Wikimedia: Power, Leadership, and Movement Roles Options Rating

[Cock-up-over-conspiracy]

Wikimedia: Power, Leadership, and Movement Roles by Eugene Eric Kim

Friend and long-time Wikipedian, Phoebe Ayers, expressed strong concern over the Wikimedia Foundation’s planned growth. The Foundation had said that it planned to grow from 40 employees to almost 200 by 2015, and to go from $15 million to $50 million in annual revenues, representing an annual growth rate of about 40 percent.

On the surface, Wikimedia’s structure looks very different from traditional organizations. It’s open, it’s bottom-up, it’s flexible, and technically, no one is in charge.

When you look a little deeper, however, it starts to look startingly familiar. There are hierarchy, committees, and titles. There are administrators and stewards. There is a long list of policies, including one called WP:NOBUREAUCRACY. Despite this formal policy prohibiting bureaucracy, there is also the formal position of “bureaucrat,”

When I first started working on Wikimedia strategy, I was surprised by how culturally engrained these structures were in the projects ... Wikimedia seems to be all about rules.

[thekohser]

I submitted a comment about the "1 star" organizational efficiency and the fact that only 41 cents out of every dollar received go toward program expenses. If facts like that get rejected, we'll know what's what with Eugene Kim.