Below is a message Jimmy Wales sent to James Heilman and myself on Feb. 29.
I mentioned the existence of this message on the list on March 2:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-March/082901.html
I feel this message can provide important insight into the dynamics
surrounding James H.'s dismissal, and various people have expressed
interest in seeing it, so I'm forwarding it to the list. (For what it's
worth, I did check with James H.; he had no objection to my sharing it.)
For context, as I understand it, Jimmy's message was more or less in
response to this list message of mine:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-February/082764.html
-Pete
[[User:Peteforsyth]]
---------- Forwarded message ----------
*From: *Jimmy Wales
*Date: *February 29, 2016 6:21:46 AM
*To: *Pete Forsyth,James Heilman
*Subject: **A conversation?*
James, I wonder if you'd be up for a one on one conversation. I've been
struck in a positive way by some of the things that Pete has said and I
realize that moving things forward on wikimedia-l, being sniped at by
people who are as interested in creating drama as anything else, isn't
really conducive to reaching more understanding.
I have some questions for you - real, sincere, and puzzled questions.
Some of the things that you have said strike me as very obviously out of
line with the facts. And I wonder how to reconcile that.
One hypothesis is that you're just a liar. I have a hard time with that
one.
Another hypothesis is that you have a poor memory or low emotional
intelligence or something like that - you seem to say things that just
don't make sense and which attempt to lead people to conclusions that
are clearly not true.
Another hypothesis is that the emotional trauma of all this has colored
your perceptions on certain details.
As an example, and I'm not going to dig up the exact quotes, you said
publicly that you wrote to me in October that we were building a
Google-competing search engine and that I more or less said that I'm
fine with it. Go back and read our exchange. There's just now way to
get that from what I said - Indeed, I specifically said that we are NOT
building a Google-competing search engine, and explained the much lower
and much less complex ambition of improving search and discovery.
As another example, you published a timeline starting with Wikia Search.
It's really hard for me to interpret that in any other way than to try
to lead people down the path of the conspiracy theorists that I had a
pet project to compete with Google which led to a secret project to
biuld a search engine, etc. etc. You know as well as I do that's a
false narrative, so it's very hard for me to charitably interpret that.
Anyway these are the kinds of things that I struggle with.