On 3 March 2016 at 11:53, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote: ...
The ED has been sacrificed. It is obvious that the baying for blood has not stopped.
Last time I checked, Lila was still alive and supporting the WMF for the rest of the month. Fortunately the age of martyrs is long past.
It is true that a change of CEO, means a convenient scapegoat so that issues that had absolutely nothing to do with Lila, such as Jimmy Wales' "utter fucking bullshit" attacks,[4] can be spun away and might be forgotten by the community. The trouble is, that many of these problems have not vanished just because Lila will be moving on. The deep rooted problems must be faced by the current board of trustees, and they can rely on the fact that after 15 years of organic growth of the community, there are too many passionate WMF observers, tech journalists and long serving Wikimedia volunteers who have memories stretching back longer than most trustees have been around.
Criticism of the WMF board to be expected, when we read ridiculous contradictions in public statements and the jaw dropping failures in trustee governance over the past few months. Though a couple of "nutcases" (to quote a recent email sent to me) may be read as bloodthirsty and probably not worth focusing on, the vast majority of critical posts are supported by the facts and expressed in a civil way, even if they are grounded in anger and disappointment because, you know, those of us writing here who are not paid to do so, care about what happens to *our* Wikimedia projects and the future of *our* content.
Fortunately we have been reassured many, many times that the trustees are listening, being thoughtful and they are nothing like clowns. Sadly the trustees are also many months overdue to take any meaningful positive action on their own failed governance. As an example, the Geshuri fiasco has not resulted in a single improvement so far, perhaps there never will be anything more than political spin in response, even the Board Governance Committee has not changed a single face as far as I can tell (though, they appear to have not published any minutes since 2013, may there are minutes hidden away somewhere equally opaque, it's beyond my skills to discover them at this moment).[1]
In the meantime, dearest Gerard, please turn down the dial from 11 to a 6, especially if you are going to keep on being the most prolific poster breaking the 30 post soft limit month after month.[2][3]
Links 1. https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Category:Minutes 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_to_eleven 3. https://stats.wikimedia.org/mail-lists/wikimedia-l.html 4. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/27/trust_me_pleads_wikipedia_former_goo...
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