There is not much one can say in response to an email such as that. During the last month many within the community have come to a similar conclusions as I did back in Oct following seeing the documents surrounding the Knight Foundation grant.
The decision I had pushed for back in November has now been made. While we have lost a lot of amazing people at the WMF, greater losses I believe have been avoided. I would like to thank everyone who stuck through it all and thank all the staff who raised concerns. I heard them loud and clear.
I think we have the opportunity not only to learn a lot from all of this but to become stronger as a movement. I believe we need to make a few changes. We need to remove the ability of the board to remove community elected members "without cause" and without community involvement. We need to have a staff representative at the board table. And I believe Jimmy Wales should stand for community re election (at which I imagine he would succeed).
I am here because what we do matters. The content we create has a positive effect on people's lives. And while I do not plan to go anywhere it is unfortunate that one needs to be so thick skinned within this movement.
James
On Wed, Mar 9, 2016 at 6:48 PM, David Emrany david.emrany@gmail.com wrote:
Oliver
I have also been in the movement for over a decade, and I am sick of people on all sides distorting facts, gaming the system / manipulating the community.
IMO, this came to a boil in Dec 2006 when WMF altered its structure and purpose and relocated followed by the "COO scandal" [1] and other things.
I'm glad that community people are now revisiting those early days and trying to figger out how it all happened so secretly and without a whimper from the community reps on the BoT who we entrusted to protect our stake in our work,and who let us down very badly.
David
[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/13/wikimedia_coo_convicted_felon/
On 3/10/16, Oliver Keyes ironholds@gmail.com wrote:
I've been in the Wikimedia movement for over a decade now. I've seen Wikimedia-l. I've seen internal-l. I've had death and sexual assault threats show up in my inbox. And this, /this/, is genuinely the most horrified I've ever been by any message I've seen yet.
This email is not a good faith email. it is not, despite the neutrality of its language, a civil email. It's the kind of blinkered, detached, ultrarationalist gaslighting[0] I associate with people in LessWrong.[1]
No assumption of good faith. No discussion of the issues. No admission that different people can legitimately and normally interpret things in different ways. The framing of things so that the options are that James is a liar, stupid, or suffering from PTSD. Whether deliberately or not, it is deeply manipulative and frames the entire discussion with assertions that James is disconnected from reality.
Jimmy, if this is genuinely how you are comfortable behaving, intentionally, and if this is the standard that you wish to set, I would ask you to do it in a new community. Resign from the Board. Abrogate your status as a founder. Go create these standards somewhere new, with people who have signed up for them.
And if you instead don't understand why this sort of message is chilling and terrifying and incredibly problematic, you need to step back from all of these discussions for a time and go find someone who wants to explain it to you. Because this is not productive, and this is not how leaders behave. I appreciate you think you *have* to participate as some kind of movement moral compass, but, you aren't, and you don't. And even if you did, the morality demonstrated by that email is, I suspect, not something any of us want a part of.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting [1] for other examples of this kind of language, and the thing my brain immediately jumped to, see how ultrarationalists deal with people asking if individuals could please stop harassing them for disagreeing with an idea http://lesswrong.com/lw/lb3/breaking_the_vicious_cycle/bnrr
On Wed, Mar 9, 2016 at 7:56 PM, Pete Forsyth peteforsyth@gmail.com
wrote:
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. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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