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

[Anthony]

> > > In my experience, it's the same in the UK. I think people are failing
> > > to consider the fact that while Wikipedia is enormous, the WMF is
> > > tiny. Yes, she had the title "COO", but that's because she was the
> > > only person in her department, so she had to be in charge of it. There
> > > is a big difference between the COO of a large multinational
> > > corporation and a solitary bookkeeper of a one-office charity.
>
> > But some involved in the foundation would seem to be trying to have
> > things both ways; to expect their organization to be treated as a
> > small private club when that suits them, and have it be treated as a
> > huge multinational operation when *that* suits them.
>
> You appear to be attempting to deny the point that it is in fact both
> - it's not a matter of "suits them", it's a matter of which aspect is
> relevant. There may be hundreds of thousands of volunteers, but it
> really is a vanishingly tiny charity office.
>
The Wikimedia Foundation is rather unique in this sense.  Its revenues
are a few million a year, but its market value would probably be in
the billions.

In any case, I think this is irrelevant.  A non-profit organization
with roughly a million dollars in cash and equipment isn't "tiny".
Small, maybe, but not tiny.  A big mistake was made entrusting the
operation of such an organization to someone without properly
investigating her background.  Maybe the principle of "assume good
faith" is being relied on too heavily here.  We are told a process is
in place to make sure it doesn't happen again, but there doesn't seem
to be an acknowledgment that such a big mistake was made in the first
place.  No one has stepped up and taken the blame, and I think there's
a lot of blame to go around.  I guess legal considerations make it
difficult.  But I also think there are some people who really don't
understand how negligent they were.