ISSUE
Jimmy Wales has never declared a conflict of interest or loyalty when acting as a WMF trustee. He is co-founder of Wikia Inc, set up in 2004, a commercial company that often benefits from new MediaWiki developments, and clearly he benefits financially from resulting profitability of Wikia. The original vision for Wikia was as a "Google-killer" open search engine, so it would seem highly prudent for Jimmy to have declared a conflict of interest and avoided WMF board discussions and votes in relation to new development projects around open Knowledge Engines / Search Engines.
I welcome some feedback as to whether the general perception of Wikimedians is that WMF trustees should be seen to do more to declare and manage their potential conflicts of interest, and whether Jimmy Wales is perceived to have a conflict of loyalties when steering the WMF board member in areas which overlap with Wikia Inc.'s marketing strategy, and that they might otherwise fund commercially.
BACKGROUND
With regard to his potential conflict of loyalties when serving as a voting unelected trustee on the WMF board, Jimmy Wales has stated: "I did not have any conflict of loyalties during that process. Spending a reasonable portion of our IT budget on an ambitious project to improve search and discovery, and to conduct research and community consultation on that, is a great idea for Wikipedia and for the broader Wikimedia movement and I strongly support it."[1]
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]
There is no record in the WMF board minutes for 2015 of Jimmy Wales having ever declared a conflict of interest or loyalty for Wikia Inc or for any other reason, nor of any other trustee doing so. In order to comply with standard company law, these are expected on the standing agenda for board meetings, and it is worrying for a Foundation with control of $100m assets to never have a trustee or director ever declare an interest as a reason to abstain from a vote or discussion.[3]
Jimmy does not appear to see there may be a public perception of conflict of interest or loyalties[6] when he is involved in steering the WMF strategy for prioritizing new developments that are likely to benefit Wikia Inc. The Knowledge Engine / Search Engine project was discussed by the board during 2015 and Jimmy has been a public advocate of the project since it was publicly leaked. The overlap of what is thought to have been the original proposal to the Knight Foundation with Jimmy Wales' original vision for wikia.com, being "Search Wikia", described as a "Google-killer search engine", is an obvious concern. Jimmy Wales: "Obsession: Currently, it’s wikia.com. It is meant to take on Google by creating a search engine where all the editorial decisions are made by the general public and all the software is open."[5]
Nine years later Jimmy is promoting the same ideas but with the WMF investing charitable donated funds to support a development that will benefit Wikia, rather than it being commercially funded while using much of the same rhetoric, such as the importance of transparency.[4]
Links 1. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-February/082678.html 2. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-February/082721.html 3. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Meetings 4. Search Wikia interview http://searchengineland.com/qa-with-jimmy-wales-on-search-wikia-10171 5. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18wwln-domains-t.html 6. Company directors and trustees are expected to declare both "conflicts of interest", normally interpreted as having a direct or indirect financial interest, and "conflicts of loyalty" where their non-financial interests may be seen to potentially influence their judgement as a board member. There may be no demonstrable conflict for this to be an issue, it only needs to be potentially be seen to be an issue by others, in order to require a declaration. 7. "Take advantage of Wikia's custom research solutions to achieve campaign objectives, including brand lift studies, target audience insights, and more!", "Reach the right audience with the right message using Wikia's multitude of targeting opportunities, including demographic, psychographic, geographic, contextual, genre, devices, conquesting, and more!" http://www.wikia.com/mediakit
Fae
Fae,
Your second citation didn't at all match what I recall Jimmy saying on the subject, so I went and read it. Even the specific email you cite is not, in any way, "...arguing the case against introducing charges for commercial reusers of WMF services...". Some quotes from the email you cited:
"...my general view is 100% in agreement with him on the core issue - where commercial re-users are getting enormous value from our work, they should be paying for the engineering resources required for their support."
"...I come down firmly on the side of being careful about falling into a trap of doing lots of expensive work for commercial re-users without having them pay."
He does say that there would be some caveats and it would be something to step lightly on, but I don't think it could be any clearer that he does want commercial reusers to pay for WMF services in at least some cases.
I'm all for discussion and identification of potential conflicts of interest. But if you're going to accuse someone of that, you really do need to make sure you've got your facts straight. Misrepresenting someone, or some things they said, will not get anyone to take you seriously.
Todd
On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 12:47 PM, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
ISSUE
Jimmy Wales has never declared a conflict of interest or loyalty when acting as a WMF trustee. He is co-founder of Wikia Inc, set up in 2004, a commercial company that often benefits from new MediaWiki developments, and clearly he benefits financially from resulting profitability of Wikia. The original vision for Wikia was as a "Google-killer" open search engine, so it would seem highly prudent for Jimmy to have declared a conflict of interest and avoided WMF board discussions and votes in relation to new development projects around open Knowledge Engines / Search Engines.
I welcome some feedback as to whether the general perception of Wikimedians is that WMF trustees should be seen to do more to declare and manage their potential conflicts of interest, and whether Jimmy Wales is perceived to have a conflict of loyalties when steering the WMF board member in areas which overlap with Wikia Inc.'s marketing strategy, and that they might otherwise fund commercially.
BACKGROUND
With regard to his potential conflict of loyalties when serving as a voting unelected trustee on the WMF board, Jimmy Wales has stated: "I did not have any conflict of loyalties during that process. Spending a reasonable portion of our IT budget on an ambitious project to improve search and discovery, and to conduct research and community consultation on that, is a great idea for Wikipedia and for the broader Wikimedia movement and I strongly support it."[1]
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]
There is no record in the WMF board minutes for 2015 of Jimmy Wales having ever declared a conflict of interest or loyalty for Wikia Inc or for any other reason, nor of any other trustee doing so. In order to comply with standard company law, these are expected on the standing agenda for board meetings, and it is worrying for a Foundation with control of $100m assets to never have a trustee or director ever declare an interest as a reason to abstain from a vote or discussion.[3]
Jimmy does not appear to see there may be a public perception of conflict of interest or loyalties[6] when he is involved in steering the WMF strategy for prioritizing new developments that are likely to benefit Wikia Inc. The Knowledge Engine / Search Engine project was discussed by the board during 2015 and Jimmy has been a public advocate of the project since it was publicly leaked. The overlap of what is thought to have been the original proposal to the Knight Foundation with Jimmy Wales' original vision for wikia.com, being "Search Wikia", described as a "Google-killer search engine", is an obvious concern. Jimmy Wales: "Obsession: Currently, it’s wikia.com. It is meant to take on Google by creating a search engine where all the editorial decisions are made by the general public and all the software is open."[5]
Nine years later Jimmy is promoting the same ideas but with the WMF investing charitable donated funds to support a development that will benefit Wikia, rather than it being commercially funded while using much of the same rhetoric, such as the importance of transparency.[4]
Links
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-February/082678.html 2. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-February/082721.html 3. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Meetings 4. Search Wikia interview http://searchengineland.com/qa-with-jimmy-wales-on-search-wikia-10171 5. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18wwln-domains-t.html 6. Company directors and trustees are expected to declare both "conflicts of interest", normally interpreted as having a direct or indirect financial interest, and "conflicts of loyalty" where their non-financial interests may be seen to potentially influence their judgement as a board member. There may be no demonstrable conflict for this to be an issue, it only needs to be potentially be seen to be an issue by others, in order to require a declaration. 7. "Take advantage of Wikia's custom research solutions to achieve campaign objectives, including brand lift studies, target audience insights, and more!", "Reach the right audience with the right message using Wikia's multitude of targeting opportunities, including demographic, psychographic, geographic, contextual, genre, devices, conquesting, and more!" http://www.wikia.com/mediakit
Fae
faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
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Todd, putting the caveats before the main thrust of Jimmy Wales' email, is a strange way of reading it. I read the email the obvious way, and I encourage others to read the original for themselves, rather than relying on cherry-picked quotes towards the end.
Thanks, Fae
On 28 February 2016 at 20:17, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
Fae,
Your second citation didn't at all match what I recall Jimmy saying on the subject, so I went and read it. Even the specific email you cite is not, in any way, "...arguing the case against introducing charges for commercial reusers of WMF services...". Some quotes from the email you cited:
"...my general view is 100% in agreement with him on the core issue - where commercial re-users are getting enormous value from our work, they should be paying for the engineering resources required for their support."
"...I come down firmly on the side of being careful about falling into a trap of doing lots of expensive work for commercial re-users without having them pay."
He does say that there would be some caveats and it would be something to step lightly on, but I don't think it could be any clearer that he does want commercial reusers to pay for WMF services in at least some cases.
I'm all for discussion and identification of potential conflicts of interest. But if you're going to accuse someone of that, you really do need to make sure you've got your facts straight. Misrepresenting someone, or some things they said, will not get anyone to take you seriously.
Todd
On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 12:47 PM, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
ISSUE
Jimmy Wales has never declared a conflict of interest or loyalty when acting as a WMF trustee. He is co-founder of Wikia Inc, set up in 2004, a commercial company that often benefits from new MediaWiki developments, and clearly he benefits financially from resulting profitability of Wikia. The original vision for Wikia was as a "Google-killer" open search engine, so it would seem highly prudent for Jimmy to have declared a conflict of interest and avoided WMF board discussions and votes in relation to new development projects around open Knowledge Engines / Search Engines.
I welcome some feedback as to whether the general perception of Wikimedians is that WMF trustees should be seen to do more to declare and manage their potential conflicts of interest, and whether Jimmy Wales is perceived to have a conflict of loyalties when steering the WMF board member in areas which overlap with Wikia Inc.'s marketing strategy, and that they might otherwise fund commercially.
BACKGROUND
With regard to his potential conflict of loyalties when serving as a voting unelected trustee on the WMF board, Jimmy Wales has stated: "I did not have any conflict of loyalties during that process. Spending a reasonable portion of our IT budget on an ambitious project to improve search and discovery, and to conduct research and community consultation on that, is a great idea for Wikipedia and for the broader Wikimedia movement and I strongly support it."[1]
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]
There is no record in the WMF board minutes for 2015 of Jimmy Wales having ever declared a conflict of interest or loyalty for Wikia Inc or for any other reason, nor of any other trustee doing so. In order to comply with standard company law, these are expected on the standing agenda for board meetings, and it is worrying for a Foundation with control of $100m assets to never have a trustee or director ever declare an interest as a reason to abstain from a vote or discussion.[3]
Jimmy does not appear to see there may be a public perception of conflict of interest or loyalties[6] when he is involved in steering the WMF strategy for prioritizing new developments that are likely to benefit Wikia Inc. The Knowledge Engine / Search Engine project was discussed by the board during 2015 and Jimmy has been a public advocate of the project since it was publicly leaked. The overlap of what is thought to have been the original proposal to the Knight Foundation with Jimmy Wales' original vision for wikia.com, being "Search Wikia", described as a "Google-killer search engine", is an obvious concern. Jimmy Wales: "Obsession: Currently, it’s wikia.com. It is meant to take on Google by creating a search engine where all the editorial decisions are made by the general public and all the software is open."[5]
Nine years later Jimmy is promoting the same ideas but with the WMF investing charitable donated funds to support a development that will benefit Wikia, rather than it being commercially funded while using much of the same rhetoric, such as the importance of transparency.[4]
Links
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-February/082678.html 2. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-February/082721.html 3. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Meetings 4. Search Wikia interview http://searchengineland.com/qa-with-jimmy-wales-on-search-wikia-10171 5. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18wwln-domains-t.html 6. Company directors and trustees are expected to declare both "conflicts of interest", normally interpreted as having a direct or indirect financial interest, and "conflicts of loyalty" where their non-financial interests may be seen to potentially influence their judgement as a board member. There may be no demonstrable conflict for this to be an issue, it only needs to be potentially be seen to be an issue by others, in order to require a declaration. 7. "Take advantage of Wikia's custom research solutions to achieve campaign objectives, including brand lift studies, target audience insights, and more!", "Reach the right audience with the right message using Wikia's multitude of targeting opportunities, including demographic, psychographic, geographic, contextual, genre, devices, conquesting, and more!" http://www.wikia.com/mediakit
Fae
Sorry, let me back peddle on that sentence, Todd is correct. Dropping that paragraph from my email does not stop the issue of perceived conflict of interest and Wikia from being a valid concern worth open discussion.
Fae On 28 Feb 2016 20:23, "Fæ" faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Todd, putting the caveats before the main thrust of Jimmy Wales' email, is a strange way of reading it. I read the email the obvious way, and I encourage others to read the original for themselves, rather than relying on cherry-picked quotes towards the end.
Thanks, Fae
On 28 February 2016 at 20:17, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
Fae,
Your second citation didn't at all match what I recall Jimmy saying on
the
subject, so I went and read it. Even the specific email you cite is not,
in
any way, "...arguing the case against introducing charges for commercial reusers of WMF services...". Some
quotes
from the email you cited:
"...my general view is 100% in agreement with him on the core issue -
where
commercial re-users are getting enormous value from our work, they should be paying for the engineering resources required for their support."
"...I come down firmly on the side of being careful about falling into a trap of doing lots of expensive work for commercial re-users without
having
them pay."
He does say that there would be some caveats and it would be something to step lightly on, but I don't think it could be any clearer that he does want commercial reusers to pay for WMF services in at least some cases.
I'm all for discussion and identification of potential conflicts of interest. But if you're going to accuse someone of that, you really do
need
to make sure you've got your facts straight. Misrepresenting someone, or some things they said, will not get anyone to take you seriously.
Todd
On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 12:47 PM, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
ISSUE
Jimmy Wales has never declared a conflict of interest or loyalty when acting as a WMF trustee. He is co-founder of Wikia Inc, set up in 2004, a commercial company that often benefits from new MediaWiki developments, and clearly he benefits financially from resulting profitability of Wikia. The original vision for Wikia was as a "Google-killer" open search engine, so it would seem highly prudent for Jimmy to have declared a conflict of interest and avoided WMF board discussions and votes in relation to new development projects around open Knowledge Engines / Search Engines.
I welcome some feedback as to whether the general perception of Wikimedians is that WMF trustees should be seen to do more to declare and manage their potential conflicts of interest, and whether Jimmy Wales is perceived to have a conflict of loyalties when steering the WMF board member in areas which overlap with Wikia Inc.'s marketing strategy, and that they might otherwise fund commercially.
BACKGROUND
With regard to his potential conflict of loyalties when serving as a voting unelected trustee on the WMF board, Jimmy Wales has stated: "I did not have any conflict of loyalties during that process. Spending a reasonable portion of our IT budget on an ambitious project to improve search and discovery, and to conduct research and community consultation on that, is a great idea for Wikipedia and for the broader Wikimedia movement and I strongly support it."[1]
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]
There is no record in the WMF board minutes for 2015 of Jimmy Wales having ever declared a conflict of interest or loyalty for Wikia Inc or for any other reason, nor of any other trustee doing so. In order to comply with standard company law, these are expected on the standing agenda for board meetings, and it is worrying for a Foundation with control of $100m assets to never have a trustee or director ever declare an interest as a reason to abstain from a vote or discussion.[3]
Jimmy does not appear to see there may be a public perception of conflict of interest or loyalties[6] when he is involved in steering the WMF strategy for prioritizing new developments that are likely to benefit Wikia Inc. The Knowledge Engine / Search Engine project was discussed by the board during 2015 and Jimmy has been a public advocate of the project since it was publicly leaked. The overlap of what is thought to have been the original proposal to the Knight Foundation with Jimmy Wales' original vision for wikia.com, being "Search Wikia", described as a "Google-killer search engine", is an obvious concern. Jimmy Wales: "Obsession: Currently, it’s wikia.com. It is meant to take on Google by creating a search engine where all the editorial decisions are made by the general public and all the software is open."[5]
Nine years later Jimmy is promoting the same ideas but with the WMF investing charitable donated funds to support a development that will benefit Wikia, rather than it being commercially funded while using much of the same rhetoric, such as the importance of transparency.[4]
Links
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-February/082678.html
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-February/082721.html
- https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Meetings
- Search Wikia interview
http://searchengineland.com/qa-with-jimmy-wales-on-search-wikia-10171 5. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18wwln-domains-t.html 6. Company directors and trustees are expected to declare both "conflicts of interest", normally interpreted as having a direct or indirect financial interest, and "conflicts of loyalty" where their non-financial interests may be seen to potentially influence their judgement as a board member. There may be no demonstrable conflict for this to be an issue, it only needs to be potentially be seen to be an issue by others, in order to require a declaration. 7. "Take advantage of Wikia's custom research solutions to achieve campaign objectives, including brand lift studies, target audience insights, and more!", "Reach the right audience with the right message using Wikia's multitude of targeting opportunities, including demographic, psychographic, geographic, contextual, genre, devices, conquesting, and more!" http://www.wikia.com/mediakit
Fae
-- faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 11:47 AM, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
The original vision for Wikia was as a "Google-killer" open search
engine, so it would seem highly prudent for Jimmy to have declared
a conflict of interest and avoided WMF board discussions and votes
in relation to new development projects around open Knowledge
Engines / Search Engines.
Um, what? The vision for Wikia (then called Wikicities) was a wiki hosting provider for small communities. See e.g. [1]. (And also, I suppose, to capture the ad money that could not be captured on Wikipedia, and put it into MediaWiki development. Today the contributions to MediaWiki from Wikia are dwarfed by those from Wikimedia but that wasn't always so.)
Search Wikia was a (short-lived and thoroughly unsuccessful) experiment to create a community of search engine developers and come up with an open-source, transparent, community-curated Google-competitor. Which was a nice idea, if unrealistic, and IMO more likely to end up in a new Wikipedia-style thing than anything profitable to Wikia, given that there was no lock-in. I'm not even sure if Wikia the company was involved in it in any significant way, apart from providing the wiki used for discussion and creating some media attention.
[1] http://www.sptimes.com/2005/04/04/Technology/Global_villages_conve.shtml
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
After an offlist correspondence with Gergő, we agree it is quite hard to get to grips with the beginnings of Wikia unless you lived through it and casual interviews may be confusing.[1] This remains a tangent to the issue of whether ownership of Wikia is seen in the public eye as a conflict of interest or loyalty for Jimmy Wales.
Based on that discussion, a second issue that may muddy the waters is that some may interpret "Conflict of Interest" in the same way as it is interpreted on Wikipedia.[2] Keep in mind that companies and charities read this narrowly in a legal sense as having a demonstrated financial benefit from your actions as a board member, and that the concept of conflict of loyalty extends this to relationships that may make it harder for a trustee/director to be seen as capable of making decisions that are not unduly influenced by those relationships.[3] Ownership of Wikia is a relationship where loyalty will be perceived by the public as questionable, and there may be indirect financial gains, even though there is no traceable direct benefit.
Links: 1. Wikia early press releases: http://www.wikia.com/Press/2005; archive of search.wikia https://web.archive.org/web/20080516180103/http://www.search.wikia.com - thanks to Gergő for suggesting these sources 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest
Fae
On 28 February 2016 at 19:47, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
ISSUE
Jimmy Wales has never declared a conflict of interest or loyalty when acting as a WMF trustee. He is co-founder of Wikia Inc, set up in 2004, a commercial company that often benefits from new MediaWiki developments, and clearly he benefits financially from resulting profitability of Wikia. The original vision for Wikia was as a "Google-killer" open search engine, so it would seem highly prudent for Jimmy to have declared a conflict of interest and avoided WMF board discussions and votes in relation to new development projects around open Knowledge Engines / Search Engines.
I welcome some feedback as to whether the general perception of Wikimedians is that WMF trustees should be seen to do more to declare and manage their potential conflicts of interest, and whether Jimmy Wales is perceived to have a conflict of loyalties when steering the WMF board member in areas which overlap with Wikia Inc.'s marketing strategy, and that they might otherwise fund commercially.
BACKGROUND
With regard to his potential conflict of loyalties when serving as a voting unelected trustee on the WMF board, Jimmy Wales has stated: "I did not have any conflict of loyalties during that process. Spending a reasonable portion of our IT budget on an ambitious project to improve search and discovery, and to conduct research and community consultation on that, is a great idea for Wikipedia and for the broader Wikimedia movement and I strongly support it."[1]
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]
There is no record in the WMF board minutes for 2015 of Jimmy Wales having ever declared a conflict of interest or loyalty for Wikia Inc or for any other reason, nor of any other trustee doing so. In order to comply with standard company law, these are expected on the standing agenda for board meetings, and it is worrying for a Foundation with control of $100m assets to never have a trustee or director ever declare an interest as a reason to abstain from a vote or discussion.[3]
Jimmy does not appear to see there may be a public perception of conflict of interest or loyalties[6] when he is involved in steering the WMF strategy for prioritizing new developments that are likely to benefit Wikia Inc. The Knowledge Engine / Search Engine project was discussed by the board during 2015 and Jimmy has been a public advocate of the project since it was publicly leaked. The overlap of what is thought to have been the original proposal to the Knight Foundation with Jimmy Wales' original vision for wikia.com, being "Search Wikia", described as a "Google-killer search engine", is an obvious concern. Jimmy Wales: "Obsession: Currently, it’s wikia.com. It is meant to take on Google by creating a search engine where all the editorial decisions are made by the general public and all the software is open."[5]
Nine years later Jimmy is promoting the same ideas but with the WMF investing charitable donated funds to support a development that will benefit Wikia, rather than it being commercially funded while using much of the same rhetoric, such as the importance of transparency.[4]
Links
- https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-February/082678.html
- https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-February/082721.html
- https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Meetings
- Search Wikia interview
http://searchengineland.com/qa-with-jimmy-wales-on-search-wikia-10171 5. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18wwln-domains-t.html 6. Company directors and trustees are expected to declare both "conflicts of interest", normally interpreted as having a direct or indirect financial interest, and "conflicts of loyalty" where their non-financial interests may be seen to potentially influence their judgement as a board member. There may be no demonstrable conflict for this to be an issue, it only needs to be potentially be seen to be an issue by others, in order to require a declaration. 7. "Take advantage of Wikia's custom research solutions to achieve campaign objectives, including brand lift studies, target audience insights, and more!", "Reach the right audience with the right message using Wikia's multitude of targeting opportunities, including demographic, psychographic, geographic, contextual, genre, devices, conquesting, and more!" http://www.wikia.com/mediakit
Fae
On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 5:35 AM, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Ownership of Wikia is a relationship where loyalty will be perceived by the public as questionable, and there may be indirect financial gains, even though there is no traceable direct benefit.
Fae,
Is there any evidence that this is broadly the case? Are there press articles, blogs or other sources to support the claim that ownership of Wikia is seen by the public as leading to divided loyalty? Given what has been said about the diverging use of MediaWiki from Wikia and the WMF, can you point to any specific instances where Board-level decisions may present an opportunity for financial gain for Jimmy or a concern for divided loyalty?
Are you bringing this up now because you believe that these conflicts are relevant in some way to the issues causing upheaval in the WMF in recent months? If so, can you describe how they are related and what role you think these conflicts have played? I understand you believe that Jimmy has written negatively about you in private; do you think this has influenced your perception of these conflicts or your decision to raise them repeatedly?
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org