A couple of responses in-line below.
Jimmy, if you would like me to be able to respond to issues on your
Wikipedia talk page, let me know. It's been 4 years now since you
censored me from writing there, which seems like a long time to hold a
grudge.
On 27 February 2016 at 14:39, Jimmy Wales <jimmywales(a)ymail.com> wrote:
On 2/26/16 9:17 PM, Fæ wrote:
I hope you will be able to address nagging
concerns about your
personal support for keeping the search project a secret last year,
Sure - I never supported keeping the proposed and approved work on
Discovery and Search secret last year at all. I don't know of anyone
who did. The failure to sufficiently disclose happened, but it was not
a point that was discussed at the board level to my knowledge. I don't
know of any board members, past or present, who think or thought that
such things should be kept from the community.
It is my longstanding and continued position that the Foundation should
be as open as legally possible with only a very limited degree of
non-disclosure, mostly around legal matters and around employee matters.
There are a few other examples, too, like price negotiations with
vendors, and so on like that. With regard to our long term strategy, I
continue to strongly support that everything should not only be
disclosed to the community, but that it makes no sense for it to be in
conflict with the community, and that very often it should be led by the
community in consultation with the Foundation.
As has been raised by others in this email thread, a key core and
legally defined duty of the board is to hold your senior management to
account. If the board of trustees is out of touch with the Wikimedia
community giving "plausible deniability" for a claim that throughout
2015 you thought your management team was being open about the huge
(in terms of relative staff numbers) Knowledge Engine / Search Engine
project and original Knight Grant application in 2015, even while
faced with many public requests for information about the grant and
the "secret project", then the WMF board was not competent or meeting
its commitment to transparency or basic governance.
Politically your words look good, but they must be able to be
demonstrated by action. The claim that you are personally pushing for
"the Foundation should be as open as legally possible with only a very
limited degree of non-disclosure" does not withstand comparison
against the facts. As a trivial example, you have been avoiding the
publication of your email to James about his dismissal, yet apparently
both you and he are agreed can and should be published. While you are
at it, could you copy to me the email(s) about me that you sent to
your fellow board members when I was Chair of the Chapters'
Association? You have a history of behind the scenes dealing and
politicking, when there are no "legal matters" that can apply to your
personal views in correspondence, so I am sure you can understand why
some of those Wikimedians that have become disillusioned as targets of
your non-public criticism or excruciating public criticism without
your engagement in a proper process of evidence or a right to
challenge, will continue to be sceptical of your ability to lead on
openness and transparency, unless you can honestly address those past
cases.
and your
conflict of loyalties during that process, shortly after your
visit.
I did not have any conflict of loyalties during that process. Spending
a reasonable portion of our IT budget on an ambitious project to improve
search and discovery, and to conduct research and community consultation
on that, is a great idea for Wikipedia and for the broader Wikimedia
movement and I strongly support it.
Again I struggle to reconcile your opinions of your conflict of
loyalties, with how the general public would perceive a clearly
presented history of your role as an unelected WMF trustee, or
effective "trustee for life" as many have called it, with a personal
role for CEO selection that you have created for yourself, your part
in trustee appointments and the opportunities your regularly have on
the board to steer WMF strategy to encourage projects that suit your
preferences, with your significant financial interest in Wikia, Inc.,
your past experience with "Wikia Search" and how the WMF
Knowledge/Search engine development would fulfil Wikia's strategy for
selling more commercial services, selling Wikia user data and making a
greater profit from targeted advertising.[1] However I'll nail this
down a bit more in a separate thread as assessing the public
perception of your potential conflict of loyalties is worth having
multiple views on, rather than just your opinions or mine.
Links:
1. "Take advantage of Wikia's custom research solutions to achieve
campaign objectives, including brand lift studies, target audience
insights, and more!", "Reach the right audience with the right message
using Wikia's multitude of targeting opportunities, including
demographic, psychographic, geographic, contextual, genre, devices,
conquesting, and more!"
http://www.wikia.com/mediakit
Thanks,
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae