2024 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees elections
Posted: Sat Sep 14, 2024 2:07 am
Any advice who to vote for or should I abstain all together?
Wasting your time to vote. There's no such thing as a "reform" candidate and you are unlikely to make anything change by electing someone, no matter how well-placed they are in the "culture". Remember what happened when Dr. Heilman ran for a board seat in 2015; he won, was forced out a few months later for "unexplained reasons". "He made mistakes and stepped out of process for a Board member". Wales was directly questioned, and spun and redirected and lied about the whole thing until they gave up. And Heilman was re-elected to the board two years later. Insanity. Oh, the things I could tell you about that mess.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimed ... tions/2024
Especially, do not vote for Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight or Lane Rasberry. They are hardened "insiders" and have committed uncounted numbers of "dirty tricks" to mantain the status quo and prevent critics or disgruntled editors from doing "bad things" on their bloody wiki. Whether actually bad or not.
Rasberry has unquestionably been protecting the content relating to his employer, Consumer Reports, and so is a major COI violator who is quietly tolerated. Their main article looks mostly like ad copy; remember that CR is being sued by disgruntled manufacturers on almost a continuous basis, and very few of those lawsuits are mentioned in the article.
Ask them how the "viability" of board candidates is determined. They have a "Pre-Onboarding Program" that reeks of Orwellian secretive weirdness. The people who were "vetted" that way have a userbox for their userpages, but I will be DAMNED if I can find what this "process" actually involves. All I found was this bizarre slideshow from 2019, that tells you little-to-nothing. Typical.