| Summary details
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- Personal:
- Name: Gregory Kohs
- Age: 39
- Location: Pennsylvania
- Languages: English (fluent), German (functional)
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| Statement
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My candidacy is a referendum for several important principles.
- Wikipedia is doing too much harm with its biographies of living people who have never had a biography about them published on paper. As a Board member, I would advocate changing the deletion criteria on Articles for Deletion to read:
- In the case of biographies of living people, especially those where a published paper biography does not already exist, where multiple editors have expressed the opinion either, (a) that the biography could cause distress to the subject, or (b) that the biography will be particularly difficult to maintain in a fair and accurate state, due to the poor available sourcing or it being of such low interest that few but biased editors will be willing to maintain it...
- In such cases, the closing administrator shall close the debate as "Keep" only where there is a clear consensus that Wikipedia should retain the article. In all other cases the default shall be to "Delete" the article.
- Commercially-funded support activity in concert with open-source free content is natural and beneficial to the project. The WMF Board should include all stakeholders, not just the volunteer community. Business enterprises seeking to use, improve, and extend information with an added motivation of personal profit are one of the intended benefits of free information. To date, the volunteer Wikipedia community has been railroaded to believe that for-profit support of Wikipedia is an inherent evil. Did Linux collapse with the commercial support of Red Hat and IBM?
- The leadership of the WMF Board and the Executive Staff of the Wikimedia Foundation are crippling Wikipedia by failing to take due care and responsibility for the project. The past 18 months have seen a persistent series of scandals and other unseemly public relations blunders being trumpeted in both insider and mainstream publications. The WMF needs to halt the current strategy of denying wrongdoing and framing critics as "disgruntled" "trolls", and instead return to a mission of achieving a respectable level of accuracy, excellence, and ethics in media.
These three issues now affect the Foundation and its projects on a daily basis, and they are destroying at least the English Wikipedia from within. I would challenge the Board that acts as steward of the Foundation and all of its projects, to assume more professional responsibility for the care and management of its flagship project.
- I am married, have one daughter, work as the Director of Market Research for Comcast Corporation (the largest cable television company and the second largest Internet service provider in the United States), and serve on the Board of Directors of my local church. I hold a BA degree (magna cum laude) from Emory University, along with a Masters degree (and was C.Phil) from Temple University where I received the Russell Conwell Fellowship for two years. In 1985, I scored 1430 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. I enjoy travel, piano, guitar, and tournament poker.
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Discussion area
Hello Greg. Is there a template for candidates to use (or is that it above?) When is the deadline for submiting? Good straightforward description of issues you support. I suppose I should check information on WMF site, but thought I would stop by here first. GlassBeadGame 19:24, 15 May 2008 (PDT)
- See this page meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/Candidates/Submissions for the current nominees.
- Time line:
- 01–31 May 2008: primary translation phase; subcommittee actively coordinates and promotes translation.
- 08–22 May 2008: candidate submissions.
- 29 May 2008: deadline to send proof of identity (late or missing submissions will be disqualified).
- 01–21 June 2008: elections.
- 22–23 June 2008: vote-checking.
- 26 June 2008: publication of results. -- MyWikiBiz 06:49, 16 May 2008 (PDT)
