TWO TOP WIKIPEDIA EXECUTIVES RESIGN

TWO TOP WIKIPEDIA EXECUTIVES RESIGN

Wikipedia has received a jolt as two of senior executives have just quit the free online encyclopedia. Wikipedia is undergoing certain re-organisations after the resignation. Danny Wool, and Brad Patrick, general counsel and interim executive director, have given in their papers. The departure of Patrick was known to the board earlier in the month but he chose to make it public now.

The reason of the resignations is not known as none of the executives made comments about it.

"This community understands implicitly that people of goodwill can (and do) have strong differences of opinion about important matters," Patrick wrote in his e-mail. "It is my earnest hope that everyone who cares about the foundation, but has concerns about what is happening at the Foundation now, will say so. This community is strongest when it is vocal, not silent."

Danny Wool has stated that he would stand for election for a position on the board of trustees of the foundation in June.

"At that time, I will make known my position on how the Wikimedia Foundation should operate and what mistakes I perceive are being made at present," Wool wrote. "So let's leave the gossip and second-guessing behind us and get on with the real task at hand -- building the largest and most reliable repository of knowledge ever created."

The announcements of the resignations come post the unveiling of the identity of Essjay, who edited thousands of Wikipedia articles under false credential claiming he was a Professor of religious studies but was really a 24-year-old college student.

Wikipedia has become one of the widely viewed sites in recent times due to secular nature of its contents, but has been stubbornly rejecting advertisements that has hurt it economically. Recently a senior official went about telling how its weak financial position was hurting it deeply. With hundreds of new contents being added everyday, Wikipedia needs money to buy servers but the donation it gets is far less to sustain itself.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, had earlier this year announced that the Wikipedia foundation will start a for-profit, ad-supported search engine called as Wikiasiri that will show results generated by users of the site rather than algorithms that Google, Yahoo currently use.