Over the past couple of weeks, a couple of controversies have arisen regarding Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales.
There was his affair with Rachel Marsden, a political columnist, which led to accusations of conflicts of interest, accusations of extortion and then former Wikimedia man Danny Wool’s accusation of Jimmy Wales abusing the Foundation’s finances. I don’t know if these are true or not but it made me reconsider the importance of Wales to Wikipedia.
Jimbo Wales has a remarkable amount of influence and power at Wikipedia and indeed he has a remarkable amount of influence in general, at least for a nerd, being named in the Time 100. To Wales’ credit, in April 2007 he stopped being Wikipedia’s highest authority; he got rid of his power to overrule the Arbitration Committee, through giving that committee the power to overturn any decisions which he made in his ‘traditional capacity within Wikipedia’.
Even though he has stripped himself of many of his de jure rights within Wikipedia, he stills holds de facto control because anything which he says carries vast amounts of importance! Of course, he still holds the rights to ban users, delete edits, view deleted edits etc. but some of these may now be appealed.
Why does Wikipedia need such a controversial figurehead? The media already hates Wikipedia and most of the West will be aware of the project so he does not need to raise awareness! Wikipedia could probably function better if Wales were to take a significantly less active role within Wikipedia and if he were to resign from the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikipedia does not need another target for the media to criticise and Wikipedia is now so big it could easily survive without its founder.
Tags: wikipedia, wikimedia, jimbo wales, jimmy wales
No, Wikipedia no longer needs Jimmy Wales. We needed him in the beginning for the funding his company Bomis provided, and before we had the organizational structure all figured out, it did help to have a dictator. But if you look at his participation in the project over this past year, you’ll see his influence has rapidly declined. He’s stayed pretty aloof, and the few times he did interject himself into a situation ended badly because his solutions and who he took sides with made him come off as ignorant of the day-to-day happenings of Wikipedia. Many administrators are no longer willing to jump on his word.
And keep in mind, Jimbo’s role of God-king is exclusive to the English Wikipedia. He never had any special power over other projects, and when the Board was formed and he became just one of a number of Board members, he gave up any special power over the Foundation as well. His involvement has been drawing down with the project for some time, likely because of his other business ventures such as Wikia, so it’s inevitable that he will eventually lose his title of God-king. The sooner the better, because at this point he may be doing more harm than good. In terms of publicity, perception matters just as much as the truth, and his whole funds scandal looks very negative.
Hrmm, there might be enough here to write about to merit my own blog post on the issue …