[WikiEN-l] Former Wikimedia employee was a felon.

[Thomas Dalton]

On 14/12/2007, joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu <joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu> wrote:
> According to the Register,  the Foundation's former COO was convicted felon.
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/13/wikimedia_coo_convicted_felon/
>
> This is just great. And now all the Register's previous material looks correct
> because they broke this nonsense. This is likely going to be all over the
> newspapers tomorrow. I'm so shocked and appalled that I don't even know
> what to
> say about this. Why were basic background checks not done and why
> didn't we know
> about this sooner. Are we trying to implode?

Why would you do a background check for a pretty standard office job?
I don't know about the US, but in the UK such background checks are
usually only done for jobs where the person will be working with
children, or similar. Pretty much every application form I've seen has
the question "Do you have any criminal convictions, other than any
legally spent under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act?" (or words to
that effect), and they just take your word for it. If WMF didn't ask,
then that was a serious mistake (although an understandable one - by
the time she was employed directly, she had been working as a temp for
a while, so it's entirely possible that no-one thought to ask when
checking for such things changed from being the agency's
responsibility to being WMF's - of course, it may be time to pick a
new temp agency...), if they asked and she lied, then its not really
WMF's fault. You can't go around refusing to trust anything anybody
says.

I've missed out the possibility of them asking and her telling the
truth, since The Register says Mike Godwin said the WMF knew nothing,
and I'm assuming The Reg is reporting this correctly. I'm also
assuming The Reg isn't just talking complete nonsense about the whole
thing. I'm not entirely comfortable with either of those
assumptions...