Jimmy Wales had a busy Christmas Eve on Twitter, trumpeting what a principled and successful man he is. The co-founder of Wikipedia has come under fire for his acceptance of a $500,000 award from Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and the government of the United Arab Emirates, a nation criticized for its disappointing human rights record. To his credit, Wales says that he will use the money to do good in the world, but his puffy peacock use of Twitter was a bit much.
For example, two days ago he said , "I'm not the kind of person who tut-tuts from a safe distance. I make things happen." And, quite full of himself, he noted , "Damn straight I'm taking the money and using it to fight for human rights. Proudly." And two days prior, he boasted , "I am extremely strong in my fight worldwide against censorship and repression. Happy to use some of their money to destroy them." But, can Wales really be trusted to do the right thing with this newfound $500,000? The historical evidence suggests that Wales has a legacy of cooperating with dictatorships, rather than tearing them asunder.
In December 2012, Jimmy Wales found himself caught in an international news storm, with journalists in Eurasia, the United Kingdom, and the United States pointing out how Wales had aligned the Kazakh-language Wikipedia with the autocratic government of Kazakhstan. Wales financially supported a program called WikiBilim that rewarded Kazakh editors who wrote glowing reviews of the Nazarbayev government, even while that government was restricting the free press in its country and considered requiring Internet cafe web users' activity to be monitored.
Wales and his Wikimedia Foundation have long been tied into the government of Kazakhstan. For example, Graham Allison, the director of Harvard's Belfer Center, wrote the introduction to President Nazarbayev's book, 'Epicenter of Peace'. Allison's wife then gave the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) a $3.6 million grant, which included money for the WMF to hire a paid editor to personally polish up Wikipedia content related to the Belfer Center. Additionally, former UK prime minister Tony Blair maintains multi-million-dollar business ties with Kazakhstan, while Wales married Blair's former diary secretary, with Blair attending their wedding.
Furthermore, Wales lent his name to a World Economic Forum "Guide to Good Government" which the United Arab Emirates co-sponsored. Wales says that he did this because someone at the Belfer Center asked him to. In that guide, there is a chapter authored by Peter Mandelson, who also has heavy financial interests in Kazakhstan and who also attended Jimmy Wales' wedding.
So, while we have no evidence of Jimmy Wales ever having fought censorship and repression in Kazakhstan or the UAE, we do have evidence of his maintaining a network of personal and financial ties with people who prop up those repressive governments. Wales insists that with this $500,000 he received, things will be different. He intends to set up his own charitable foundation to fight for human rights.
Close observers may recall, though, the last two times Wales felt the holiday spririt and helped set up a charity to champion human interests, it hasn't turned out so well. In December 2009, he used the Wall Street Journal to announce his partnership with Andrea Weckerle to set up "CiviliNation", a web forum that would fight online hostility and incivility. But when the 2011 Form 990 was filed for CiviliNation, it showed that 74% of its expenses went to Weckerle's pocketbook (and 82% in 2012, and 80% in 2013). Wales' second recent venture into the charitable world found him teaming up with celebrity model Lily Cole to create "Impossible.com". Impossible was intended to be an altruism-based social network, where users could ask strangers for help when needed, while offering other strangers assistance when able. Thing is, the program applied for and accepted a substantial government handout when multi-millionaire Cole was clearly not "in need". Today, Impossible.com languishes with a global rank as the 396,947th most actively visited website.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Wales' $500,000 windfall from the Middle East will be watching how it is ultimately misspent in 2015.
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