Very well said.
This is an important issue, and it's quite right for the members to discuss it, but they could do so in a way that smacks slightly less of a vendetta. And if the campaign to force Roger to stand down succeeds, we will rapidly find ourselves with an alarmingly small board.
For my personal two cents, it appears to me that Roger is being paid for volunteer coordination and project management. If I'm honest, I'm not entirely comfortable with the situation, but we all have to make a living. Sadly, altruism doesn't put food on the table or a roof over one's head. Harry Mitchell
Phone: 024 7698 0977 Skype: harry_j_mitchell
________________________________ From: Nicholas Jackson dr.nicholas.jackson@gmail.com To: wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wednesday, 19 September 2012, 15:43 Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Paid editing by Roger Bamkin
On 19 September 2012 14:13, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
I would ask that you resign from the board.
Perhaps it's not my place to say this, but here goes anyway. I've edited Wikipedia articles on and off for a few years, but after attending a couple of absolutely splendid local outreach events I was inspired to actually join the UK chapter and subscribe to this mailing list.
In the two or three months I've been lurking here, I've witnessed two campaigns for board members to resign, and I have to say I'm beginning to wonder quite what sort of organisation I've joined. I know almost nothing about the background to either of these cases, and to be honest I don't really think I want to know. Maybe the critics do have a point, after all. Certainly the trustees of a charity should behave with decorum and integrity, so I wouldn't want to gainsay any legitimate attempts to hold them to account. But it seems that all the necessary information was made available to the voting members well before the election, and they collectively decided that they'd still rather elect these people to the board. So in the absence of compelling further evidence, which this doesn't appear to be, I'd have thought that's that until the next election.
I'm on the board of a small educational charity myself, and I'm very glad that I and my fellow trustees don't have to put up with constant sniping from the sidelines, calls for our resignation, or suspiciously-timed articles appearing in the national press. If we did, I'd almost certainly just say to hell with it, and walk away.
I suppose my question is: does this sort of politicking actually serve the aims of Wikimedia UK at all, and if not could it perhaps stop soon? It just seems as though all this infighting does far more damage to the reputation of the chapter than the fact that one of the trustees was temporarily banned, under somewhat questionable circumstances, from editing Wikipedia, or that one of the other trustees might have got a handful of free leaflets in connection with a pretty cool-sounding outreach initiative he's working on.
Anyway, if you'll excuse me, I've got a stack of other things to do this afternoon so I'm going to get back to them.
Nicholas
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