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Wikimedia needs your nipples

by Moxie

Background

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A couple of years ago a bored teenager took a couple of photos of himself and posted them to Wikimedia Commons. The first photo was of his bare legs, the second photo was of his nipple. Then for some reason, probably because he’d grown up a bit, he wished that those images weren’t on online any more. At the beginning of January 2012 he made a formal request asking Wikipedia commons remove the photos for him. Simply enough, you may think, but this is Wikimedia Commons, and things are never simple there.

Deletion Requests

Within a twinkling of an eye it was declared that photos of teen boy nipples are highly educational – request denied. But not before another user “VolodyA! V Anarhist”, who in 2000 was convicted of child pornography offences, had told him that:

Without any other information apart from “please delete” i hope that admins will have common sense to close the request and keep the image.

The kid tried to make the same request twice more, until some nasty mean old administrator James L. Woodward came by to threaten him:

You have nominated File:Teen_boy’s_Nipple.jpg for deletion three times without a reason acceptable to Commons. If you nominate it again, or take any similar action, you will be blocked from editing on Commons.

James L. Woodward has “more than 30 years of high technology management experience. Jim has raised over $15 million in venture capital and has been CFO of several public companies. He has been the founding CFO of a variety of successful companies” but apparently is unable to pass up an opportunity to post a threat.

Meanwhile the requests to have the photo deleted were denied, denied, and denied, “VolodyA! V Anarhist” being

…continue reading Wikimedia needs your nipples

Wikimedia UK governance review finds significant failings

By Andreas Kolbe

Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia UK team, circa 2010

The publication on 7 February 2013 of an independent report on Wikimedia UK governance, commissioned jointly by Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia UK, was covered the following day by Civil Society Media’s Governance magazine (“Wikimedia UK trustees have been ‘too involved’ to effectively govern charity”), aimed at charity trustees, chief executives and company secretaries, and by Third Sector (“Review urges major overhaul of governance at Wikimedia UK”), a UK magazine specialising on the voluntary and non-profit sector.

Background

The review, performed by management consultancy Compass Partnership, was paid for by the Wikimedia Foundation. It was commissioned in October of last year, in the wake of media controversy and community discussions around the Monmouthpedia and Gibraltarpedia outreach projects. A key part of the dispute, Governance said, was—

“ an intellectual property dispute over QRpedia, a mobile web-based system using QR codes to deliver Wikipedia articles, that was developed by former chairman Roger Bamkin (who resigned as a trustee in 2012) and contributor Terence Eden. ”

Bamkin had undertaken a paid consultancy for the Monmouthpedia project, which involved the use of QR codes, resulting in a conflict of interest that according to report authors Compass Partnership was not drawn to the attention of legal staff at the Wikimedia Foundation who dealt with trademark applications. Bamkin then also charged for consultancy fees in relation to Gibraltarpedia, leading to a further conflict of interest which eventually resulted in his resignation from the Wikimedia UK board in September 2012.

As stated by Jay Walsh, Senior Director of Communications, on the Wikimedia Foundation blog,

“ The Foundation and Wikimedia UK saw the potentially damaging effect of these matters and we ordered this review and report. We both

…continue reading Wikimedia UK governance review finds significant failings

Selling Wikipedia By The Pound

 

By Delicious Carbuncle

 

See also Cover-up begins in Wikipedia’s Gibraltar scandal and Why there is no end to the Gibraltarpedia scandal – or Jimmy Wales’ silence.

 

It is October 2010. You are watching two middle-aged men give a presentation to CIPR, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. The men are Andrew Turvey and Steve Virgin. At that time, both are Trustees of Wikimedia UK. The presentation is called “What is your Wikipedia strategy?”. On the screen, an artlessly assembled Powerpoint slide entitled “Contributions as ‘soft’ advertising” poses a question to the assembled PR professionals: Imagine having your client’s name on the Front Page of the world’s fifth website?

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Jump ahead two years to the present day. There has been some bad press about Wikipedia’s Gibraltarpedia project lately, most recently about the number of “did you know” entries about Gibraltar appearing on Wikipedia’s front page. A debate has been raging on Wikipedia for the past month about those DYKs, as they are known. They stopped temporarily when someone first pointed out the flood of Gibraltarpedia DYKs and the involvement of Roger Bamkin (at that time both a WMUK Trustee and a paid consultant to the Government of Gibraltar). Imagine having your client’s name on the world’s fifth most visited website. Now imagine having it there 15 or 20 times a month.

The Billion Pound Product In the 2012 WMUK Annual Report, Roger Bamkin says: Quote: Wikimedia has enabled me to meet some wonderful people and QRpedia has put me

…continue reading Selling Wikipedia By The Pound