Today Fox News published a story that irresponsibly smeared the Wikimedia projects and a member of the Wikimedia Foundation’s staff, Erik Moeller. The story repeats serious falsehoods and offers information taken grossly out of context, resulting in what amounts to a deliberate misrepresentation of reality.

Wikipedia is highly visible, and not uncontroversial. The Wikimedia Foundation wants to provide an environment in which staff and editors can do their work free of harassment and slander. The Wikimedia Foundation is appalled and angry that Erik’s employment with us has resulted in him becoming a target, and we believe that recklessly maligning him is indefensible. Erik is a principled and valued employee: we are proud to support him.

On the topic of allegedly illegal materials on Wikipedia and our projects: The Wikimedia Foundation obeys the law. In the weeks since Sanger’s published allegations, the Wikimedia Foundation has not been contacted by the FBI or any other law-enforcement agency with regard to allegedly illegal content on any Wikimedia projects. Our community of volunteer editors takes action to remove illegal material when such material is brought to its attention. The Wikimedia Foundation is proud of the Wikimedia editors who zealously work to keep the projects free of illegal material. If and when we are informed by law enforcement agencies of illegal content that has not already been removed through self-policing, we will take quick action to delete it.

(UPDATE) Erik Moeller has posted a detailed response in his personal blog as well.

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.