Alex756

This is the "user" page of Alex756 who was once a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. until December 2006 from its inception. Now W.M.F., Inc. does not have any members, so he is no longer a member but he is still a "user" and an administrator. He has deleted the page history here because there is some personal information stored there under a principle known as "right to vanish" but that does not mean he does not want anyone to not know him or that he does not want to be remembered for what he did in Wikipedia projects before. He does not make a lot of edits but he is still here and available if anyone wants to contact him (which does not happen very often). If you want to see the pages that have been "deleted" for any legitimate historical research purposes they still exist and are accessible through administrator privileges.

Alex756 wrote -- with Jimbo Wales -- the original bylaws of WMF in 2003-04, and also helped Wales get it tax-exempt status, helped complete the trademark applications started by Jimbo to the Wikipedia, MediaWiki and WikiNews marks and make a lot of suggestions as a volunteer "member" regarding the area of dispute resolution, establishing good record keeping for fair use rationales and editing thousands of articles in the process. Alex756 was never "hired" to do this, he did it as a pro bono volunteer. He was never paid for any of his expenses or his time. It was a gift freely given to help start what he thought was an organization that would work with "users" to create new structures and new ways for people to collaborate. Alex756 also started the English Wikipedia Association of Members' Advocates, but now the status of this organization is in jeopardy because the Board of Directors unilaterally amended the bylaws and took away the status of Wikipedia "users" to be members of this entity, so how can you have an "association" of members when you don't have any membership?

Getting rid of members implies taking away any entitlement they have to their voice, the right to seek redress to their grievances on the Board level(there was also a Disciplinary Board that the bylaws created) and to have some, if only minor, status in the WMF hierarchy. This has been replaced by some vague promise to some vague "community" to elect some directors amongst "users" of WMF projects. Basically this means the board can do whatever it wants and you can yell and scream and they will do nothing if you have any kind of problem or grievance because legally they have decided that you really have not status or voice in their decision-making process.

How did this happen? It was done without any kind of organized consultation, just a few notices on the mailing list and a couple of wiki pages that all members have been "deemed" to read. This is what the Board and its staff apparently think is "democracy". Apparently there was also a mistaken belief that a membership organization could only have directors from amongst its members or that somehow a cabal of members would "takeover" the organization; or that a membership meant that the business activities of the organization had to be run by consensus (sometimes confused with democracy). Alex756 finds these points to be coming from individuals who have a naïve, incomplete point of view or who perhaps did it for some purpose that has not been disclosed (what about NPOV here guys?) regarding not-for-profit corporate structures. In any case Alex756 does not agree with this kind of propaganda and his exercising what ever remaining right he might have to criticize the powers that be. But he is now just the "remains" of a former member, a carcass without soul, that is only traced by some edits and other electronic remnants of his former member status so whatever he thinks is really very insignificant in the WMF superstructure.

How unfortunate that the original impetus for Wikimedia was to be run much like the rest of the wiki projects it started, now it is a holding corporation that is run in the dark without transparency or any clear idea of what is really going on amongst the powers that be. If you want to complain it appears that the only redress you have is through the courts since they (the BoD) appear not to want to give former members any organized internal grievance procedure to follow to resolve disputes on the organizational structure (unless the WP arbcom).

How unfortunate! That is the opinion of Alex756 and it seems very few people really care. Why? Maybe it is a sign of the times and how citizens are now controlled by an apathy that prevents them from doing anything that is not in their individual self interest.