done it.
I want to apologize for it, particularly to Asaf Bartov, Siko Bouterse, LiAnna Davis, Frank Schulenburg, Pete Forsyth, Lori Phillips and Liam Wyatt, who tried to guide the project in the right direction and whose voices didn't get heard. We did advise the Belfer Center and the Wikipedian-in-Residence about conflict-of-interest policies on enWP, and so far we haven't seen any evidence to suggest major problems with Timothy's edits. That said, we didn't structure the program in a way that would've appropriately mitigated the risk of problematic edits, and we wish we had. We also wish we'd been better able to support our partner organizations in understanding and navigating community policies and best practices.
Thanks, Sue