Triptych wrote:Mr. Beaudette knows the game, and he does what he needs to do to keep those fat charity-paid paychecks rolling in. The game is "you give us content, Wikipedia community, and use your pseudo-governance to give us a legal liability shield. We make sure you stay secret secret secret and nobody ever holds you to account."
And it's him that does it. It isn't the first time he's said so. I'm not prepared to link it right now but the approach in which WMF looks at purported identity document for those administrators it accords access to IP and other privacy information on every Wikipedia editor, verifies it only that the person in the document is at least 18 and nothing else, that is Beaudette's approach. And then shreds everything. There was somebody sort of doing it before him not exactly the same but it is he that institutionalized and cemented it.
It is worth knowing and understanding the potential conflict of interest. It's common in nonprofits, it's a hazard I've seen many times. Nonprofits depend on staff. Staff depends on income. The nonprofit board is advised by the staff. It can easily come to pass that the staff advises the board according to its own interests rather than the nonprofit purposes of the corporation.
Now,
usually the interests of the staff and the purpose of the nonprofit are aligned. But there can be deviations. In particular, staff salaries can grow far out of proportion to the value developed by those staff members. Quite simply, not unusual. With for-profit corporations, the owners (shareholders) may exercise some restraint. With nonprofits, that kind of restraint is gone. There may be other restraints, but those, as well, can be problematic, even in the other direction.
I met a well-known fellow the other day who had raised more money for cancer research than had ever been raised before (by far). He lost his contract, because it was whacking the statistics on percentage of contributions that go for the target charitable purpose, as distinct from fundraising expenses and other overhead.
Suppose one spends $500,000 to raise $10 million for charity. 5% costs, not bad, eh? Now suppose one raises the costs to $50 million, but raises $200 million for research. 25% cost. And why is this guy making a huge salary? (I.e, comparable to what he'd have gotten in the for-profit sector, being a successful executive.) Off with his head!
And so it went, his organization was abruptly fired by the charity, very worried about backlash, and the fundraising figures collapsed. The point this particular guy was making was that charity is like every other economic activity. One spends money to make money. Parsimony in investment is penny-wise and pound foolish. He raised more money than anyone before because he spent money, and lots of it, with full-page ads that
inspired people.
That was mass-audience fundraising. Raising money by targeted presentations to a few corporate boards can be quite different.
Now, back to the point. Yes, the goose that laid the golden egg, for the WikiMedia Foundation, is the "community" governance of Wikipedia. It allows them to assert almost total independence from responsibility for any damage caused.
Notice that Wikipedia relies on independent publishers for reliable source. That's because those publishers can be *sued* if they cause harm. So the unreliability of Wikipedia is directly related to this independence. There are no consequences for doing damage by providing unreliable/harmful information. The most outrageous users on Wikipedia, the largest loss they suffer is they are not allowed to edit any more. Under that name, anyway.
Given that, the WMF could still set up structures that would make the community operate far more reliably. But I've seen no sign that they have any intention of doing this. Why should they? They don't care that Wikipedia has a terrible reputation in academia. They are insulated from criticism.
Not their fault. The fault is Bad Editors, that's it. The fault, apparently, is Poetlister. Yeah, Poetlister, He Did It.
The only globally banned user.
Banned after a meta RfC started by a WMF Board Member, with what I judged to be actionable libel. (He later edited the filing, itself a problem. I.e., early responses were to what he claimed. Inertia established in the RfC, by the pile of early comments, he then backed off. He edited his claims, he did not use strikeout. So what did those early responses mean?)
Of course, he just did that on his own, I was merely surprised to see how naive he was.
Poetlister never elected to even threaten to sue, but he'd had plenty of cause over the years. He'd been subject to illegal extortion by a Wikipedia administrator, and that was known to ArbComm, which did nothing about it. Attempts had been made to damage his career.
Checkusers had released private information, that's how Longfellow, a
permitted sock on Wikisource, I think it was, was outed as Poetlister. (He had disclosed identity to the 'crats, as was proper.)
(Poetlister did plenty to bring down approbation, and it still makes no sense to me, why he did what he did. But what he did and what he was accused of doing were different.)
So, the WMF has a privacy policy, but it has absolutely no teeth. Private checkuser information is disclosed to users who are not identifiable. Yes, they were *identified*, but who they are is then discarded. It's entirely unclear why they are identified at all. The whole purpose would be to ensure that only responsible users have access to the data, and "responsible" is not a character judgment, it indicates an actual consequence, personal harm, from policy violations. I.e., a checkuser, if immune to lawsuit from how they perform their job, is
not responsible.
(If responsible is a character judgment, then error in the judgment creates responsibility on the part of the judge. So the WMF could be sued. None of this legal theory has been tested, to my knowledge. Testing it could be expensive, but a pro se litigant could cost the WMF quite a lot of money, while spending little. Or a volunteer lawyer could take the risk and possibly win fees.)
(This is in no way an encouragement to sue. It is a recognition of a risk, and it's essential that the risk be understood, so that it can either be consciously assumed, or avoided.)
