Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-01-13/From the editors
"Once", wrote Ian Fleming in Goldfinger, "is happenstance. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a pattern" (actually he wrote, "Three times is enemy action", but let's not antagonise our viewers here). If Fleming's assertion is correct that one requires three instances of the same occurrence to identify a pattern, then now would be a pretty good time to try, as this is the third appearance of Wikipedia's annual Traffic Report. And while the dogged stalwarts of the list (Deaths in [insert year here], [insert year here] in film, [Insert Your Home Country Here], World War II) stand firm against all weather, what really reveals itself across the last three years is a shift in usage patterns from recreation to information.
That is not to say, mind you, that recreation is and perhaps will always be the prime motivator of our viewership, whatever our intentions as editors may be. Rather, Wikipedia viewers are becoming cannier in how they use Wikipedia to augment their recreation. The presence of Chris Kyle, for instance, could only be due to the popularity of the film American Sniper, but that film is nowhere to be seen. Instead, viewers were drawn to the man himself, the tragedy of his death, and the myriad controversies surrounding his legacy. Ditto Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar; viewers of the hit Netflix series Narcos turned for information not to the article on the show, but to that of the man whose violent wheel-dealings it portrayed. The Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything may have been a modest hit, but that was not what brought viewers to Wikipedia, who were more interested in the film's subject than the film itself.
The patterns of colour reveal a stark change in usage, though it is still too early to know if it marks a longterm trend. 2013 was dominated by the red of television, but both 2014 and 2015 have increasingly embraced the orange of film. 2015 is clearly the year film took over; 11 articles on the Top 25 list, nearly half the total, are either on films or are film-related, compared with five last year and two in 2013. In my first annual report I speculated that television would dominate over film because its longform structure meant it could maintain our interest for longer periods. I have apparently reckoned without the Event Movie.
In 2015, Hollywood rediscovered the magic of marketing. Movies this year were so huge (the four on the list released this year are all in the top ten highest-grossing films of all time) that they exerted their presence over months; watching the commercials and then the discussions on the news became as much a part of the experience as the film itself. Other patterns can also be seen; the bright yellow of websites has gradually lost ground, while the electric blue of current events has grown.
Given that a sizeable portion of traffic to website articles is doubtless due to people searching for the sites themselves and clicking the wrong Google hit, it shows, perhaps, that our viewers are becoming more Internet savvy, and are consciously employing it as an information tool, rather than as a means to chat or watch cat videos. One colour I am very happy to see the end of is beige. IPv6, with the benefit of hindsight, probably would have been excluded today, but sex has a far more storied and venerable past. Time was when this report would have been pointless; in the last decade, Wikipedia was still seen as something of a toy, and its only regular viewers were school children looking up naughty words. Sex, that most universal of human preoccupations, was the last to go. I do not expect to see it again.
For a list of the raw Top 5000 most viewed Wikipedia articles of 2015 (but be careful to exclude articles with almost 100% or 0% mobile views, which are afflicted by bots like the longstanding Angelsberg), see here. For the most recently weekly Top 25 reports, see Dec 20-26 Report and Dec 27 - Jan 2 Report.
The Top 25 most viewed articles of 2015 were:
| Rank | Article | Class | Views |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Deaths in 2015 | 
|
27,885,484 |
| 2 | Chris Kyle | 
|
27,765,570 |
| 3 | Star Wars: The Force Awakens |
|
23,523,985 |
| 4 | 
|
22,330,302 | |
| 5 | Stephen Hawking |
|
20,060,944 |
| 6 | Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant |
|
19,335,481 |
| 7 | List of Bollywood films of 2014 |
|
18,171,094 |
| 8 | 
|
18,107,283 | |
| 9 | Avengers: Age of Ultron |
|
17,409,029 |
| 10 | United States |
|
16,855,064 |
| 11 | Kanye West |
|
16,478,369 |
| 12 | Game of Thrones |
|
16,135,993 |
| 13 | Star Wars |
|
15,580,814 |
| 14 | Wikipedia |
|
15,157,792 |
| 15 | Furious 7 |
|
14,740,823 |
| 16 | Jurassic World |
|
14,283,010 |
| 17 | Donald Trump |
|
14,052,391 |
| 18 | Fifty Shades of Grey |
|
13,362,580 |
| 19 | Pablo Escobar |
|
13,190,232 |
| 20 | India | 
|
12,864,393 |
| 21 | 2014 in film |
|
12,542,233 |
| 22 | Floyd Mayweather, Jr. |
|
12,436,450 |
| 23 | Ronda Rousey |
|
12,298,765 |
| 24 | Paul Walker |
|
12,201,471 |
| 25 | World War II |
|
12,149,875 |
| Key |
|---|
| Website |
| Person |
| TV show |
| Film |
| Country |
| Current event |
| Historical event |
| Novel |
| Other |
The Pacific Standard reports on a study published by Simon DeDeo (Indiana University) last month, looking at conflict in Wikipedia:
| “ | If we were to think of Wikipedia as a society, what lessons could be gleaned from it? According to new research, one thing we might learn concerns the origins of conflict – namely, that it doesn't have one single origin, nor do solutions to conflict. | ” |
DeDeo says he "wanted to understand the structure of conflict and its resolutions – what conflicts look like, what starts them, and what ends them", based on the patterns of constructive changes and reverts to 60 frequently edited pages – entries on global warming, Hillary Clinton, Michael Jackson and an unspecified boy band.
DeDeo had three hypotheses on what might affect these patterns: "administrator lockdowns, users with a history of stirring up trouble, and news coverage related to a Wiki page". He was only able to find a weak correlation with news coverage of a Wikipedia page.
| “ | Lockdowns, which limit who can edit a page, had surprisingly little ability to shut down conflicts, and bad apples had little ability to initiate conflict. | ” |
In the end, DeDeo seems to have remained mystified by it all:
| “ | Conflict is real, it has distinct grammars, but it doesn't have [one] cause. [...] People ruin it together, and people fix it together. | ” |
(Jan. 7) AK
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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-01-13/Essay
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-01-13/Opinion
In the wake of the surprise ouster of community-elected Trustee James Heilman (Doc James) from the Board of the Foundation, the new trustees appointed to fill other seats on the Board have raised widespread concern in the Wikimedia community (see previous Signpost coverage). Last week’s announcement of the appointment of Kelly Battles and Arnnon Geshuri raised concerns about the Board’s ties to Silicon Valley technology companies, especially Google, and the lack of Board members from non-technology fields such as education. Since then, more specific concerns have come to light regarding the participation of Geshuri in the High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation case while a senior director of human resources and staffing at Google. Geshuri failed to respond to a request for comment from the Signpost.
From 2005 to 2009, a number of Silicon Valley technology companies, including Google and Apple, had illegal agreements which prevented recruitment of employees from other companies participating in the arrangement. The matter resulted in a United States Department of Justice antitrust action and a class action lawsuit of 64,000 technology employees, the latter of which claimed that the employees’ potential wages were suppressed due to their inability to be offered more lucrative employment by other companies. Geshuri held his position at Google from October 2004 to November 2009 and would have been an integral part of any such agreements regarding staffing. A press release from his later employer Tesla Motors noted that "Geshuri was director of staffing operations for Google, where he designed the company’s legendarily [sic] recruitment organization and talent acquisition strategy. ... While he oversaw all aspects of recruitment, Google evolved into a technology powerhouse with 20,000 employees."
Aside from the illegalities and implications for employee wages of such agreements, the direct impact these agreements had on the fates of employees, and Geshuri's participation in the enforcement of them, is seen in a 2007 incident that was discussed in a 2012 article in PC Magazine and a 2014 article in PandoDaily. In March 2007, a Google recruiter emailed an Apple engineer, which set into motion a flurry of emails between top executives for the two companies, emails that came to light as a result of the later court cases.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs emailed Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, writing "I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this." Schmidt brought the matter to Geshuri: "Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening? I will need to send a response back to Apple quickly so please let me know as soon as you can." Geshuri replied:
| “ | On this specific case, the sourcer who contacted this Apple employee should not have and will be terminated within the hour. We are scrubbing the sourcer’s records to ensure she did not contact anyone else.
In general, we have a very clear 'do not call' policy (attached) that is given to every staffing professional and I reiterate this message in ongoing communications and staffing meetings. Unfortunately, every six months or so someone makes an error in judgment, and for this type of violation we terminate their relationship with Google. Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs. This was an isolated incident and we will be very careful to make sure this does not happen again. |
” |
In response to the immediate termination of the Google recruiter, Jobs emailed Apple’s HR director with a smiley face emoticon.
PandoDaily wrote in 2014:
| “ | Apologizing and groveling to Steve Jobs is a recurring theme throughout these court dockets... as is the total disregard for all of the not-Steve Jobs names whose lives and fates are so casually dispatched with, like henchmen in a Hollywood film. | ” |
Another incident almost exactly a year later was discussed in a different 2014 article from PandoDaily. Facebook was not a party to the inter-company agreement and Google executives were concerned about Facebook’s successful recruitment of Google employees. Geshuri suggested recruiting Facebook into the agreement, either voluntarily or forcing them through retaliatory recruitment of Facebook employees. In the antitrust case, Judge Lucy Koh summed up the matter and quoted what PandoDaily called Geshuri’s "quasi-Nietzschean rhetoric":
| “ | In March of 2008, Arnnon Geshuri (Google Recruiting Director) discovered that non-party Facebook had been cold calling into Google's Site Reliability Engineering ("SRE") team. Geshuri's first response was to suggest contacting Sheryl Sandberg (Chief Operating Officer for non-party Facebook) in an effort to "ask her to put a stop to the targeted sourcing effort directed at our SRE team" and "to consider establishing a mutual 'Do Not Call' agreement that specifies that we will not cold-call into each other." Arnnon Geshuri also suggested "look[ing] internally and review[ing] the attrition rate for the SRE group," stating, "we may want to consider additional individual retention incentives or team incentives to keep attrition as low as possible in SRE." Finally, an alternative suggestion was to "start an aggressive campaign to call into their company and go after their folks—no holds barred. We would be unrelenting and a force of nature. [Our emphasis] | ” |
When these matters came to the attention of the Wikimedia community, many objected to Geshuri’s appointment to the Board. Cullen328 wrote an essay detailing these incidents that concluded "Because of this evidence of Geshuri's misconduct in this scandal, I believe that he should not be a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees." Kevin Gorman wrote:
| “ | The Wikimedia movement is not a movement whose direction should be set by someone with that degree of callousness - and the fact that he happily participated in the sort of anti-competitive agreement he did, which he must have known was illegal and which exposed his former employers to not insignificant liability, brings forth significant doubt as to whether or not he can reasonably be trusted to carry out his fiduciary duties as a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation. | ” |
Even former members of the Board of Trustees objected to Geshuri’s appointment. Florence Devouard (Anthere), chair of the board from 2006 to 2008, wrote "I fully support" Gorman’s statement. Kat Walsh (Mindspillage), another former chair and member from 2006 to 2013, wrote:
| “ | I think integrity is the most important and most difficult thing for a board member of this organization. One of the key things that distinguishes Wikimedia from other entities is that it does not take the easy path: it does not sell the privacy of users, it does not make restricted content deals, it does not believe influence over content or governance should be able to be bought. ... Organizations with tremendous reach and influence—such as Google and Wikipedia—have a great responsibility not to take actions that systematically harm the people that rely on them. To know that someone at such an organization participated in something unethical in this way does not give me great confidence in them for leadership in Wikimedia. | ” |
Community members also raised concerns about the vetting process for Geshuri and whether or not the Board was fully aware of his background prior to his selection. Some pointed out that these incidents featured prominently in Google search results for Geshuri’s name and questioned how they were missed by the Board. Jimmy Wales wrote that “I was aware (from googling him and reading news reports) that he had a small part in the overall situation” but regarding Geshuri’s prominent involvement and the revelations of the court cases, he wrote “I don't (yet) know anything about that”. Dariusz Jemielniak wrote that he missed the incidents because they were not prominent in the results in Google’s other language domains: "I'm investigating with the [Board’s Governance Committee] what went wrong with the whole process (that some Board members did not have full information) and we're hoping to come back with learning from this failure, as it was just one point of several that were suboptimal."
Requests direct to the WMF Board and the Wikimedia Foundation resulted in a statement from Board member Alice Wiegand, who told the Signpost:
| “ | The Board of Trustees evaluates all candidates for their relevant skills and interests, and conducts a criminal background check. Our current process follows nonprofit industry best practices, and has consistently produced successful outcomes. We are constantly looking for ways to improve our processes and go beyond best practices in service to the movement’s values. Currently we are reviewing options to further strengthen and enhance this process, including possibly adding a public relations review. | ” |
Community members also raised concerns about the current Board's many ties to Google, including one member, Dr. Denny Vrandečić (Denny), who is a current Google employee who works on Google's Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph draws from Wikipedia and Wikidata and Board decisions about these projects may affect Google's commercial interests. When asked by an editor about Vrandečić's involvement in such decisions, Wales wrote:
| “ | If we are going to be that broad with our view of what "directly impacts Google" then virtually everything we do impacts Google. Denny has always been excellent about recusing himself from anything having to do with Google and indeed has been quite keen to bend over backwards to do the right thing. I think it very appropriate for him to give input and advice to the board and the staff and the community about issues relating to discovery on the website | ” |
Wiegand's statement did not respond to concerns regarding Vrandečić specifically, but she told the Signpost:
| “ | The Board takes concerns about potential Trustee conflicts of interest very seriously. In accordance with our conflict of interest policy (wmf:Conflict of interest policy), it is established practice that any Board member with a possible or perceived conflict of interest is recused from the relevant conversation. | ” |
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-01-13/Serendipity
As covered previously in the Signpost, I was removed from the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees in late December, by an 8–2 vote. The Board has not been forthcoming (publicly or to me) about the reasons, though they have (officially and as individuals) repeatedly stated that “mutual trust” was the main factor.
My brief time on the Board – since sent there with more than 1800 of your votes in June – was defined by tensions around transparency. I believe transparency is a crucial value of the movement. Upon joining the Board, I encountered a culture of secrecy that was distressing. I advocated, forcefully at times, for publishing information that others felt should be kept secret. They may have believed I felt so strongly that I would publish it unilaterally; but it’s hard to know: I’m not a mindreader. I’ve not published such information.
During my time as a trustee, and in the weeks since my removal, I’ve learned that many Wikimedia Foundation staff share the Wikimedia movement's dedication to transparency, share my concerns about secrecy in the present organization, and are willing to take bold steps to bring about change.
Shortly after my removal, several Wikimedia staff created, and began to populate, a page on Meta Wiki called the "Wikimedia Foundation transparency gap." Many community members, including English Wikipedians and members of other projects, and former staff and Board members, have built out the page in detail, documenting areas in which the WMF could improve its transparency, and suggesting specific steps it could take to do so.
This essay will focus on just a few of those ideas.
The past couple of weeks have seen a great deal of discussion on transparency and what this means for our movement. Members of the volunteer community, along with Foundation staff, have begun collecting specific ideas about how transparency could and should be improved, on the Meta page Wikimedia Foundation transparency gap. The community is a unique and invaluable asset of Wikimedia. Not only is transparency required to properly leverage this asset: our communities demand transparency.
Not everything should be transparent, but a great deal must be, and I believe much more than currently. We need a culture that is transparent by default, one where confidentiality is only dragged out for specific reasons and with specific justification.
We must keep in mind that the WMF is a steward of movement funds, and those in positions of authority should act accordingly. This is reflected in our values "we must communicate Wikimedia Foundation information in a transparent, thorough and timely manner, to our communities and more generally, to the public." We additionally say: "In general, where possible, we aim to do much of our work in public, rather than in private, typically on public wikis." We need to redouble our efforts to reach this goal.
Our long-term strategy must be developed in genuine collaboration with our movement. This means that strategy discussions are started early, that ideas are proposed, and that this is done before a year into a project or millions of dollars are spent. Our ideas around “search and discovery” were developed before April to June of 2015 and we presented them first to potential funders rather than our own communities.
Restricted grants can change the direction of an organization. If allowed they need to be very carefully managed. The Bylaws require Board approval of restricted grants over $100,000, and for good reason. In a movement like ours we must not be “selling” ideas to potential funders that we are not willing to sell to the movement as a whole.
Grant applications should be published at the same time as they are submitted to potential funders. This would keep those in a position of management accountable. It would reduce the risk of unpleasant surprises down the road. The community would also be aware of what has been promised to those who are funding us. Best practice would be to take this a step further by discussing what kind of grants we should accept – an idea put forward by the previous ED, Sue Gardner.
With the grant for the visual editor (VE), from my understanding there was a timeline around rollout agreed to with the funder. Thus VE was rolled out before it was ready, as exemplified by the difficulty initially of adding references with the new system. It should have been obvious to all involved that rollout was too early. We ended up taking an idea that had a great deal of support from the community at large and turning it into a loss for the WMF’s programming teams.
Those who have pushed the most for transparency around restricted grants have left the organization. We now need “clear standard[s] for transparency [around] restricted grants”].
If the US government can have “open, honest, challenging conversations”, then why can’t we? Our communities are able to have frank and difficult discussions in public. If one takes a controversial position one should be willing to defend and stand behind it. We have a communication gap, one that holds our movement back; this would help address it.
That these discussions are public keeps some level of behavioral decorum and allows inappropriate intimidation tactics to be reined in by admins. It also allows those who “vote” for community candidates to judge if those they have elected are living up to their positions before they ran. We should not be hesitant to publish dissenting views. While the final vote obviously wins the day attempts to hide other views should be disallowed. And they should definitely never be misrepresented.
James Heilman is a Canadian emergency room physician, a founder of Wikimedia Canada and the Wiki Project Med Foundation, and a former member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.
Wikipedia officially turns 15 years old at the end of the week.[1] The tone of the TV news segments, newspaper op-eds, and other media spotlights will be celebratory. However, the mood among Wikipedia insiders is anything but: the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), its Board of Trustees, and close observers within the community are entering the third week of a crisis that’s arguably more public and pointed than similar issues in years past. The major events and themes seem to be as follows:
Woven into each strand is a theme that The Wikipedian has covered since 2012 at least, each time with a few more data points and a little more urgency: that the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikipedia community it supposedly exists to serve have become increasingly at odds with one another. A deep exploration of why is beyond the remit of this post—for now, we just need to put everything that’s going on in one place.
On December 28, well-respected community leader Heilman announced via email to the Wikimedia-l public mailing list[2] that he had been “removed” from the board. Heilman gave no initial reason for the announcement, guaranteeing a flurry of speculation and general disarray, not to mention the revelation came during that weird “office dead zone” week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
Within the hour, Board chair Patricio Lorente confirmed the news in a follow-up email, providing scarcely any more context, and WMF’s legal department posted the full text of the resolution “James Heilman Removal” on the web:
| “ | Resolved, James Heilman is removed from the Board of Trustees, fully ending his term in office and appointment as a member or liaison for any Board committees. | ” |
Eight trustees voted to approve; only two voted against: fellow community representative Dariusz Jemielniak and Heilman himself.
Into the contextual void spilled hundreds of replies even before the turn of the calendar three days later. Wikipedia’s famous co-founder, Jimmy Wales, the longest-serving trustee, was the first to add a smidge of information. In response to the growing concern of commenters on his user page, Wales simply stated that Heilman’s removal was “for cause”.
On January 1, while the community was still searching for answers, Heilman posted a somewhat cryptic statement giving his side of the story, suggesting that the Board had sacked him for “[r]eleasing private board information”—even though, according to Heilman, he had only “pushed for greater transparency”. This view was largely adopted by other Wikimedia-l participants, who were already predisposed to side with him.[3] In their view, Heilman’s mysterious dismissal looked like the canonical example of the Board’s troubling lack of transparency.
On January 5, the Board published a FAQ explaining their rationale, although it’s doubtful that it satisfied many. It seemed to agree that some form of this “confidence vs. transparency” question was at the core:
| “ | Over time, his fellow Trustees came to the opinion that they lacked sufficient confidence in his discretion, judgment, and ability to maintain confidential Board information about the Wikimedia Foundation governance activities. | ” |
Later still, community-elected trustee Denny Vrandečić posted his own take on the dismissal, reinforcing this consensus. Even so, the underlying disagreement remained a mystery. To solve it, the first clue may be found in Heilman’s January 1 post, making a point that went unremarked-upon by the Board. Heilman wrote he had been “accused”—though not publicly to this point—of:
| “ | Giving staff unrealistic expectations regarding potential board decisions. I have always stated to staff that I only represented 10% of the board and have never given assurances that I could convince other trustees. | ” |
Well, now what does that mean? Convince them of what, exactly? Careful observers on the list had some idea:
| “ | For whatever reason James ended being ground zero for complaints by WMF employees. … James handled these complaints in a way that the WMF management felt was undermining their authority/ability to lead and complained to the board. The board sided with management and removed James. | ” |
As far as I have seen, no Board member has disputed this. Then again, none has yet commented upon it in any way. Perhaps frustrated by this fact, last Friday[4] Heilman made public his final pre-removal letter to the Board—in which he admitted acting “out of process” and asked for a second chance:
| “ | Our board made the decision to give Lila a second chance in the face of staff mistrust. In the long road ahead to improve our movement, I would like to have the same opportunity to continue working together with you as well. | ” |
Ten days later, his request was denied and the whole thing broke wide open.
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The tenure of Lila Tretikov, the second major leader of the Wikimedia Foundation, got off to a rocky start even before she assumed the title of Executive Director in mid-2014: as The Wikipedian reluctantly chronicled at the time, her (rather eccentric) significant other had inserted himself, unbidden, into the Wikimedia-l mailing list and other forums for Wikipedia discussion, depriving her of the chance to set the tone of her own arrival.
But everyone wanted her to succeed, she made good impressions, seemed to have the résumé for the job, and so was given time to prove herself. However, as I wrote in my year-in-review last month, that honeymoon period is long over: very high turnover in top management, questionable hires, and emerging details of a staff revolt at the Foundation’s New Montgomery Street office have brought her leadership under close scrutiny.
Although staff discontent has been mostly the stuff of rumors over the past six months (at least), if you knew what to look for, you could find it in certain corners of the web. There was that one Quora thread, although it didn’t say very much. Somewhat more voluble is the Foundation’s entry on Glassdoor,[5] where reviews by anonymous current and former staffers provide clearer evidence of dissatisfaction among WMF employees. Of note, Tretikov holds just a 15% approval, and reviews have grown steadily more negative in recent months:
| “ | Unfortunately, the foundation is going through management turmoil. There is no strategy — or worse, a new strategic plan is rolled out every couple of months with no follow-through or accountability. … Please hire better executives and directors. | ” |
And:
| “ | The Executive Director unveils a new strategy every three months or so. She completely abandons the previous strategy and then does nothing to actually follow through on the strategy. … We need a new Executive Director. Most C-Level executives have fled. We will not be able to attract top talent until there is new leadership at the very top. | ” |
Although Glassdoor may present a skewed sample, this doesn’t appear to be the case. As Wikipedia Signpost contributor Andreas Kolbe points out, comparable non-profit organizations[6] have much, much better employee ratings. And last week the Signpost reported on the existence of a yet-unreleased internal WMF survey from 2015 that found approximately 90% employee dissatisfaction. Yet when the turnover issue came up on the mailing list, Boryana Dineva, WMF’s new HR director, replied that everything was well within normal limits for the industry. This seems hard to believe.
Amidst all this, the Board announced on January 6 the naming of two new appointed trustees: Kelly Battles and Arnnon Geshuri. Following some initial confusion as to whether either was a replacement for Heilman—they were not, but replacements for Jan Bart de Vreede and Stu West, whose terms had ended in December 2015—there came the usual round of congratulatory notices.
But the following day a regular list contributor raised a new issue: Geshuri had, in a previous role as Google’s Senior Staffing Strategist, actively participated in a rather infamous episode of recent Silicon Valley history: an illegal, collusive agreement among several leading firms—Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, eBay and others—to avoid recruiting each others’ employees. The overall effect was to restrain the career advancement (and hold down salaries) of thousands of tech workers, and the participating firms eventually agreed to pay $415 million to settle the class action lawsuit.
Geshuri’s role in all this? According to email from the unsealed case, as reported by Pando Daily, Geshuri acted decisively to fire a Google recruiter who had been reaching out to Apple employees—which would be, you know, par for the course. Apple’s Steve Jobs complained to Google’s Eric Schmidt, who passed it along to Geshuri. His reply back:
| “ | Eric,
On this specific case, the sourcer who contacted this Apple employee should not have and will be terminated within the hour. We are scrubbing the sourcer’s records to ensure she did not contact anyone else. … Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs. This was an isolated incident and we will be very careful to make sure this does not happen again. |
” |
For more details, see this detailed summary by Wikipedian Jim Heaphy, whose Wikipedia article-styled summary ends with a call for Geshuri’s removal from the Board.
On the mailing list, criticism of Geshuri’s appointment came from none other than two former Board chairs: Florence Devouard (in a short comment) and Kat Walsh (in a longer one). Considering how slow current and former Board members were to chime in regarding Heilman’s dismissal[7] the swift and strong rejection of Geshuri by Devouard and Walsh underlines how seriously the Board screwed up.
In fact, Dariusz Jemielniak, who had first posted news of the appointment to the list, indicated in a subsequent comment that the Board had not discussed this aspect of Geshuri’s career at all. Wales, for his part, confirmed that he was aware at least of the broad outlines, which of course can be easily found—where else?—in Geshuri’s Google search results.[8] Curiously, as of this writing, the anti-poaching scandal exists on Geshuri’s entry only as a single, carefully phrased sentence.
At the time of this writing, no announcement about Geshuri’s continued trusteeship has been made, but it seems his tenure will be very short. Considering the nature of the scandal, and the strident opposition, it’s very difficult to see how he can remain. And if Geshuri somehow survives where Heilman did not, the chasm between the Foundation and community will become considerably wider.
Besides Geshuri, the Wikipedia Signpost observed last week that at least five Board trustees have significant relationships with Google.[9] Likewise the WMF has some Board connections to Tesla, and somewhat weaker ties to Facebook. What of it? A few big issues come to mind.
The first is simply the question of diversity and representation: Wikipedia may have been founded in and still operating out of the United States, but its reach is global and its underlying ethic is inclusive. This is rather hard to do, and gets into extraordinarily thorny questions of identity politics which even those who raise them are unprepared to answer. But until such a time as there is consensus that the WMF is sufficiently representative of its global audience, it will at least be mentioned.
The second is the always-present question of conflicts of interest. Not just the perennial “COI” question about Wikipedia content and publicity-motivated editing, but the big picture version of same: whether this public good, this collaborative, free-in-all-senses online knowledge repository is being manipulated by powerful insiders for private gain—especially in a way that steers Wikipedia and its sister projects in a direction that deprives others from making the most of their Wikipedia experience.
This specific harm hasn’t been shown to be the case, but if anyone is going to do that, well, it’s entirely plausible[10] this may come from the Silicon Valley firms who are close to Wikipedia both in physical proximity (WMF is based in downtown San Francisco) and focus area (WMF all but owns the tech side of Wikipedia). Indeed, there have been calls for Board members to disclose their own conflicts and recuse themselves when relevant interests intersect.
Then again, there are now fears that something like this might be happening with an embryonic project called Search and Discovery. Last week the Wikimedia Foundation and Knight Foundation jointly announced a new partnership examining the search habits of Wikipedia users with an eye toward a later project that may eventually replace Wikipedia’s current internal search.[11] It might even incorporate other databases—not just Wikidata, but non-Wikimedia data resources as well. (Big Data is the future, lest we forget.) It sounds like a plausible direction for WMF, but as the Signpost reports, the staff morale problem is at least in part tied to concerns about the resources allocated to the project. And this, too, intersects with Heilman’s dismissal from the board: in recent days he has made comments suggesting that the grant—which was actually decided in September 2015—should have been announced earlier.
Other criticisms have come from former staffer Pete Forsyth, who has questioned the process whereby WMF accepted the “restricted grant” from Knight—a practice once opposed by Sue Gardner, Tretikov’s predecessor. And a highly thought-provoking argument (also in the Signpost this week) comes from longtime Wikipedia veteran Liam Wyatt, who made this compelling observation in his own blog post about the controversial last few weeks:
| “ | [A] portion of the Board of Trustees and the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation believe that it should be treated as a technology organisation in the style of a dot-com company, out of step with the staff and without the awareness of the community. By contrast, it’s always been my belief that the Wikimedia Foundation is an education charity that happens to exist primarily in a technology field. Of course software engineering is crucial to the work we do and should represent the major proportion of staff and budget, but that is the means, not the end. | ” |
The contrary view is that the Wikimedia Foundation has long been heavy on technology—under Gardner, the WMF identified itself as a “grant-making and technology” organization—as these are roles the foundation can undertake without overstepping its charter, and for which of course it has sufficient funds. That said, there has been little clamor for this particular project, especially as the community has made different technology recommendations to the Foundation, such as better integration with the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine and improved UI in editor tools, which are arguably clearer and more achievable.
As I post this on Monday, January 11, it’s entirely possible that new information about any or all of the above related controversies could appear and change the picture dramatically. Given the fact, I’d better post this before anything else happens that would require a massive rewrite. I’ll aim to save those for a subsequent update, whether below this inadequate summary or in a separate blog post. Either way, stay tuned.
This article was originally posted on the author's blog and is republished with his permission.
For this issue of the Arbitration report, we interview some of the outgoing and incumbent/returning members of the Committee.
1. First off, congrats on becoming an Arbitrator.
2. Why did you want to run for a seat in the Committee?
3. How did you feel about the election as a whole?
4. What are your thoughts on the outcomes to cases from the previous year (e.g: GamerGate, Lightbreather, Arbitration Enforcement 1/2)? Did you think they were handled the best that they could have? Why?
5. (For first time Arbs) Now that you are part of the Committee, how do you feel about this new position?
6. What would you say would be the challenges of this position? What do you plan to accomplish from this?
7. Would there [be] a chance to bring back the Ban Appeals Subcommittee in the future?
8. Any additional comments?
1. First off, thank you for your work as an Arbitrator.
2. What would you say was the biggest challenge while being an Arbitrator?
3. Has there been any cases or motions you thought could have been handled differently while on the Committee?
4. Do you feel that you did enough during your time on the panel? If not, what were you hoping to accomplish during your time?
5. What advice would you give to hopefuls who want to take part in the Committee?
6. Would you consider running for Arbitrator again?
7. Any additional comments?
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-01-13/Humour
