Sue Gardner, who oversaw a period of rapid growth and evolution at Wikipedia, said Wednesday that she would step down as executive director of the nonprofit organization that runs the free encyclopedia.
In an interview with The Times on Wednesday, Ms. Gardner said she would depart in roughly six months, after the board of the organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, has decided on a successor. She said she wanted to advocate more directly for an open Internet, either by starting her own nonprofit group, writing a book or by joining an advocacy organization.
“Wikipedia will be fine. It’s a behemoth and people love it,” said Ms. Gardner, 45. She added: “I worry about the broader conditions of a free and open Internet and the future of other Wikipedia-like projects.”
Ms. Gardner took over the group that oversees Wikipedia in 2007. It was a time of intense skepticism about the accuracy of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that relies entirely on tens of thousands of volunteers to write and edit entries, which now appear in 285 languages.
The year she joined, Wikipedia’s credibility was damaged when it was made public that a prolific contributor who went by the name Essjay and claimed to be a tenured university professor turned out to be Ryan Jordan, 24.
Ms. Gardner worked to broker relationships with librarians, academics and grant-making institutions. “At that time, people didn’t know what to make of it,” (Wikipedia) she said. Today, she added, “Wikipedia is widely acknowledged as useful in a way it wasn’t five or six years ago.”
With credibility came scale. Today, Wikipedia gets more than 488 million unique visitors each month, making it the fifth-most-visited Web site, behind Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook and ahead of Amazon, Apple and eBay, according to comScore data from January.
In the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation had assets of $5.7 million, compared to $49.3 million in assets in the period from July 1 to Dec. 31, 2012, according to the nonprofit’s financial statements.
In 2007, the Wikimedia Foundation, then based in a shopping center in St. Petersburg, Fla., had fewer than 10 employees and raised less than $3 million annually. Ms. Gardner moved the foundation to San Francisco. It now has roughly 160 paid employees. Its most recent fund-raising drive, late last year, raised $25 million to help run Wikipedia from 1.2 million donors.
Ms. Gardner said the turning point in her decision to leave Wikimedia came early last year when she oversaw a blackout of Wikipedia to protest two pieces of antipiracy legislation under consideration in Washington — the Stop Online Piracy (known as SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (known as PIPA).
The move was controversial because Wikipedia prides itself on being politically neutral. It became central in a grass-roots online effort that led lawmakers to shelve both pieces of legislation. The blackout cemented Ms. Gardner’s position as a vocal proponent of Internet openness and one of the few influential female voices in the movement.
The SOPA and PIPA protests “started me thinking about the shape the Internet was taking and what role I could play in that,” Ms. Gardner said.
In a post that will be published on her personal blog early Wednesday evening, Ms. Gardner wrote: “Increasingly, I’m finding myself uncomfortable about how the Internet’s developing, who’s influencing its development and who is not.”
Ms. Gardner also said it was important for her to step down before Wikimedia suffered from a “founder’s trap,” when an organization is too dependent on a single personality. When she took over, Wikipedia was still very much tethered to its co-founder, Jimmy Wales, who started the online encyclopedia in 2001.
In recent years, Ms. Gardner, a Canadian who previously worked at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, has emerged as the driving force behind the free encyclopedia. “It’s important not to let any organization be overly defined by any single person,” she said. “That’s particularly the case in the Wikipedia movement because it’s a collaborative movement.”
Ms. Gardner will leave some projects unfinished. She has championed efforts to recruit more female editors to Wikipedia. The encyclopedia has been criticized for a lack of diversity among its editors that has led to a dearth of coverage in areas like fashion, style and design.
Entries on subjects like video games, anime, computer programming and other issues that tend to be popular among Wikipedia’s largely young, male editors receive inordinate attention.
“It’s a slow change, but the seeds have been planted for change, and I think there’s an understanding for why that change was wanted,” Ms. Gardner said.
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/a-driving-force-behind-wikipedia-to-step-down/?partner=rss&emc=rss