So concerned that he monitors articles on child sexuality on Wikipedia personally. So concerned that he has started Wikiyouth, an organization unaffiliated with Wikipedia which attempts to "protect" children from "fearful adults." So concerned that he has, in the past, posted naked pictures of children in sexual poses to his website, The Humanist.

Before becoming the Wikimedia Foundation's deputy director, Möller was elected to the nonprofit's board of directors by Wikipedia's users. What this points to: The problem goes much deeper than Möller. Wikipedia's inner circles have been taken over by an extreme cadre of advocates of "free culture" whose beliefs boil down to not having a problem with children seeing porn.

They're entitled to their point of view, of course. But they can hardly pretend that, compared to mainstream thought on the subject that it is, in Wikipedia parlance, a "neutral" one. And Wikimedia Foundation can hardly expect to continue raising millions of dollars from mainstream organizations like the Sloan Foundation if it tolerates the likes of Möller in its top ranks.

One wonders if trustees of the Sloan Foundation, which recently donated millions to Wikipedia after Möller pitched them, share his views on pedophilia. BoyLinks finds his pro-pedophilia arguments agreeable, as does Martijn, a Dutch counterpart to the North American Man-Boy Love Association.

Möller himself appears to be growing aware of the need to whitewash his history. He recently removed a vile image of child pornography from his Humanist.de website. But evidence remains in Google's cache.

The notion of a person with such views shaping Wikipedia's articles on "child sexuality" is unsettling enough. What critics of Möller should find equally disturbing is what, exactly Möller hopes to accomplish in his official role at Wikipedia. He has long made no secret that, like founder Jimmy Wales, he, too, wants to profit from the work of Wikipedia's many volunteer editors. Since January, he's been drawing a paycheck from the Wikimedia Foundation. But I doubt his financial goals end there. If Wikipedia starts selling advertising, or otherwise profiting from its users' work, will Möller argue that the site's users were asking for it?

(Photo by Leonard Witt)

*Sloan Foundation to support Wikipedia's quality and growth initiatives*

''Institutional support of $3 million to Wikimedia Foundation over three years will support organizational growth and technical innovation''

March 25, 2008, New York/San Francisco - The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation today announced it is awarding $3 million of support to the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization which operates the world's largest and most popular encyclopedia, Wikipedia. The money will support Wikimedia's organizational development and help to increase the quality of its content and the reach of its services.

"We are extremely grateful for this support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation," said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. "Wikipedia and its sister projects have an enormous global impact, but the organization behind them has been operating on a shoestring: unable to pursue partnerships, execute projects, or even to effectively fundraise. This institutional support from Sloan will enable us to make progress on some key goals: increasing quality, broadening participation, and distributing free knowledge to people without Internet connectivity."

"We are delighted to support the Wikimedia Foundation and to help develop its organizational capacity and improve the quality of its flagship, Wikipedia," said Doron Weber, Sloan Program Director for Universal Access to Recorded Knowledge. "As the largest encyclopedia in human history and one of the top ten web sites in the world, Wikipedia represents a quantum leap in collecting human knowledge from diverse sources, organizing it without commercial or other bias, and making it freely available to people everywhere."

The funding will be received over three years, at 1 million dollars per year.

It comes at a critical time in the history of the Wikimedia Foundation, which has just relocated to San Francisco and upped its staff from 10 to 15. One of the projects which will be supported with the Sloan grant is a software feature called Flagged Revisions, which will allow experienced editors to publicly and visibly grade the quality status of articles — in effect, functioning as a kind of "nutrition labeling" for Wikipedia content. In coming years, Wikimedia also plans to significantly expand outreach events such as Wikipedia Academy, designed to increase Wikipedia's quality by teaching academics, older people, and other targeted groups how to contribute. Another goal is the distribution of educational content from Wikipedia and its sister projects in non-web-based formats such as DVDs and books, to reach people who are not online.

The Wikimedia projects are written, edited and maintained by a global community of thousands of volunteers. The Wikimedia Foundation, founded in 2003, has a staff of 15, and provides organizational support for the projects. It plans to grow its staff to 25 by 2010.