Giving up his founder status so fast after he removed the images which were offending in his eyes is a clear sign of some tough discussions between Jimmy and the Board of Trustees in the last couple of days.

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System: The following 2 messages were spliced on to this thread from: http://www.webmasterworld.com/webmaster/4130660.htm [webmasterworld.com] by engine - 8:54 am on May 11, 2010 (utc +1)

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Dispute Escalates At Wikimedia Over Explicit Content [news.bbc.co.uk]

A row over sexually explicit content on the web encyclopaedia Wikipedia and related sites has escalated.

Co-founder Jimmy Wales gave up some of his site privileges following protests by contributors angered that he had deleted images without consultation.

What has the world come to when people start censoring classic art and sculpture on reasons of explicit content?

What a sad age we live in

Wikimedia's Wales gives up some top-level controls [news.cnet.com]

Change is afoot in the Wikipedia community, according to a report from Fox News, but the reality may be less drastic than has been reported.

However, multiple representatives from the foundation say Fox's report is not entirely accurate. Rather, Wales voluntarily gave up his special account status, according to Wikimedia Foundation's head of communications, Jay Walsh. Wales had been the lone person holding a unique "founder" status, a position above both registered editors and various levels of administrators in the editorial hierarchy within the largely volunteer community. He has now given up that special status; specifically, that means he will not be able to block users, delete pages, or "protect" pages. However, he still plans to participate as a regular user, according to Walsh.

I haven't looked at any of the images as frankly I find Wiki's information worthless for the most part. It is edited to the point that the information posted isn't correct for the stuff I searched for and just quit going to the site because the stuff is wrong.

Looks like the point of decision for Wiki.

I guess we all tried at one time or another to contribute to an area that we knew but after countless edits and delets it became a game to those and most have quit trying to help. IMO this site has become an ego trip for most of the people working on it.

bwnbwn, you'll never become a British journalist with that attitude. Where would our newspapers be if the journalists couldn't simply copy "facts" from Wikipedia and then include them in stories presented as hard-fought, on-the-street investigations?

Reminds me of the American spelling of the word aluminium.

wasn't there some amazing fact published last year about there being 5000 uber-editors that created 80%+ of the content on wikipedia?

wasn't there some amazing fact published last year about there being 5000 uber-editors that created 80%+ of the content on wikipedia?

I could see that, some people take great pride in creating and watching over Wiki's content for free when they could potentially be making their own sites and money for themselves. To each his own I guess.

That's very true... The same could be said for many sites though. I've always wondered about the people who contribute thousands of photos to some other site, or spend countless hours doing reviews for a sales site or something. Why on earth would you want to spend that kind of time helping somebody else make money? Many people that contribute seem to be younger people, or maybe people that don't quite get the internet yet. I've stumbled onto photos taken from my sites that people put up on Wiki. They were good about taking them down, but it shows the amateurish attitude with many contributors. The funny part is, I've offered to start pages on my sites dedicated to people's photos, where I'd give them their own page with full credit and everything... and they blow me off. They'd rather keep posting to some giant site where they get little to no credit.

Odd question... makes one wonder why folks expend so much time and effort on Webmasterworld! :)

I have one little oddity site where folks expend tremendous resources to keep it going... and have done so for 13 years. Sometimes passion is the answer.

I think these 'community content' type sites need to go into great detail into what's allowed and not. At inception. Because people will always push the limits. Change things later and people will scream.

Wales had been the lone person holding a unique "founder" status, a position above both registered editors and various levels of administrators in the editorial hierarchy within the largely volunteer community. He has now given up that special status;

So who's in charge now? A ship without a captain will sink. Or at least flounder around :)

Flounder/founder... been there done that, recently as regards ships at sea.

Not going with the quibble of vernacular, but am expressing krappola makes sense, and community is really kewl krapolla. Community is what IS (think Bill Clinton) and go from there.

CEO, board of trustees, CFO, consultants, etc.

It's a website, not an airline company. The more people you take on and the more positions you create the greater the risk of having disagreements. SINCE it's a website and people don't care to listen to the drama involved in running it there is also a risk that an enthusiastic teenager takes the time to build something better. I hope that happens. I'd prefer a site where the voice of it's users make such decisions.