http://mollywhite.net/wikimedia-timeline/
The above conflates a lot of highly unrelated events, but it's a cool visualization.
But the reality is that she lost the support of senior staff, and wasn't able to regain it. It's impossible to recover from something like that, so it's a good sign she stepped down.
Something caught my eye looking at it "Signpost reveals that the Wikimedia Foundation initially requested $6 million from the Knight Foundation". That's pretty common actually when dealing with private foundations. They don't have the budget for a big request this funding period, but are interested so they drop a smaller amount of funding. This might lead to a bigger funding event or the interest of other foundations (a good thing). This seems like it was characterized as bad, but it actually is normal and often very good. I remember a couple projects that got a regional grant to give seed money which developed into a very large grant from a national foundation. The angel investing pattern is not limited to startups.
Looking at what happened and given the demonizing of the Knight Foundation, I would imagine no private foundation will do a follow-up or even be inclined to give money for other projects.
They also made that grant application so vague that it looked like they wanted to compete with Google. Read the document. Heck, read the article that is now on Wikipedia!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engine_(Wikimedia_Fo...
Ok, the lower funding number might not be the issue, but it certainly seems like the timeline and article regarded it as a bad thing.
> The issue is that it wasn't discussed within the BoT
Ok, well, I would expect that will probably end the likelihood of further grants from Knight Foundation or many other reputable grant givers. Poor procedure inside an grantee is frowned upon, and having their name shown in a negative light is a warning to everyone else.
> They also made that grant application so vague that it looked like they wanted to compete with Google. Read the document. Heck, read the article that is now on Wikipedia!
Looking at this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/a/a7/Knowl...
It looks pretty normal for how you write up a project. You really only put high level stuff in for some of these organizations.
Thst grant application was ambiguously worded. It repeatedly said it was for “the Internet”. It reads that “today, commercial search engines dominate search engine use of the Internet, and they’re employing proprietary technologies to consolidate access to the Internet’s knowledge and information. Their algorithms obscure the way the Internet’s information is collected and displayed”.
How on earth would an internal search engine help in this regard? And why is this wording so broad?
The kicker is the line in the grant that “Knowledge Engine by Wikipedia will be the Internet’s first transparent search engine, and the first one engineered by the Wikimedia Foundation.”
If I was to read that grant application, I'd be expecting an Internet search engine. Lila and the BoT, including Jimmy Wales, says that it never was.
If that's the case, as I said in a comment on a recent blog post by Lila, then the only conclusions that can be come to are:
A. The Knight Foundation were mislead as to the purpose of the grant application,
B. Someone, or multiple people, within the BoT of the WMF were not telling the truth, or
C. This grant application was put together by someone who was incompetent.
I was commenting on the actual application. Its pretty normal for what you submit and, yes, technical perfection is not a hallmark of granting. Ambiguously worded happens a lot particularly if there is a size limit to the application. I didn't comment if the intent actually matched what they told other people. If they mislead people is not really something I have knowledge of.
I will say once again that I doubt they (or their successors) will have a shot of outside grants given the governance problem and the negative light it cast on Knight Foundation. It is an amazingly small world of grant organizations.
Grant writers know this, and the foundations who give the money also know it. If you weren't on the committee that worked on the grant application, I don't think you can draw any of A, B, or C with certainty. They are not exhaustive of all possibilities, so there's no logical imperative to accept one.
I've written and received grants from the Knight Foundation. Everyone involved understands that there is flexibility in scope from the planning to execution of a project.
For example, I was on the board of an orchestra that won several grants to put on "a performance of the Verdi Requiem." Surprisingly, that can mean different things to different people. What we ended up doing was an interactive multi-media presentation that focused on the history of the piece and its performance by captive Jews at the concentration camp at Terezin. During the course of which, we did also perform the requiem itself.
It was not anything like what you would see if you bought tickets to the NY Phil to go hear the requiem. I can see a reasonable point of view where a person at that event could say, "That was not the Verdi Requiem." And to that person, I would say that it was never our intent to do what the NY Phil would do. We always intended to do something very different. But in my opinion it still counts as "a performance of the Verdi Requiem" and was totally in line with what we requested the grants for in the first place.
I'm not saying this is the situation with the Wikimedia grant. I'm saying that it could be. And you should be careful about trying to draw bright lines around a topic that's pretty hazy by nature and about which we have very incomplete knowledge.
The degree of chaos and dysfunction it illustrates truly is astonishing, it seems they had an utter lack of competent, experienced managers.
Very sad situation. Is Wikipedia itself severely affected by this?
See: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2014-2015_Fundraising_R...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11177401
But the original story on HN has some comments from me:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11101164
My take at the time:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11101262
For an excellent backgrounder, then Liam awyatt's b;oh sets things put the clearest:
http://wittylama.com/2016/01/08/strategy-and-controversy/
And:
http://wittylama.com/2016/01/30/strategy-controversy-part-2/
As well, the foundation has no current strategic plan at the moment. Once there is a plan (formed with community involvement) and it's decided some search project should be a priority, then I think most people would have no problem with such grant funding.