Truemors
is reporting from
Member
NP Rank:
NP Rank:
Two Top Wikipedians Resign
Share: 
by Jordan Yerman | March 26, 2007 at 07:12 am
561 views | 10 Recommendations | 1 comment
Chalk it up to growing pains within Web 2.0: when companies invent new ways of doing business they inevitably reach a point where they are making it up as they go along. In this case, two top board members are leaving Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia's business entity) over individual disagreements regarding how the Wikimedia board functions, citing frustrations with an overall lack of busines experience and planning.
Two top employees of the Wikimedia Foundation have resigned, citing disagreements with the board. Both publicly tendered their resignations to the community yesterday on a foundation mailing list, but say their resignations are unrelated and the timing coincidental.Danny Wool, who has worked out of the foundation's St. Petersburg, Florida, office since October 2005 under the title of grants coordinator, and who is widely regarded as the number two guy at Wikimedia, discussed his resignation first in a message to the foundation list.
That note was later followed by one from Brad Patrick, general counsel and interim Executive Director of the foundation, who resigned formally to the foundation earlier this month but decided to announce it publicly to the community after seeing Wool's note go up. Patrick will continue with the foundation until March 31 and has retained executive headhunting firm Phillips Oppenheim to help find a permanent director for the foundation.
What is NowPublic?
NowPublic lets people work together to cover news events around the world.
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (1)
at 08:20 on March 26th, 2007
This case of "growing pains" is important as a case study for similar ventures everywhere. Growing pains, and the price of being the pioneers- you allude to both in your artful and readable frame. As they say (and without irony).."Nice"... and an excellent example of what you might call a "core tech story"- one that is about a particular development at a company , but one that references wider implications. That's something we don't see enough of in the large majority of what passes for tech or business news.