The WMF foundation is hiring! And in order to weed out potential problem candidates, they now have an actual procedure to screen candidates (scroll down under the job description). The basic premise is trying to find out how much of the Koolaid potential candidates have already consumed so that they keep on with their glassy-eyed cheerleader routines while on the job.

After a few obligatory "Yeah Team!" questions ("Tell us how you see the significance of Wikimedia communities in the world.", "Tell us what you find personally exciting about Wikipedia or any other Wikimedia community."), you get to the bottom of the page and you have to answer this :



Now, I've been watching this process for a few years now. I'd be hard pressed to reduce it to one or two sentences, especially in a general manner. I mean, especially now, when there's no telling what with happen with an RfA.

So, what are they after here? Is it a joke?

Oh yes.



They do? I can see that the technical staff may, but the rest of them? The only pressure I can see is to keep the coffers filled...

I would treat this as more of a call for a new form of post-modern blank verse, almost like haiku except more attuned to the Twitter Generation. In fact, a good model for this may be found on Twitter in the form of Discographies on Twitter, in which the entire recorded works of well-known singers and bands are distilled down to a single 140-character "tweet." Some of them are quite funny.

So, a similar approach to explaining the RfA process might look something like this:

1 Go on IRC, suck up; 2 Find nommer, suck up; 3 BS the Q&A section, suck up; 4 Hope nobody remembers previous account; 5 Win; 6 Jerk off.

How could they not hire you after that?

It's very telling that they're not interested in attracting the best possible talent. Otherwise why would they slant the process so strongly toward existing community members, and relegate material that would demonstrate actual experience to a secondary, if not tertiary, role?

WMF jobs are rewards for being especially good followers of Der Jimbo. Not that we didn't already know this.

The CommunityHiring page seems to be only for the "Community Department" jobs. Since that department needs people who have a clue about the wiki process, people who are already community members are desirable to them; the slant is reasonable in that context. I don't see any indication that this is used for general hiring. I would be rather disappointed if it were.

That being said, do you think that they would knowingly hire someone who is antipathic to Jimbo?

Possible typo? Could the word be "holes"?

I think, maybe they should.

Because he's still the Holy One, and it's evidently not doing their public image any good.
Running it like The Little Boy's Clubhouse is not conducive to database quality.

My first thought was to question the assertion that Jimbo's prominence within Wikimedia doesn't do their public image any good. After all, wasn't he largely responsible for the spikes on this graph? I seem to recall the more recent fundraiser trying different people, for the same highlight, with poorer results, such as Craig Newmark of Craigslist.

My second thought is that your underlying idea might be good. An official "devil's advocate" position to provide useful, targeted criticism could be productive for everyone. My conception of it would have it rotate annually between experts in various relevant specialties such as ethics, epistemology, publishing, journalism, that sort of thing. The trick would be finding the right spin (and the right people) for suggesting it to the current staff.