The Form 990

[ericbarbour]

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/0 ... wikipedia/

Written by Andreas Kolbe, formerly of Wikipediocracy.....we've come full circle when a WR/WO forum regular and addicted WP editor ends up writing Wikipedia critiques for The Register.

Yes, they gave Moeller, one of Jimbo's favorites, $208,000 to go away.

In 2013, the new "VisualEditor" feature, hailed by Wikimedia chair emeritus Jimmy Wales as "epically important", proved so buggy that volunteers overrode Möller and switched it off. When the 2014 "Media Viewer" launch caused another volunteer uprising, Möller granted himself "superpowers" to shut volunteers out, resulting in a letter of protest endorsed by 1,000 volunteers (which the WMF ignored).

Something else never discussed openly anywhere that I know of, at least since Lila resigned:

Sicore's main WMF legacy appears to be the role he played in the Knowledge Engine fiasco that led to executive director Lila Tretikov's resignation in early 2016. Sicore had been accused of being involved in "top secret" plans to take "a run at Google" and spend $32m of donors' money to try to turn wikipedia.org into a Google-beating search engine, but we cannot confirm this.

And yes, as was little noticed anywhere else, Heilman was put back on the Board of Trustees. After he was forced out under the ugliest circumstances imaginable--including Jimbo's personal attacks on him.

I guess this shows that Jimbo might be seriously losing whatever control he had over the WMF.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimed ... 17/Results
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/w ... 87622.html
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/05/20/b ... ions-2017/

[Flip Flopped]

Thirty-two million wouldn't be enough to take a run at competing with Google search.

[ericbarbour]

Only ~900 people showed up for the 2017 Wikimania in Montreal. That's well down from previous years.

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/09/05/w ... materials/

All that shit over the years about "the WMF is an inclusive movement", and look at this crowd. Extremely white, mostly male, nerdy as hell.
In the front row: Andrew Lih, their original all-purpose token Azn fanboy.

[Flip Flopped]

Only ~900 people showed up for the 2017 Wikimania in Montreal. That's well down from previous years.

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/09/05/w ... materials/

All that shit over the years about "the WMF is an inclusive movement", and look at this crowd. Extremely white, mostly male, nerdy as hell.
In the front row: Andrew Lih, their original all-purpose token Azn fanboy.

I think there was a controversy over the price of tickets with some people who live in Montreal (maybe Salvidrim, too?) stating that they couldn't afford to buy a seat.

[badmachine]

Only ~900 people showed up for the 2017 Wikimania in Montreal. That's well down from previous years.

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/09/05/w ... materials/

All that shit over the years about "the WMF is an inclusive movement", and look at this crowd. Extremely white, mostly male, nerdy as hell.
In the front row: Andrew Lih, their original all-purpose token Azn fanboy.

There are some great shots here that i'm sure many of them will regret, and I would bet that at least some of these will be up for deletion soon.

And if you ever need a shot of Wikipedians looking cult-like, you could hardly do worse than this shot:

[Kumioko]

To be perfectly honest, the vast majority are the same characters that go to all of them. You have the WMF staff, some admins, arbcom members, functionaries, some developers and the staff of the local organization supporting it, a large percentage or local editors to that area and then, the remainder are everyone else.

My personal opinion is that the WMF keeps the price fairly high to make sure only the wealthier editors can get in. I think the general mentality is if you're wealthy enough to afford college, then you can afford the ticket. Since the WMF targets young vulnerable college students, this seems to be pretty logical.

[ericbarbour]

My personal opinion is that the WMF keeps the price fairly high to make sure only the wealthier editors can get in. I think the general mentality is if you're wealthy enough to afford college, then you can afford the ticket. Since the WMF targets young vulnerable college students, this seems to be pretty logical.

Unless, of course, a Wikipedia deep-insider wants to attend. Then funds are "made available" from the WMF official travel budget. This is only for the hardcore of Jimbo-suckers, and as far as I can tell they never talk about it in public. Makes me wonder if the WMF forces anyone who gets a free ticket to sign an NDA so they won't reveal the little nepotist-scam.

You can be DAMN sure that people like Forrester, Lih and Heilman had their travel tabs picked up by the Foundation.

[ericbarbour]

There are some great shots here that i'm sure many of them will regret, and I would bet that at least some of these will be up for deletion soon.

The person with the most photos posted there is Mervat Salman, followed by Katherine Maher and then by Jimbo. He's slipping. Plus, note the attempts to make Wikimedia look "inclusive", mostly by giving more attention to women of color.