[WikiEN-l] Just what *is* Jimbo's role anyway?

[David Gerard]

On 21/03/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> Well, Sheldon, this assumes that the Foundation has authority *over* the
> community, which the Foundation more or less denies.  So whatever
> corporate powers I have or don't have are likely quite different from
> whatever powers our community traditions give me.
> Several board members have made it quite clear that they don't intend to
> interfere with that one way or the other.
> The community predates the Foundation, and was created to hold certain
> legal assets and fulfill certain legal responsibilities.


The community is not the Foundation. The Foundation asserts certain
powers by virtue of being the organisation that runs the web servers,
e.g. administrator is a community function, but checkuser is more of a
Foundation job - it's essentially a power normally held by the
developers/sysadmins - the power to look certain sensitive stuff up in
the database, said database being run by the Foundation. (It was
originally created so the ArbCom didn't have to keep bugging Tim and
Brion to look up IPs.) Steward powers are probably much the same,
though they cross over. Certain things make more sense if you think in
terms of what's the community and what's the Foundation.


- d.