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

[Steven Walling]

A non-profit with a teeny, tiny staff kept on a temp from an agency
several years ago. Today, we learn she is a felon. So a bad mistake
was made.

Where this seems to have caused bad blood in the community (at least
to my thinking), is where people have taken the Register's
rumor-mongering too seriously. They take a honest  hiring mistake on
the part of the Foundation and turn it in to an engine pushing the
idea that this has somehow had a continued effect on the charity's
finances or the regular functioning of the project.

I say we perhaps try and show a united front to this unfounded claim
and act like adults: showing an assumption of good faith for the
Foundation and getting on with the work at hand.


On 12/15/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 15/12/2007, Christiano Moreschi <moreschiwikiman at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > Someone there must have known - the COO can't just vanish to jail
> > and no one on the staff/Board knows anything - and they neglected
> > to tell you. That's the other story of incompetence here ...
>
> Wait, wait, wait.
>
> You seem to be assuming the Foundation *had* to know about her
> extracurricular activities, but this seems to be a misplaced
> assumption.
>
> Let's look at the story again, shall we?
>
> ----
>
> First off, her past history. This is the stuff that a background check
> would have picked up - one doesn't seem to have been done. Fair dos,
> criticise them for that, you can consider it unfortunate or
> unforgivable according to taste. But if you don't do it, you don't
> pick up anything, however odd it may be...
>
> (I am assuming she didn't tell them. I would be quite bemused if she
> had and they employed her regardless)
>
> Secondly, her time at Wikimedia.
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/13/wikimedia_coo_convicted_felon/page2.html
>
> * "Four months after Doran's hiring, on May 20th, she was arrested ...
> paid a $5,250 bond and was released that same day."
>
> So here's our first incident. Looking at the calendar, May 20th was a
> Sunday; it all happened on that one day; if she didn't tell anyone,
> how would the Foundation have known? I know this is all a matter of
> public record, but that doesn't equate to "people get told about it" -
> I'm sure *my* HR department doesn't scan the local paper every week to
> find out if I've been caught doing something.
>
> * An incident where she was stopped by immigration sometime in June
>
> Details entirely unclear; maybe they knew about it, maybe they didn't.
> Even if they did, there's no reason they would know the *content* of
> the interview.
>
> * "On July 4 ... the Wikimedia Foundation passed a private resolution
> concerning Carolyn Doran, and she was soon removed from the official
> Foundation staff list"
>
> ['soon' = on the 10th]
>
> * "A month later, she was arrested and jailed by the Pinellas Park,
> Florida police after a warrant was issued by the sheriff in Loudoun
> County, Virginia. ... This November ... she was extradited to
> Virginia"
>
> It seems that the 'carted off to jail' happened a good month after she
> *stopped* being WMF's COO. It doesn't strike me as desperately
> surprising that they didn't know about it - keeping tabs on the
> whereabouts of your ex-employees a month after they've left is very
> nice, and all, but not really required!
>
> ----
>
> The rest of it seems to boil down to "when we knew about it we could
> google and find confirmation!" Well, bully for you. How many of your
> current colleagues do you regularly google to check on their criminal
> pasts? If the answer is more than zero, um, this strikes me as a
> little worrying...
>
> We can legitimately criticise the hiring practices here, and I
> certainly won't argue with you doing so. But to think that Wikimedia
> somehow failed to notice an employee being sent to jail is just mad -
> it's something even the original article isn't claiming!
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>