Erik Möller

Erik Möller (2014)

Erik Möller (* 1979 ) is a freelance journalist , book author and software developer . He has been involved as an author and formerly a developer for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and its sister projects since 2001 . From September 2006 he was a member of the board of the in San Francisco -based Wikimedia Foundation until then from early 2008 to April 2015 Deputy Managing Director (Deputy Director) acted.

Life

Möller studied computer science from 1999 to 2003 at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences and holds a degree in computer science ( FH ). He then worked as a freelance journalist and book author. Since 1998 he has been writing articles about P2P , Open Source and Wikipedia for c't , taz and since 1999 also for Telepolis . For Telepolis he also wrote the six-part series GNU / Linux and Open Source: The Reformation you can touch . In 2005 he published the book The Secret Media Revolution - How Weblogs, Wikis and Free Software are Changing the World . Wolfgang Krischke from the FAZ criticizes the attention to detail and the exclusively positive view of the Internet that Möller shows in the book, as well as the fact that he does not give any insight into the internal processes of Wikipedia. He praised the knowledgeable presentation of the subjects.

Möller has been involved as a non-profit author (under the user name Eloquence ) for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia since 2001 and has been a developer in the past in the creation of the sister projects MediaWiki , Wikinews and Wikimedia Commons , where he especially promoted Wikinews and Commons as an initiator . Since 2006 he has been instrumental in the definition of “free cultural works” . In September 2006 he was elected to the board of the Wikimedia Foundation from a total of 17 candidates to succeed Angela Beesley, who withdrew, and took over the role of managing director as Executive Secretary within the board the following month . When Sue Gardner was hired outside the board as the first full-time managing director of the Wikimedia Foundation in December 2007 , Möller resigned from the board and in January 2008 became deputy managing director under Gardner and later under Lila Tretikov . Möller left the Wikimedia Foundation at the end of April 2015. He subsequently became Senior Project Manager at the Freedom of the Press Foundation .

Controversy

In July and August 2014, Möller and Wikimedia Foundation employees pushed a new viewing function for media content (“media viewer” or “media viewer”), which had previously met with considerable rejection from the English and German-speaking author community due to technical and legal problems. In order to technically enforce his own position, Möller had the software adapted so that he and WMF employees were given higher-ranking protection and editing rights (“super protection”) against local administrators in order to prevent the media viewer from being blocked locally. In the course of this, his account in the German language Wikipedia was blocked for one month for violating local guidelines. The super protection rights were finally abolished again in 2015 after persistent criticism, but the controversial software extension remained.