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

[Sue Reed]

Some companies do background checks for standard office jobs, some don't. However, a company that doesn't do an extensive background check before promoting someone to COO is really playing with fire and putting themselves in a very bad position. 

Do I think a drunk driving conviction should get not hired from a COO position? Not necessarily, although it does show a lack of judgement - especially multiple DUI convictions. One conviction is I drank too much and didn't realize I was impaired. Multiple DUI convictions show that you don't know how to say when. However the other convictions would be something that would cause me not to hire the person on any level that has to do with Foundation funds. 

I work for a non-profit and we're just now publishing our financials for the past fiscal year, so the fact the the WMF hasn't published financials yet is not something I'm hugely concerned about. However, the Board needs to get a handle on things and give accurate information to the community and the press. Being involved in marketing and investor relations, I always under promise and over deliver. It's much better to say that the financials will be ready at the end of the year and then get them done in October than to say they will be ready in September and still not have them available three months later. Throw in this latest scandal and people have every right to question how their donations are being spent. But, to be honest, if I were the foundation, I'd be a lot more worried about the people that give the WMF grants than I would be at any group of individual donors.  
 
Sue Anne
sreed1234 at yahoo.com


----- Original Message ----
From: Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton at gmail.com

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...

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