In Wikipedia’s The Signpost this week there are multiple articles about the dismissal of Doc James and tension in the Wikimedia Foundation board. Anyone who wants to know more about the issue could read this very interesting issue of our Wikipedia newsletter.
I came to know Doc James in 2012 when I first started at Consumer Reports. Before then, I mostly edited medical research articles and not general health articles, so if our paths crossed, I had not become aware before then. Since then we became friends and colleagues. My first memory of him is providing a lot of criticism of my editing that I did not like and thought was not good, but over time, I came to feel that he was right about lots of things and that he had deep intuitive understanding of the Wikipedia community.
Among other things in this issue of The Signpost, Doc James gave some reasons why he was dismissed. So far, the Wikimedia Foundation board has not given any clear indication of why they dismissed him. James suggests that he was dismissed for a difference in values. Like so many others, I have been reading discussions in mailing lists, on-wiki, off-wiki, and then whatever articles summarize things in The Signpost. Just last Saturday at the Wikipedia Day celebration, Resident Mario from The Signpost said that the articles on James’ dismissal are the most popular ever. Doc James is well liked and we all are worried. For the past few weeks we have all been left to gossip and speculate and read tea leaves to find meaning in this tragic event.
As background to James’ dismissal, my perspective is that the Wikimedia Foundation board is designed for tension. I only started following wiki-politics a bit in 2009 at the earliest, and only became deep in them in 2012. The history of the Wikimedia Foundation board is documented, but the interesting part to note is that it is designed to be under community control. There are ten seats. Three of those are elected by popular vote of the Wikimedia community, two are elected by Wikimedia community organizations, four are appointed by the board itself, and one is reserved for Jimbo. For whatever reasons, currently the appointed seats and Jimbo are usually discussed as the establishment and the other seats are called community seats. My perspective is that tension in the board is about money. The Wikimedia Foundation, like any organization, has a bias for directing its budget to benefit itself as an organization. Its nonprofit mission, however, is to benefit Wikimedia project users, and when the community votes, the intent is that the vote will empower the community. The community has the perception that the Wikimedia Foundation has funded and publicized high-profile software projects that either became vaporware or were managed in a way that benefited WMF staff to the detriment of the Wikimedia user base. There is also the perception that the Wikimedia Foundation withholds information about budget and project development from the Wikimedia community, which is an especially harsh accusation considering the engagement of the community and the supposed shared commitment to transparency. Regardless of whether these things are true, I feel that transparency of how money is spent is the root of tension and the Wikimedia user base sees the board as an opportunity for the Wikimedia users to overcome the encroachment of financial interests into management of the Wikimedia community’s funds.
Back to James’ dismissal – From what I see, the nicest way to explain the conflict is to say that it is a personality clash. In this narrative, everyone on the Wikimedia Foundation board shares common values. However, without assigning any particular blame to anyone, it happens that James’ personality is difficult to make compatible with the personalities of others on the Wikimedia Foundation board. The difference in personality leads to needless arguments unrelated to governance or the business of the board, and because the tension is based in James’ nature, and because he is one naturally agitating person against the rest of the board, it is for the greater good that he be dismissed. I like this narrative because it is neutral. It also is a little implausible. James is an emergency room physician, which means that he has enough experience having groups of people come in on the worst day of their lives then watch one among them die. In these kinds of situations, it is James’ business to be an ocean of calm, and to tolerate any sort of attitude from anyone because if people are going to die anyway then they might have any kind of behavior. I have only seen James to act as a person who listens for as long as anyone cares to talk, and who evaluates when decisions must be made and when they can be referred, and who in any situation never loses his cool, sense of etiquette, or his kind and even compassion. It is difficult for me to imagine that he could have a personality clash with anyone. I have heard him say that he can be stubborn and arrogant at times, but sometimes saying those things are an act of humility and I would never hold anyone at fault for apologizing. People who apologize often and quickly are often not people with many faults, but rather they are ones who are quick to take a little blame to bring quicker peace.
Another possibility could be that James and the rest of the Wikimedia Foundation board had a clash of values. This would be the more worrisome circumstance. If James was dismissed from the board for his personality, that is not such a bad thing as compared to the possibility that the board has a bias to people with values like the ones James has. In this last popular election, the number of votes grew about 3 fold as compared to the last election. This does not represent a great increase in the number of people contributing to Wikimedia projects, but rather, it represents an increase in interest in the governance of the projects. James especially was chosen because of his reputation as being the ideal Wikipedian. James edits Wikipedia continually, has for years, but he also balances a professional and personal life, and somehow does other things like commenting on policy, doing Wikipedia public speaking, and makes it all seem easy like a hobby that any volunteer could have. The inside story is that probably James spends more time on Wikipedia than a typical person with a casual hobby, but other than that, James is the Wikipedia volunteer ideal.
I worry that the board’s dismissal of James might be the board’s dismissal of the Wikipedia volunteer ideal. I know that there are community elections, but elections which happened longer ago had a less engaged community base, and I see a future with more community engagement in every election. I worry that some part of the establishment may want people like James to not be on the WMF board, and that establishment interests might become increasingly tempted to gain access to Wikimedia community funding now that it has grown to nearly USD 100 million yearly.
I perceive James’ actions and concerns as being aligned with the Wikimedia community and I have a lot of fear that his dismissal represents a misalignment of the values of the Wikimedia Foundation with the values of the Wikimedia community. I believe that the best way to govern Wikimedia projects is to develop the values of the Wikimedia community and to hold those dear, and I worry a lot that somehow other influences might creep in and try to manipulate or inappropriately capture the good will that the community has for Wikimedia projects. From one perspective the Wikimedia community has a lot of power, but from another perspective, it is vulnerable to division and infighting because small investments in disruption can greatly upset volunteer community organizations, and it does seem a little unfair that the Wikimedia Foundation has financial power to direct and control conversations. The very design of the board makes it friendly to community – 5 elected seats which elect the other 4 – and it seems to me that this design is likely to seat 9 people just like James in the long term. As board composition develops to include mostly people like James, or if that happens, I wonder what will change. Right now, the establishment side of the board dismissed James, and is getting a pass for doing this. There are so many people who might be elected in the future who are not as kind as James, but next time I think a dismissal will not be tolerated so gently.
I wish for more peaceful conversation and collaboration. I want the board of the Wikimedia Foundation to encourage conversation and to have direct discussions about how the Wikimedia community budget is allotted.