Let's get real. Let's stop apologising for Jimmy Wales or pretending he's our Royal family and can never be correctly held to account for his actions.
We can say without any doubt that Jimmy is a bully, he misuses "confidentiality" as a political weapon, and he has repeatedly been emotionally unable to back down from any of his obviously misleading statements, even when directly caught out with demonstrable facts. If any trustee should be removed "for cause", it would be Jimmy. The community should be able to hold up a mirror and call his misuse of his trustee position "utter fucking bullshit". He is the only trustee with a very direct commercial conflict of interest, yet his ownership of Wikia has never been publicly declared, nor has Jimmy ever recused from open WMF board discussions and decisions because of that direct and highly profitable interest.
This nonsense has been going on for a decade. Jimmy is never going change, and he's never going to give up his honorary Founder's seat without being forced off it with a massive political crowbar. A meta RFC to get rid of the Founder's seat, and thereby force Jimmy to stand for election, may be appropriate and necessary now, certainly the current WMF trustees are incapable of discussing Jimmy in any frank way, despite their private views.
P.S. Andreas, I suggest adding to your list of failed promises his recent speedily arranged trip to San Francisco where he made several claims that he was going to meet WMF employees to get the facts behind their discontent, and the results were going to be published. I do hope that the board covered all his expenses, which were perfectly legitimate. However presumably the WMF board were expecting a published outcome and report to the board. Presumably the meetings either failed to happen, or went very badly, perhaps they were critical of the board and Jimmy, as there has been a profound silence from Jimmy and the rest of the trustees about what those meetings. Surely everyone now gets the idea that the WMF board has a serious lack of transparency without Jimmy rubbing everyone's nose in it?
Thanks, Fae
On 5 May 2016 at 14:26, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 10:09 AM, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
In a Dec 30th, 2015 personal email JW touched on two potential reasons but they are unfounded.
I've lost count of the number of times Jimmy Wales said in recent months that he would know "within a few days" whether it was fine to publish that Dec 30th personal email, that he was urging the board towards full transparency, that all would be clear on Monday ... and then ... nothing. Just empty promises, without any follow-up to say whether the email will or will not be published.
Is anyone on the board actually preventing Jimmy (or James) from publishing that personal email?