[Foundation-l] EFF & Bitcoins

Wed Jun 22 16:55:19 UTC 2011

On 6/22/2011 9:25 AM, MZMcBride wrote:
> Ting Chen wrote:
>> Am 21.06.2011 18:15, schrieb MZMcBride:
>>> Related: if you're interested in buying a Wikimedia Board seat, I believe it
>>> costs about $2 million (USD only, I think).
>> This statement is such a lie that I cannot let it stay here unresponded.
>>
>> You imply the board seat of Matt Halprin. Matt had long left Omidyar, if
>> his board seat was bought, we had had to chose someone else from that
>> Foundation to replace him. As we had explained before many times, Matt
>> is on the board only because his skill and knowledge on board governance.
> Sorry, I don't follow.
>> Matt had long left Omidyar.
> That's not true, Ting.
Only if you decide to parse Ting's statement in a way that puts all the 
emphasis on awkwardly written participles and deliberately ignore the 
context supplied by words like "replace". Holding Ting to a writing 
standard of selectively literalistic native-speaker is hardly fair, and 
it's the sort of thing that contributes to the subtle (or not so subtle, 
perhaps I should say pervasive instead) language-based biases in the 
Wikimedia movement.
> Can you clarify what you meant?
I thought it was reasonably understandable, even without perfect 
grammar, that Ting was saying that since Matt is no longer at Omidyar, 
if your insinuation were true, when he left the foundation would have 
needed to bring in someone new from Omidyar to fill "their" board seat. 
I figured that out, and honestly I wasn't even aware until now that Matt 
had left Omidyar.

--Michael Snow