Just to follow up a little bit after having lost track of this thread...
QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Thu 16th December 2010, 2:44pm)
QUOTE(Somey @ Tue 19th October 2010, 7:54pm)
I guess it's possible that they had to oust him because after all this time, he finally got around to reading a legal textbook and realized that what the WMF does has been utterly illegal all along...
I just discovered this (fascinating!) thread. Somey, what exactly do you mean when you say "what the WMF does has been utterly illegal all along"?
That was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but I was mostly referring to what I consider to be the WMF's bogus "charity" status. For them to call themselves a charity has always struck me as little more than outright fraud. The fact that many of them edit Wikipedia themselves, and then claim that this activity "is in no way related" to their statuses as WMF employees, is probably not so much illegal as simply dishonest.
Obviously it's not illegal to host a website, and I suppose there are charities that occasionally harm people and realize it, but all the WMF really does is host websites - and they've always known that their websites can harm people. If they were doing something more traditional, like manufacturing toys for kids, but working under the same operating principles that they have now... I think they would have been put in the slammer by now, for reckless endangerment.