[Foundation-l] A Board member's perspective

Sun May 9 00:18:19 UTC 2010

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 9:52 AM, Stuart West <stu at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> ...snip...
> - We were hosting material that was unambiguously not
> relevant to our educational mission and it needed to go. Its presence on
> our projects/servers alienated people (users, potential new volunteers,
> educators, others) who we need on our side. Getting rid of it was the
> right answer for the long-term success of our mission which is a focus
> both of my responsibilities as a Board member and my personal motivation
> as a volunteer. More broadly, in allowing the clearly objectionable
> content on one of our projects I feel the community (including the
> Board, Foundation and Commons admins) failed in our collective role as
> stewards of the mission.
How was content that is historically art (and as far as i know, actually
displayed in some museums) not educational, How about the images that
were actually used in articles on projects, how is that not inherently
educational?

> - I agree with the view that the presence of hardcore pornography on
> Commons represents a clear failure of our community-driven consensus
> process and that we must change the way we do things. Among other
> drivers I see: (1) There were some bad actors at work (e.g. hardcore
> pornography distributors taking advantage of our open culture to get
> free anonymous hosting). (2) As a community (including the Board), we
> debated the issue too long and failed to drive closure and implement.
> (3) There are complex issues around _some_ of the content that is in a
> gray area and those complexities distracted us from dealing with the
> clearer cut cases.

They did have policies, Just because people don't agree doesn't mean
they should go on a deleting rampage deleting anything that they don't
like then wheel warring with people that are active on the project
compared to someone that to my understanding has never taken interest in
the project on a community level and had less than 30 edits before
change which tends to suggest they hasn't really had time to absorb
local policy. Some of their policies included but not limited to
Deleting unusable content, Redirecting/Suggesting people to use other
sites to submit their content, Getting people to submit content into
OTRS for verification. Oh heaven forbid people have to do work and check
on gray area situations......

> - Due to the failure of the community process, something extraordinary
> had to be done. A small step was our Board statement we hoped would
> focus attention. A bigger step was the work by Jimmy and other
> individuals on Commons who took bold and decisive action. Clearly it is
> messy, and there is room for overcorrection and the removal of some
> materials that are indeed relevant to our educational mission. This is
> inevitable but is certainly fixable. I want to thank all those who have
> been working so hard on this, either the initial clean-up or the ongoing
> review process. It's not easy work, but it's critically important.

Failure of community process? There were more than ready to discuss the
issues, They had had policies for years which foundation staff have been
involved in, Then a board member goes on a mass rampage deleting
anything they don't think abides by his view, wheel warring with
members, refusing to listen till after the matter is "dealt with" then
they publicly stating on the mailing list that it was for "Good PR" all
whilst another board member has stated the matter is still being
discussed ("Oh hai thar! I'm a cop and arresting you on something that
hasn't been made a law yet...". much?!) with the other members.

> ...snip...
> -stu