This much we know: Somebody has it in for Erik Möller, the deputy director of Wikimedia. Danny Wool, a former employee and one of the most outspoken critics of the Wikimedia Foundation, says it's not him, but he knows who it is and that it would "shock people."
The Erik Möller drama, just one of many scandals that have engulfed Wikimedia Foundation over the last six months, started a few weeks ago, after somebody dug up some of Möller's writings which suggest a disturbing defense of child pornography. Someone leaked passed the material on to Valleywag, and it escalated in the blogosphere from there.
Danny Wool, who admits he has no love for Möller and has called for his ouster, seems like the obvious leak source.
"It's no secret that I don't like Erik. There is a lot of history there -- we both started at Wikipedia at the same time, and I never liked his attitude toward Wikipedia."
But Wool adamantly denies he's the source of the gossip.
For its part, Wikimedia says that the allegations against Erik are not only a crock, but they're part of a potentially libelous smear campaign.
"This is a part of what appears to be a systematic attempt to smear people close to the foundation. In this case someone is sniping facts -- stringing together disparate and out-of-context quotes to try to paint a story," Wikimedia spokesman Jay Walsh wrote us by e-mail.
Wool, who has also written extensively about Erik Möller's alleged fascination with child pornography, also concedes that it's probably untrue.
"I tend to believe that [Erik's writing] was some stupid intellectual exercise for him," says Wool. "I think some of it is totally inappropriate though, and I would like to be reassured that he has rethought a lot of his ideas."
If Erik Möller shuffled papers in the bowels of a large corporation, the things he wrote on a random website seven years ago might not have surfaced, nor would it have gained media attention. But because Möller works for a public utility, Wikimedia, a nonprofit that relies on public donations and runs on the work of hundreds of thousands of volunteers, his views on child pornography are relevant. Still, from what we can gather, the board has turned a blind eye to the matter.
Discussions on the Wikimedia Foundation email system have mainly centered around board elections and structural issues. Rumors about Möller have not been part of the conversation.
"You could say this is a credit to the project supporters overall [that the topic has not come up]. I obviously can't speak for the community (including list subscribers) as a whole, but I would say that there is a reluctance to add further energy to false stories that come from publications like valleywag or their ilk," Walsh said by e-mail.
Photo: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com
