To Give Up Wikipedia Means to Give Up Internet? — “Imagine an online encylopedia anyone can edit — and no one can run. With the calendar running out on 2008, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s sleaze-drenched cofounder, nearlylost his seat on the board. Who’s in charge here?
Wales’s term was set to expire on December 31, along with two other trustees. The board of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia’s parent organization, is supposed to have 10 board members, half appointed and half elected. It currently has two elected members — Kat Walsh, a Virginia law student, and Ting Chen, a gay Chinese programmer working for IBM in Germany — and two temporary appointees. According to the foundation’s bylaws, it requires a quorum — at least five trustees — to take any action other than appointing new members. On December 28, with days left to go, the board announced the reappointment of the three expiring board members on an obscure mailing list — a move that the board’s chair, Michael Snow, only saw fit to make public on the foundation website’s nearly a week later (after the publication of an earlier version of this post). Five of the ten board seats remain empty or filled by seatwarmers. ” valleywag