Andreas Kolbe
I think bullying you is very risky Kolbe as you have half a dozen equally warped friends who do little else but tear into Wikipedia and Wikipedians at every possible opportunity. Indeed, I believe at least one or two are actually claiming publicly to be professional journalists taking money for articles which basically have a theme of tearing into the Wiki projects and targeting community members at every possible opportunity. Would he need to put this on his User page as a Declaration of Interest so that other Wikipedians know that he has a paid for agenda when talking to them?
Your orchestrations of Wikipediocracy’s rather pathetic attempts to see conspiracy and subterfuge where there is none does you no service and people should think seriously when talking to you in any Wikipedian forum as your track record suggests you are unlikely to use what you hear for good.
http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=17779#p17779 (Mr Kolbe is the blonde guy 2-3 down from the top on the left for those keen to be on their guard if he comes calling) And the whole of this site is dedicated to tearing down people and undermining the whole Wiki Project, if any of you reading this are unclear.
You and your little chums decided I was liable to be ‘up to something’ without a single shred of evidence. But I suppose Wikipediaocracy does not need evidence and that would simply be cumbersome, particularly when you have tame journalists in the States who’ll print any claptrap you tell them, which you can then hold up as conclusive proof of something that does not exist. I think it highly amusing to see your chums speculating on whether gaps in my editing record and small bursts of edits mean I was paid sums of cash for practising editing by moving French text from the French Wikipedia to the English stub about a town where my Mum-in-Law lives and where my wife was born.
(see your site’s recent trawl over my own website in screen grab below).
I spent three years of my life trying to get a Chapter functioning in the UK so that we could build relationships with institutions, encourage people to learn, encourage people to pick up ICT skills and think about how they can apply all that is good about Wikipedia and the other projects to their lives. My business was effectively put on hold, ticking over during that time. Although I was a Director and owner of that business I and it never so much as promoted itself on any occasion to anyone anywhere when I was working. So get your creepy sad little friends off my case. The Chapter actually owes me money. I took no expenses during the first year of its existence with me on the Board and I have not submitted expenses for the work I carried out February to May this year.
Your ridiculous fellow conspiracy theorists have said my PR links are some kind of evil proof of me cashing in on my connections. Let’s kill that one off now too. Jimmy Wales went to see a big PR agency last January after outing them as doing paid for editing. In attendance were PRCA & CIPR people who were very unhappy at the complete disconnect between the PR world and ours and wanted to kick a dialogue off to see if there was any hope in hell of sorting this out. I started that dialogue. I told them THEY had to show good faith and start doing something for us before we’d even begin to consider them as anything other than ‘dodgy and dubious.’ They agreed. The two PR groups then asked some individual PR people to work Pro-Bono for us on promoting Monmouthpedia. This is what happened. The CIPR also talked to the younger social media PR crowd amongst its members and asked them to get a working paper together for discussion – so that OUR community and their community could begin to talking to try and bridge the unbridgeable divide that may well divide us from the PR world. Note ‘talking’ – not taking cash, not having freebies – nothing.
You and your crowd are a cancer undermining the Wiki Projects. The perpetual attacks on people devoting their time for free will ultimately result in no one coming forward to stand for the Board as idiots from this site will be looking at their Directorships, trolling their website looking for a word here or there out of place or whipping up a incompetent journalist to write utter nonsense about them and then holding it up as some kind of major discovery of a plot to usurp donors money for personal gain.
I personally liked and was proud of achieving things for the benefit of the chapter – working with a leading member to achieve charitable status. Organising Jimmy Wales’ 10th Birthday of Wikipedia celebration talks in Bristol in January of last year. Persuading people to give freely of their time to promote an excellent world first in Monmouth. Do you know I’ve never seen nearly 300 major articles across 38 countries about something Wikipedia has done all positive across a 3-5 day period? Have you?
I know you are your Wikipediocracy chronies can boast the reverse and that you’ve got tonnes of negative coverage. But that to me suggests how warped you are your chronies sets of values are. If you had a shred of decency you’d walk away from a set of projects that you seem to despise.
Before I get another 10 pages on Wikipediocracy for being honest about what you and your tiny band do, let me stress this is a personal view.
Steve Virgin
From: wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andreas Kolbe
Sent: 20 September 2012 12:21
To: UK Wikimedia mailing list
Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Paid editing by Roger Bamkin
On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 2:33 PM, Craig Franklin <cfranklin@wikimedia.org.au> wrote:
Good grief, the only way that someone could come to that conclusion
from what you've quoted is if they had a rather severe case of
paranoia or were overly fond of conspiracy theories. Teaching people
how to use Wikipedia, what villainy and wickedness! I'm not surprised
that Roger isn't dignifying this nonsense with a direct response, and
I can't say I blame him either.
We are not just talking about teaching people how to use Wikipedia. We are talking about people being paid to teach members of the public to edit Wikipedia, for projects that in some cases are openly described and sold as marketing initiatives. Does your chapter have programmes like that?
As the minutes and disclosure statements show, Roger has been pretty
clear about this with the board and with the members at the AGM, and
the information you are dredging up is all on the public record. If
there is a grand conspiracy here to secretly "a programme to secure
unemployed Wikipedian friends paid employment", then it's a pretty
inept one. Rather than Roger resigning, I think it would be better if
you just stopped trolling this list.
Don't try to bully me. I voted for Roger in this year's board election. That was before the Geovation bid, and before he became a paid consultant for the government of Gibraltar – a fact which the Spanish daily of record, El País, pointed out this morning is not noted on his Wikipedia user page. That's an oversight that should be fixed.
The El País article is currently on the elpais.com front page (not sure about the paper edition). Regardless of whether there is impropriety or not, it is hardly possible to claim that the appearance of impropriety has been avoided.
http://elpais.com/
Andreas