How Jimbo gamed Wikibooks, in 2006 Options

[Adrignola]

As interesting as Abd's theory of the tinderbox is, knowing the Wikibooks community as I do, I don't think anything will come of it. Policy discussions there are pretty much dead and I've not seen a new policy approved or an approved policy heavily revised and reapproved. To continue the metaphor, we're all out of matches.

What I have heard anecdotally from others who've been there longer than myself is that the video game guide book purge resulted in a measurable decrease in project participation. That's too bad. At the start of the next month another administrator will be removed due to inactivity, bringing the total to ten, an all-time low. Wikibooks is larger than Wikiquote, Wikinews, and Wikiversity. Using a toolserver tool's measure of active admins, they have 6, 20, and 6 respectively in comparison to Wikibooks' 7.

Maybe the video game guides were Wikibooks' golden goose?

[Doc glasgow]

Whatever.

I just see you, a sad man, with a vendetta.

[dogbiscuit]

I've found that assuming good faith, at least until the person has been invited to explain their actions, generally has some traction beyond wikipedia's talk pages. Greg has (perhaps) shown a set of circumstances, which could be construed in a negative way. That doesn't show anything much. Maybe it shows a certain naivety, but nothing much else. It is possible Jimmy is a crook, but this isn't a smoking gun.

That doesn't really stack up as an argument though. Jimbo has a long track record of self-interest in his personal dealings with the WMF, including his statement of being an Objectivist which I take as an intellectually dishonest way of stating that there is no need to take account of others. With respect to Wikia, there is a long track record of inappropriate dealings - many petty, but inappropriate all the same. In that context, pretending that we start afresh and assume the best is naive.

If the rule was "no manuals on WikiBooks" and some happen to end up on Wikia, then that's fine, but it is not the case. Just games, and send them to Wikia, all seems rather odd.

In the real world, good faith is earned or assumed in two ways - by reputation or when no other evidence exists. I don't see that applies. I agree that you get more bees with honey than vinegar, but you also get wasps.

[thekohser]

Whatever.

I just see you, a sad man, with a vendetta.

You've scored one with the "vendetta". Yeah, it's a vendetta against an easy target that is obviously nefariously manipulating others to personally profit. Geez, I've chosen such an inappropriate target, huh, Doc?

As for "sad", though... you've missed the mark. I'm having a ball with life. Family, career, activities, this hilarious crowd here at WR (you excepted, of course, Serious Doc), community service, my output on various wiki projects, personal expression on blogs and Examiner.com... all add up to "happy", as far as I'm concerned.

Doc, remind us again, what do you do with yourself outside of Wikipedia Review?

[Cock-up-over-conspiracy]

Greg openly set up an editing service that allowed companies to have a presence on Wikipedia. Remember that Wikimedia is a 230 protected organisation and is not a publisher, it is just providing a platform. Greg went to some lengths to sort out rules of engagement. He was arbitrarily banned from contributing, and he was and still is libelled by the Wikipedian community who have consistently misrepresented what Greg was doing.

It is probably worth pointing out that many companies and individuals make money out of charities. The voluntary sector is a vast consumer of services of all sorts from accounting to consulting to advertising and PR.

In real world terms, it is all really no big deal. It is just a tiny PR contract proven as successful on the ground that the articles stuck.

The spit of bile of the Pornopedians, from Jimbo down, is aimed at Kohs merely because he got the price of a few drinks off someone whilst they are getting nothing. It has nothing to do with ethics or rational logic.

And it laughable when the ex-Porn King Jimmy Wales is ripping product endorsement fees and $70,000 per night speaker's fee off corporations.

I think all works should be paid and even voluntary workers be offered expenses and benefits.

[Doc glasgow]

Doc, remind us again, what do you do with yourself outside of Wikipedia Review?

Well, I haven't much time, what with three daily masses for Jimbo's soul.


(edit) sorry, should have capitalised Masses, sorry Ottova!

This post has been edited by Doc glasgow: Tue 14th September 2010, 3:38pm

[Somey]

Yes, I believe so. Explain to me why the only period where a decline in Wikia links from Wikipedia occurred was the two-month period (August-September 2006) where I was pointing out Wales' hypocrisy to the Wikipedia community; then after I was removed by Wales from that forum of discussion, Wikia links skyrocketed, all out of proportion to Wikipedia's natural growth rate?

Interesting graph... There were a lot of things that were going on around that time that might have contributed to this, but the thing that really triggered it was their decision (not long after the Kohs block(s)) to add the "nofollow" tag to all outgoing links, except the ones to Wikia and a handful of other "trusted" sites, most of which were "friendly" non-commercial wikis, many of which were being run by Wikipedians. That had two effects - it disincentivized SEO people from adding links to their own sites, but it also sent a subtle message to Wikipedians that Wikia was "okay" and "trusted," and therefore "safe to link to."

So with this graph, Mr. Kohs may be trying to suggest that his being blocked was an additional (and not necessarily subtle) message to The Faithful that if anyone objected to this state of affairs, they would no longer be welcome on Wikipedia. Obviously it's a rather self-centered suggestion on his part, but I don't think it's entirely unwarranted - a LOT of people were pissed off about the "nofollow" tags and still are, and Kohs was one of the few people suggesting an ulterior motive for them (i.e., besides it being simply an attempt to reduce the amount of spamming that was going on).

Having said that, I would actually have to agree with Jimbo that a site like Wikibooks can't really allow fiction and primary-source material - otherwise it would be an open invitation to a crap-flood, which might easily outstrip the amount of "legitimate" public-domain book content that they (apparently) want.

As for video games, that's a bit more tricky. It would depend on the nature of the material - if you look at the Wikia for Halo, for example, there's an entire category devoted to books, but these are articles about the books, not the books themselves (though if you actually might consider reading any of the books, don't read the articles, as they're basically nothing but spoilers). Regardless, I should think that any legitimate book or manual for a video game would fall under some sort of existing copyright, wouldn't it? They'd all have been written after, say, 1980, or 1975 at the earliest. So if Wikibooks is supposed to contain the text of actual books... I'd say the only ones they could really carry would be manuals for games that are no longer being produced, and for which the game's publisher has expressly released the manual into the public domain. In those cases I'd say Wikibooks would be a perfectly appropriate hosting site. There are probably a few of those out there, but I'd be hard-pressed to come up with any actual titles, not being much of a "gamer" myself.

Interesting problem - all in all, I'd have to say these "policies" (more like decrees) were probably necessary - again, to avoid crap-floods. But the fact that Wikia/Jimbo is the primary beneficiary looks pretty bad. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they didn't engineer things that way, though at least they were sort of subtle about it (Mr. Kohs' block notwithstanding).

[Milton Roe]

Interesting problem - all in all, I'd have to say these "policies" (more like decrees) were probably necessary - again, to avoid crap-floods. But the fact that Wikia/Jimbo is the primary beneficiary looks pretty bad. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they didn't engineer things that way, though at least they were sort of subtle about it (Mr. Kohs' block notwithstanding).

Of course they engineer it, and give the reason as preventing "crap floods." But crap floods in other areas (biographies of minor sports people, Pokemon) are actively protected (save for the rare plagarism and copyright infringement case) by simply citing WP:NOTPAPER. That's the "get out of jail free" card for infinite fanboy expansion of any non-money generating topic on WP.

And to tell the truth, WP:NOTPAPER actually has a point. Since it's not paper, WP really has no legitimate concern with "crap explosions," so long as its servers can handle the amount of content-- which I've seen no evidence is a problem. And so long as the material is digested and indexed properly. A properly-constructed encyclopedia built along WP:SS can contain knowledge down to any level of detail that anybody wants to put in, and it will can possess absolutely no bother or problem to those interested in skimming and summarizing at higher levels. Since it's not paper, a reader doesn't need to ever see or feel or get hampered by the footnotes and minutia. It's not only NOT like a paper encyclopedia, it's not even like a library of paper documents. The crap can be totally invisible and out of sight and mind, unless you want dig for it by successive linking. There's beauty in this! That was the original idea behind HTTP and HTML-- that all human knowledge would eventually be sorted or semi-sorted in this way. It sure as hell wasn't WP's idea. All Sanger contributed was the idea of crowd-sourcing the work to do it.

But now, turn this around and you see there really isn't any legitimate reason to make anything on WP disappear, only to re-appear on Wikia. We really should have two words for "scrape"-- one which means "copy," and the other that means "copy to THERE, followed by erase HERE." Like what happened to the Klingon Wikipedia.

Even today, although there's much Trek-related info on WP (enough to give the appearance of impartiality), it is still true that something with the detailed level of information possible at Memory Alpha, ends up getting deleted, with the suggestion the the poster go to Wikia and Memory Alpha. Which is to say, to a site that will eventually use it to pay a tiny bit of money to Jimmy Wales every time somebody looks at it.

Doc glasgow, you want to refute this?

The fact that WMF and its Koolaiders have actually convinced themselves of a need to limit the scope of WP, and to "disappear and deport" some of the rest to Wikia FOR ANY REASON whatsoever, is actually a masterpiece of psychological manipulation by Wales. He's got everybody at WMF (including board members who get NO MONEY) that it's ENTIRELY reasonable that WP be limited in scope, and that some of what it "can't handle" should go to Wikia instead! Even though this makes absolutely NO rational or logical sense.

It boggles my mind. Even pretty smart people like WMF board member Sam Klein/Sj (not to be confused with Essjay) are totally fooled. And nobody else is going to go against Jimbo, even if they do have an itchy glimmering that something is not right about the incestuous relation between WMF and Wikia.

MR

P.S. I don't really care if Wikia has not made a profit on paper. Have you ever heard of a venture which made little or no profit, yet from which the owners and controllers individually still profitted anyway (even as investors and the IRS got screwed)? Not to shock you, but it happens.

I'm sure Jimbo draws a very nice salary from Wikia, though of course I can't tell you want it is. And god knows what his expense account over there looks like, without an effective COO to keep his fingers out of the pie, as happend at WMF.

[thekohser]

Yes, I believe so. Explain to me why the only period where a decline in Wikia links from Wikipedia occurred was the two-month period (August-September 2006) where I was pointing out Wales' hypocrisy to the Wikipedia community; then after I was removed by Wales from that forum of discussion, Wikia links skyrocketed, all out of proportion to Wikipedia's natural growth rate?

Interesting graph...

I'm happy that the graph was interesting to you. All factual data. The fun was in attributing the causal relationship.

[Adrignola]

So if Wikibooks is supposed to contain the text of actual books... I'd say the only ones they could really carry would be manuals for games that are no longer being produced, and for which the game's publisher has expressly released the manual into the public domain. In those cases I'd say Wikibooks would be a perfectly appropriate hosting site.

Emphasis mine.

I'm afraid you're getting Wikibooks and Wikisource confused. While Wikisource hosts public domain books and public domain materials, Wikibooks is CC-BY-SA licensed and policies prohibit it from being a repository for source texts. Any game manuals were written by the players for the players. They are very similar projects in theory, but the licensing difference and Wikisource's alignment with Project Gutenberg are what differentiate it with Wikibooks. What is Wikibooks? Wikibooks encourages dynamic collaboration to improve upon content created by contributors rather than a hosting of static content already published and simply formatted and proofread.

[Somey]

I'm afraid you're getting Wikibooks and Wikisource confused. While Wikisource hosts public domain books and public domain materials, Wikibooks is CC-BY-SA licensed and policies prohibit it from being a repository for source texts. Any game manuals were written by the players for the players. They are very similar projects in theory, but the licensing difference and Wikisource's alignment with Project Gutenberg are what differentiate it with Wikibooks. What is Wikibooks? Wikibooks encourages dynamic collaboration to improve upon content created by contributors rather than a hosting of static content already published and simply formatted and proofread.

Ahh, okay, sorry. I just figured people had been taking existing game manuals, uploading them to Wikibooks and improving on them (or trying to), but you're saying the game manuals people were doing on Wikibooks were completely original? If anything, that makes Jimbo's decision to prohibit them (while welcoming them at Wikia) even more suspicious. And yes, that would definitely mean reduced participation in general at Wikibooks - for all intents and purposes, gamers are the core demographic for all of Wikiland.

[Somey]

I'm happy that the graph was interesting to you. All factual data. The fun was in attributing the causal relationship.

Well, that's just it - I'm agreeing with you that there was a causal relationship. My only point is that it probably wasn't a direct causal relationship, but like I say, you were probably the first and most prominent among us to point out the fact that Wikia sites were nearly all included on the exempt-from-nofollow-tags "whitelist."

And yet, what sort of content do you find on Wikia? An entire month after I noticed it and reported it here, there's still an entire Wikia devoted to the question, "What age can a child squirt?" If you link to that NSFW set of pages from Wikipedia, there won't be a "nofollow" tag, but if you link to, say, the Chronicle of Higher Education website or Harvard University, sorry, no Google-juice for them. (They might accidentally squirt it! )

"Safe" and "trusted" my ass! They don't even check their own content!

Anyway, I didn't want to just rely on my memory for the timing of all these events, so I checked - and yes, all of this was nearly simultaneous.

January 12, 2007
January 20, 2007 (nofollow tags "turned on")
February 2, 2007

IIRC, this was followed by a great deal of negotiating, during which Mr. Kohs was asked to stop criticizing WP so much in exchange for being unblocked. At one point, I believe he actually agreed to some of these conditions - and in fact, was unblocked by Jimbo himself on 23 March, only to be blocked again a week later by Samuel Blanning for making a "legal threat" when he referred to a libelous statement made by User:Durova as a "libelous statement."

[jayvdb]

I'm afraid you're getting Wikibooks and Wikisource confused. While Wikisource hosts public domain books and public domain materials, Wikibooks is CC-BY-SA licensed and policies prohibit it from being a repository for source texts. Any game manuals were written by the players for the players. They are very similar projects in theory, but the licensing difference and Wikisource's alignment with Project Gutenberg are what differentiate it with Wikibooks. What is Wikibooks? Wikibooks encourages dynamic collaboration to improve upon content created by contributors rather than a hosting of static content already published and simply formatted and proofread.

Ahh, okay, sorry. I just figured people had been taking existing game manuals, uploading them to Wikibooks and improving on them (or trying to), but you're saying the game manuals people were doing on Wikibooks were completely original? If anything, that makes Jimbo's decision to prohibit them (while welcoming them at Wikia) even more suspicious. And yes, that would definitely mean reduced participation in general at Wikibooks - for all intents and purposes, gamers are the core demographic for all of Wikiland.

Wikibooks should be textbooks only, and to hell with existing demographics or pageviews of Wikimedia projects or of Wikia. Sending this crap to Wikia (or anywhere else) helps to define the culture of Wikibooks, which should be a quieter environment for people motivated to write textbooks.

If wikimedia projects are favouring Wikia over other similar Wiki hosts, then we have problem. It isn't necessarily a problem which can be blamed on Jimbo, unless he is actively promoting and protecting a practise of favouring Wikia on Wikimedia projects. If there is favouring going on, it is more likely that the community feel that Wikia is a closer ally due to overlap in the communities, or simply because wikimedians want Jimbo's project to succeed. OTOH, Jimbo/Wikia should be actively ensuring that there is no favouritism occurring, in order to be seen to be avoiding the possibility of unfairly profiting due to overlap in the boards and community.

btw, does anyone know who holds executive roles at Wikia; I can't seem to find a page on Wikia.com that provides a list of people who are responsible at Wikia. Jimmy Wales says he is currently the president of Wikia, but Wikia says that he is the chairman, and that Gil Penchina is the CEO.

[Doc glasgow]

Jimbo/Wikia should be actively ensuring that there is no favouritism occurring, in order to be seen to be avoiding the possibility of unfairly profiting due to overlap in the boards and community.

I don't think it is Wikia's role to ensure it doesn't get favourable treatment. Most commercial organisations will take whatever they can get.

OTOH, it is the role of the WMF (including Jimbo wearing his WMF hat) to make sure its charitable assets are not being used to benefit a commercial organisation at the expense of the goals of the charity.

The last bit is important. "at the expense of the goals of the charity". If Wikia is by its very nature a good place to link to or favour, then that would by OK. If, however, a bias towards it means that operational decisions are made, where if there were no bias evidently better ones would follow, then we have a problem.

[jayvdb]

Jimbo/Wikia should be actively ensuring that there is no favouritism occurring, in order to be seen to be avoiding the possibility of unfairly profiting due to overlap in the boards and community.

I don't think it is Wikia's role to ensure it doesn't get favourable treatment. Most commercial organisations will take whatever they can get.

OTOH, it is the role of the WMF (including Jimbo wearing his WMF hat) to make sure its charitable assets are not being used to benefit a commercial organisation at the expense of the goals of the charity.

The last bit is important. "at the expense of the goals of the charity". If Wikia is by its very nature a good place to link to or favour, then that would by OK. If, however, a bias towards it means that operational decisions are made, where if there were no bias evidently better ones would follow, then we have a problem.

It was Jimbo who I was thinking of mostly when I said 'Jimbo/Wikia', as he is the only person that appears to have an active role in both, as best as I can quickly tell. I agree that it is the WMF which is legally accountable for this, however I doubt that they legally accountable unless they are involved in the favouritism; in the case of the 'community' making decisions which result in favouritism, it makes more sense to me that Wikia should be the one to keep tabs on whether or not it is unduly benefiting from the relationship; by being proactive and transparent about this, they avoid the clearly beneficial relationship from being buggered up.

Also, 'at the expense of the goals of the charity' is not the only potential problem here. The others are arrangements which are designed to divert money to the WMF executive, either directly or indirectly, and there could be a case for anti-competition as well. For example, if WMF developed mediawiki enhancements that are more suitable to Wikia than their competitors, this results in Wikia not needing to pay resources to do this, and thus having an unfair market advantage; or if the code repository gatekeepers (who are WMF employees) rejected patches from other sources, this increases the maintenance and upgrade costs for Wikia competitors. IMO, strong long-lived ties between non-profits and corporations are best avoided.

[thekohser]

You guys are missing/forgetting many of the additional linkages between Wikia and the WMF.

I might elaborate later, but if you could so easily forget that Wikia co-founder Angela Beesley was the chair of the WMF Advisory Board, the office space rental scam, and the Omidyar-bought board seat (Omidyar invested start-up cash in Wikia), then I'm not sure my effort is worth it.

This post has been edited by thekohser: Wed 15th September 2010, 2:28pm

[Kelly Martin]

The simple fact is that nobody really cares about Jimbo's "misconduct" in this regard. Americans expect corporate leaders to cheat like this; nobody is surprised by it and nobody sees any point in doing anything about it because his replacement isn't likely to be any better.

[Jon Awbrey]

You guys are missing/forgetting many of the additional linkages between Wikia and the WMF.

I might elaborate later, but if you could so easily forget that Wikia co-founder Angela Beesley was the chair of the WMF Advisory Board, the office space rental scam, and the Omidyar-bought board seat (Omidyar invested start-up cash in Wikia), then I'm not sure my effort is worth it.

Not to mention the whole culture that is being cultivated at Jimbo's Wiki-Peanut Plantataion (aka Wiki-Pharmville). Every serfile wiki-peon — like MikeyLifey or MrOllie — knows the juice they get from keeping all the links as internal to Wiki(a)pedia as possible.

Now we all know that there's such a thing as real spam, but anyone who watches one of these Wikiaphidlers for any length of time knows that their antics go way beyond defending against spam, to the point where they disserve Readers, Learners, Contributors, and Society itself, all the things that the Wikimedia Foundation claims to justify their tax-advantaged status as an Educational Charity.

Jon Awbrey

[Avirosa]

I don't think it is Wikia's role to ensure it doesn't get favourable treatment. Most commercial organisations will take whatever they can get.

So you wouldn’t expect to be prosecuted for receiving stolen goods ? Corporations whether profit making or non profit making have a responsibility to ensure that their members (the Board) act in ways that do not do make the Corporation party to illegal or improper acts. As a for profit corporation Wikia would be equally as culpable as any of its board members acting individualiy, if it (Wikia) was to be benefiting from private inurement achieved through self dealing by any of its board members, or even if it were merely facilitating that inurement for those individual board members. Whether or not there may be criminal sanction under US Law in the suggested circumstance, is not obvious to me, however in the described circumstance the WMF would certainly have a Civil claim against both its inuring directors/officers/employees and Wikia. To avoid liability Wikia would have to show that it acted both in good faith and that it could not reasonably have known that its board member(s) were cheating WMF.

OTOH, it is the role of the WMF (including Jimbo wearing his WMF hat) to make sure its charitable assets are not being used to benefit a commercial organisation at the expense of the goals of the charity.

The last bit is important. "at the expense of the goals of the charity". If Wikia is by its very nature a good place to link to or favour, then that would by OK. If, however, a bias towards it means that operational decisions are made, where if there were no bias evidently better ones would follow, then we have a problem.

That is not the limit of what is required of a registered tax exempt corporation in the US. In fact using the term charity is confusing because it evokes the UK system which differs in may respects from the US. The operative regulation for WMP is the IRS code on Tax Exempt Organizations http://www.irs.gov/charities/content/0,,id=96986,00.html . A condition of tax exemption is the absolute avoidance of inurement and private benefit, any breach of this provision may be subject to removal of exempt status and punitive taxation. The WMF has an overiding duty to its funders who support it as tax exempt organisation, to ensure that it is wholly immune from any inurement, private benefit or self dealing. The follow/no follow of links with advantage preferenced to Wikia might well be something that may suggest to the IRS that there a matters of inurement requiring investigation. That is of course should anyone choose to alert the IRS.

A.virosa

[Abd]

You guys are missing/forgetting many of the additional linkages between Wikia and the WMF.

I might elaborate later, but if you could so easily forget that Wikia co-founder Angela Beesley was the chair of the WMF Advisory Board, the office space rental scam, and the Omidyar-bought board seat (Omidyar invested start-up cash in Wikia), then I'm not sure my effort is worth it.

You invest your effort and you take your chances. Usually, Greg, it's not worth it, if the people with power, or the organization with power, doesn't want to know.

Speak to someone who wants to know, or, indeed, you will be wasting your time and just get people riled up. About you, for disturbing their nap.

Your question at Wikibooks was completely off-the-wall. Raising the issue of the arbitrariness of the exclusion of video-game textbooks was fine. Blaming it on Jimbo, even though he obviously was very involved in that original shift, wasn't. Wikibooks isn't the judge in a conflict-of-interest lawsuit. It's not even the jury, and even if a consensus appeared there that Jimbo was an evil, self-dealing monster, it would be irrelevant. Would that mean that policy should be changed to frustrate the ESDMs?

I don't think so. What's needed at Wikibooks is a coherent vision, expressed as a policy, with consensus, that then leads to consequential decisions like the VG guide decision. And all the crap of the past is actually irrelevant and distracting, leading to useless argument, unless we turn to the actual issue. That was my "firebreak."

Adrignola, it is not only the Wikibooks community that is involved. If debates pop up on Wikibooks, and are publicized here, and seem to be going in a way that "others" don't like, you will see the others and their friends popping up to participate. You may think that the Wikibooks community isn't interested in this, so there is no danger, but ... the "community" is not just those whom you see working on the project. It's potentially everyone in the world who is willing to register an account, and there are a whole pile of editors, quite interested in preventing this "trolling," who would have the motive to stir the pot on Wikibooks, and to try to provoke Thekohser into making comments to justify the original ban, even more than might be his natural inclination.