Nathan Awrich wrote:
I'd like to agree with what someone else wrote - assume good faith is a principle of life that is included in policy at Wikipedia only because cynicism has become such a habit, particularly in the United States. I know I have difficulty adhering to that principle, especially concerning public figures, but I try!
Thanks to Mike Godwin for clearing up that he and the Foundation are prevented from commenting in detail.
Perhaps, though, you can answer some general questions?
I assume those questions were for Mike Godwin, but since you posted them as a response to my message, I have a couple of answers:
- Does the Foundation perform criminal background checks on
prospective new hires at any level of responsibility?
I know little to nothing about the Wikimedia Foundation or its board. But from personal experience: I'm on the Board of a corporation (not as big as WMF, but not tiny, either), and I don't think the question of criminal background checks has ever come up for us. We hired a new Executive Director last year, and while one of my fellow board members may have done something privately, I certainly never heard about it.
Perhaps I and the rest of my Board were/are grossly negligent in this respect. (We have a board meeting next week; I'll ask, out of curiosity.) But as far as I'm concerned, I'm a reasonable person, and the fact that we didn't think to run any checks doesn't bother me. So I can very easily imagine that, especially a year or two ago, the Wikimedia Foundation's board, still coming to grips with how much of a tiger it had by the tail, didn't think to either.