I've been advised by more than one community member not to engage further on this, but I need to correct what I see as a potentially dangerous falsehood.
On 2/28/16 11:47 AM, Fæ wrote:
ISSUE
Jimmy Wales has never declared a conflict of interest or loyalty when acting as a WMF trustee.
This is absolutely 100% false. I have always declared, formally and in writing, my role at Wikia. I have additionally worked to make sure that all board members know about it, and I have on multiple occasions recused myself from votes where there could be a perceived or actual conflict of interest.
In the current case, the board has not voted on anything like having a general purpose search engine. That I tried to build an open source search engine several years ago would not, in my view, have any bearing on the decision not to do that, and if we were voting on doing something like that, I would vote no - I think it's not possible with our resources and therefore our limited resources are better used on sensible things.
Additionally, as others have pointed out, Wikia is moving away from Mediawiki. So even the idea that me thinking that Mediawiki should be improved as a dastardly conspiracy doesn't really seem very persuasive.
Most recently Jimmy Wales has been arguing the case against introducing charges for commercial reusers of WMF services, with an obvious reuser of MediaWiki code improvements and WMF supported open project data being Wikia Inc.[2]
You'd be more persuasive smearing me if you bothered to read what I wrote. I support introducing charges for commercial reusers of WMF services, in those cases where it makes sense to do so. I listed some objections to that idea which I think are worthy of consideration, but I come down on balance that the idea, in principle, is a good one.
I won't be engaging further with this kind of nonsense. There are really important and interesting conversations that are happening here.
--Jimbo