Erik Möller

Erik Möller (born 1979) is a freelance journalist who has edited Wikipedia since 2001 and who initiated the Wikinews project. A mid-2000s conference biography describes him as a journalist and author from Berlin, Germany, with a diploma in informatics. He presents the degree as Dipl.-Inform. (FH) and identifies himself as a software developer as well as a journalist. He lives in Berlin. He is director of programs at the Sovereign Tech Agency, responsible for strategy, operations and staff across the agency’s programs.

In April 1999 he and others started the church-critical weblog Der Humanist, and in August 2000 he started infoAnarchy.org, a site on file sharing that went on to publish more than 960 stories. In 2005 Heise published his book Die heimliche Medienrevolution – Wie Weblogs, Wikis und freie Software die Welt verändern in its Telepolis series, on weblogs, wikis and free software. A 2006 Tagesspiegel review quoted the book’s question of whether the internet could become dangerous to Bertelsmann, Time Warner and Rupert Murdoch, and described Möller’s “revolution” as independent online voices that, at their strongest, might replace the media of political elites as a primary news source.

From late 2001 he spent more of his time on Wikipedia, including policy writing, early project-wide votes and a December 2003 fundraiser, and from late 2002 he worked on the MediaWiki software and on administering Wikimedia servers. The Wikimedia Foundation credited him with thousands of edits and uploads and with helping to launch Wikinews and Wikimedia Commons. He sat on the Foundation’s Board of Trustees in 2006–2007, most recently as executive secretary, and resigned that seat when he joined the staff. Effective 10 January 2008 he became deputy director under executive director Sue Gardner, charged with technical strategy and with full delegated authority when she was absent, and he moved from Berlin to San Francisco. By 2014 he was also vice president of engineering and product development. He told The Guardian that year that Wikipedia Zero, inspired by Facebook Zero and built through deals with mobile operators, let an estimated 350 million subscribers read Wikipedia without data charges, and he called a visual editing environment without wiki markup—the VisualEditor—the single most important technical change then underway for widening who could contribute.

In August 2014, after volunteers resisted making the Foundation’s Media Viewer the default way to display images, heise online reported that Möller had a new “superprotect” status added so that a local administrator could not keep changing the relevant configuration page, and that he described local disabling of Wikipedia functions as unacceptable. An administrator then blocked his account on the German Wikipedia. On 13 April 2015 executive director Lila Tretikov told the Wikimedia-l mailing list that he would leave the Foundation on 30 April 2015 “to explore his passions beyond our walls,” thanking him for more than a decade as a volunteer, board member and staff leader. The Register, drawing on the Foundation’s Form 990 for the 2015–2016 financial year, reported that his calendar-2015 compensation included $208,306 in severance, the largest part of close to half a million dollars paid that year to outgoing managers.

He later spent seven years leading engineering at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, including the team behind the whistleblowing system SecureDrop; the project’s 2025 year-in-review said the organization had said goodbye to him as vice president of engineering. On his own site he describes spare-time open-source work under the name Permacommons, including lib.reviews, a nonprofit platform for reviews.

Early life and education

Little of Erik Möller's life before higher education appears in published sources. A biographical note to an interview with him for WebWatching, a project of young journalists and students of journalism at the Hamburg Institute for Journalism and Communication Studies (Hamburger Institut für Journalistik und Kommunikationswissenschaft), describes him as Jahrgang 1979—of the 1979 birth cohort—and as a freelance journalist who had recently published Die heimliche Medienrevolution. The note, written for an interview conducted by Ada von der Decken, gives no day or month of birth and no birthplace. A speaker biography for the Berlin conference series Wizards of OS calls him a journalist and author from Berlin, Germany. Neither that biography nor the interview note names his parents or any school he attended before a Fachhochschule.

Studies in Berlin

What is on record about his training in Informatik is a diploma from a Berlin Fachhochschule, a type of university of applied sciences. On his personal website, as archived on 20 June 2001, Möller wrote that he was occupied chiefly with his studies at the TFH Berlin, along with other projects; that page does not say when the course had begun. A capture of the same site from 7 December 2003 styles him Dipl.-Inform. (FH) and states that he had successfully completed those studies at the TFH Berlin in the summer of 2003, without naming the degree program or a thesis. The Wizards of OS biography uses the shorter form Dipl.-Inf. and places him in Berlin, but it does not name the college, so the institution and the completion date rest on his own account.

The Technische Fachhochschule Berlin was founded in 1971, when several engineering academies were merged into what is now a state university of applied sciences. It was renamed Beuth Hochschule für Technik Berlin in 2009 and, from the winter semester 2021/22, Berliner Hochschule für Technik; that name has been in effect since 1 October 2021.

The style he uses matches the professional title for a Fachhochschule degree in Informatik. A framework for the Diplom examination in that subject, adopted by the Hochschulrektorenkonferenz on 5 November 2002 and by the Kultusministerkonferenz on 13 December 2002, provides for the degree Diplom-Informatiker or Diplom-Informatikerin, abbreviated Dipl.-Inf., with the addition Fachhochschule (FH). The same framework sets a standard length of eight semesters, covering theoretical semesters, practical semesters, examinations, and a Diplomarbeit, subject to state law and each school's own examination rules. Those national rules were adopted only months before Möller said he had finished, and they describe the degree in general rather than the examination rules, enrollment date, or thesis of any particular student.

Journalism and early software work

Freelance reporting

Before joining the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation, Möller worked in Berlin as a freelance journalist and author. In a 2006 board-election statement he said journalism had been his trade for most of his adult life.

He wrote for Telepolis, published by the Heise Group. In 2000 it ran "Schöner tauschen," a technical survey of file-sharing programs: the 30 June installment on Napster and related clients, and the 8 August installment, "Führerlos," on networks without a central server, including Gnutella and Freenet. On 25 February 2001 Telepolis published the first part of "Treffen unter Gleichen," his report from O'Reilly Media's peer-to-peer conference in San Francisco on 14–16 February.

From 12 October 2001 Telepolis published "GNU/Linux und Open Source: Die Reformation zum Anfassen," opening with "Die Befreiung von Unix." A press notice of 4 February 2002, after the sixth and last part, said the series covered the history and supporters of Linux as free software, copy protection and software patents as threats to the open-source idea, Microsoft's position, and what it called extremist currents in the Linux community.

In May 2003 editor Florian Rötzer introduced the four-part series "Tanz der Gehirne," in which Möller examined wikis, the contents of Wikipedia, Everything2 and H2G2, and compared Wikipedia's free material with Encarta. Rötzer noted that Möller was an active Wikipedia participant and part of its open-source development team. A Wizards of OS speaker biography said he had also written more than 40 stories for Kuro5hin. His site lists pieces in c't, die tageszeitung, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Linux-Magazin, including "Klötzchendämmerung" (February 1998) on classic games and emulators. Heise's archive indexes that title, subtitled "Spieleklassiker und Emulatoren aus dem Internet-Fundus," in c't 5/1998 from page 156, without a displayed byline.

Hosting, peer-to-peer sites and OmegaWiki

The conference biography says that in April 1999 he and friends started Der Humanist, a German weblog critical of churches, and that in August 2000 he started infoAnarchy.org "as a response to the file sharing revolution," with, it said, more than 960 stories and a later wiki of about 2,000 pages. A 2013 capture shows a publicly editable collection on peer-to-peer protocols, file sharing, copyright and related civil liberties, placed in the public domain unless otherwise noted. The biography also says he kept "The Origins of Peace and Violence," an archive on research into violence, and moderated PEACELIST.

Hosting became paid work as well. On 30 August 2005, posting as Eloquence, he offered "a free wiki (using MediaWiki) hosted by myoo.de" as a prize in a Wikinews contest. The 2006 statement said he also earned money from content-management consulting and hosting, and had moved into project management for WiktionaryZ. In April 2006 WikiEducator, an educational wiki begun on a desktop at the University of Auckland, moved to a hosted server. Its chronology says Möller provided the hosting and the Commonwealth of Learning funded it.

WiktionaryZ stored lexical data in a relational database on MediaWiki, around concepts rather than one article per word. Möller co-authored the 2006 paper "An Online Ontology: WiktionaryZ," on a versioned, wiki-editable layer of biomedical concepts. On 12 December 2006 the project blog announced the name OmegaWiki, for "information about all words of all languages," and said the Dutch foundation Stichting Open Progress would host it because the experimental design was outside what the Wikimedia Foundation would run. The material was to stay under a combined GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons Attribution license.

In a 2007 board report he called the chief technology officer role at Open Progress his day job—structured wiki software on MediaWiki, notably OmegaWiki, and oversight of LiquidThreads—while he still hosted WikiEducator. LiquidThreads is a threaded discussion extension. Documentation credits the first version to David McCabe, from the 2006 Google Summer of Code, then sponsored by the Commonwealth of Learning and Wikia; Andrew Garrett reworked it at the Foundation from May 2009. Announcing Möller as deputy director on 9 January 2008, the Foundation said that as chief technology officer he had managed a decentralized team implementing OmegaWiki, hosted communities including WikiEducator.org, and project-managed other wiki software, including LiquidThreads. iTWire the same day also called him Open Progress's recent chief technology officer.

Die heimliche Medienrevolution

Argument and contents

Die heimliche Medienrevolution: Wie Weblogs, Wikis und freie Software die Welt verändern is Erik Möller's German book on blogs, wikis and free software. On his own site he describes it as a history of media used as instruments of power, set against what he calls the emancipatory potential of the internet, where decentralized projects such as Wikipedia and open-source software could democratize knowledge.

The blurb held by the German National Library puts the publisher's case in similar terms. It opens with "Medien bedeuten Macht" and asks whether the internet could threaten Bertelsmann, Time Warner and Rupert Murdoch. It presents freely modifiable software as the basis of new media forms, weblogs as independent voices, financing experiments meant to support journalism, and volunteer works such as Wikipedia.

The 2006 edition has four chapters. "Meme in Bewegung" runs from writing, censorship and radio through media proprietors and hypertext to the German web. "Die Befreiung des Codes" treats GNU and GNU/Linux, including Debian, and the legal and economic conflicts around free and open-source software. "Die Blogosphäre" discusses Slashdot, Indymedia, hoaxes, whether blogs are journalism, a section titled "Der Dean-Effekt," podcasting and a how-to for a collaborative weblog.

Editions and reception

Telepolis, published by the Heise Group, announced the book on 30 November 2004 as a Heise title produced with dpunkt.verlag, at 19 euros, ISBN 3-936931-16-X. The national bibliography records the first edition as a 2005 Heise paperback from Hanover in the Telepolis series: 219 illustrated pages, ISBNs 3-936931-16-X and 978-3-936931-16-7. The second, expanded and updated edition is catalogued as Heise, Hanover, 2006, in that series, with XV and 231 illustrated pages and ISBNs 3-936931-36-4 and 978-3-936931-36-5, still at 19 euros.

On 14 March 2006 netzpolitik.org reported that, with the publisher's consent, Möller had released the first edition under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence and the GNU Free Documentation License, as a PDF and as a word-processor file. The notice specified the first edition.

Reviews were divided. Perlentaucher's note on Wolfgang Krischke's 29 July 2005 review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung calls an excess of detail the main charge, while noting useful tips and links. Krischke, in that account, found the internet treated only as a platform for a future just and democratic world society, argued that this flattened the history, and regretted that a Wikipedia veteran shared little insider knowledge while praising transparency.

Holger Wenk, in the ver.di magazine Menschen Machen Medien (15 May 2005), recommended the book to journalists seeking a concrete account of free software, weblogs and wikis. He wrote that commercial media, email and commerce were largely missing, that the web was not yet a mass medium, and that the text did not show how Linux, weblogs or Wikimedia projects would check injustice, war or human-rights abuses better than Microsoft, Spiegel Online or conventional encyclopedias. He also objected to asking programmers and journalists to give away their work. Without that "ideological ballast," he still called the 2005 Heise edition, 219 pages at 19 euros, worth reading.

Der Tagesspiegel reviewed the book on 18 April 2006. Achim Fehrenbach's article, headlined "Motoren der Meinungsfreiheit," opens by quoting Möller's question whether the internet could threaten Bertelsmann, Time Warner and Rupert Murdoch.

Wikimedia volunteering

Editor and developer

Möller was editing Wikipedia by late 2001 as Eloquence, a name a foundation mailing-list post also paired with the alias Xirzon. A Wizards of OS speaker biography said he helped write project policies, contributed to hundreds of articles, organized early project-wide votes, and from late 2002 worked on the software and on server administration. On 20 July 2003 he announced an international logo contest, due to close on 20 August, and asked each language edition to link it from its main page.

A MediaWiki commit dated 1 July 2003 records him adding himself to the software’s credits. In August 2003 Daniel Mayer quoted a note in which Möller said he would rename the software from “Phase III” to MediaWiki, a name Mayer had suggested because it fitted “Wikimedia” and did not appear to be in use. A 2008 Wikimedia Foundation announcement described him as an editor of its projects since 2001 who had made thousands of edits and uploads and had contributed to the software.

The same biography credited him with organizing the first large fundraising drive, in December 2003. On 1 January 2004 Daniel Mayer, newly able to see the foundation’s PayPal account, wrote that about US$4,200 was on hand when Jimmy Wales appealed on 28 December, and that 1,483 PayPal donations by 31 December, mostly under US$20, had brought the recorded total to about US$32,000.

Wikinews and Wikimedia Commons

On 19 March 2004 Möller proposed on wikipedia-l a shared repository at commons.wikimedia.org, combining an existing project, Project Sourceberg, with what he called Wikimedia Commons. It would hold images, public-domain texts, other freely licensed documents, and music or artwork; fair-use files would be excluded, and a file would qualify if it was useful to at least one Wikimedia project. Other wikis would embed those files rather than store copies. On 7 September 2004 Angela Beesley announced that a database was available at that address and thanked Tim Starling for creating it.

On 10 October 2004 he asked the foundation to open Wikinews in the major Wikimedia languages at wikinews.org, a domain he had registered and pointed at Wikimedia’s name servers. He defined it as a place to summarize outside news and to publish original, neutral reporting, with policy settled on the live site as it was on Commons. Journalism.co.uk reported on 15 December that the site had officially launched in early December with 770 registered users. It called Möller the founder and quoted him comparing the project to early Linux and saying that reporting required money for travel, communication, and source material, which he hoped small donations would cover. On 10 February 2005 The New York Times said Wikinews had opened in December and that Möller, “a technology journalist in Berlin,” had drafted the original proposal. He told the paper that short-lived articles gave contributors less sense of building a permanent store of knowledge than Wikipedia did. The paper reported more than 500 articles in the first two months. In a WebWatching interview he said visible edits and documented original reporting mattered more to him than a claim of inherent credibility, and he doubted the foundation would pay for reporting. In July 2005 a foundation-list complaint accused the English Wikinews administrator Eloquence of banning other administrators; it was not a foundation finding.

Chief research officer

On 26 May 2005 Wales appointed several volunteer officers as board contacts, with no special authority in community groups and with tasks still undefined. The list, subject to acceptance, included Brion Vibber as chief technical officer and Möller as chief research officer. Möller accepted the same day and asked the other trustees to confirm that the titles were official. He said the post should accompany software development rather than direct it: organizing meetings, writing reports, and linking the board, researchers, and editors. He planned to shift most of his Wikimedia work toward it. On 7 June he reported that 25 people had met the day before as a Wikimedia Research Team and had agreed it would be a network of groups on the projects’ sociology, MediaWiki tasks, and content analysis. He signed as chief research officer and proposed calling the group a network.

He resigned on 17 August 2005. He wrote to the board and the foundation list that personal differences and a dispute over scope had ended useful collaboration: he had wanted to coordinate outside developers and institutions, comparing MediaWiki to the Linux kernel for free content, and to answer offers of help himself, but the board required others to make agreements first. He cited a loss of trust, including public disagreements with the trustee Anthere and Wales’s view of him as a rival for leadership. He said he would leave the research network, stop a Commons upload bot, drop list moderation, and largely quit IRC and most lists except wikitech-l.

Definition of Free Cultural Works

Drafting

Erik Möller began the Definition of Free Cultural Works in 2006 to clarify "free content" for the Wikimedia Foundation projects, inspired by the Free Software Foundation's definition of free software. Early comments came from Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons, and Angela Beesley, then a Foundation board member and a Wikia vice president; Benjamin Mako Hill, who had argued for a "standard of freedom," joined before public editing as a co-initiator, and open editing was announced on 1 May 2006. Version 1.0, released on 14 February 2007, names Hill, a Debian developer, and Möller as initiators, and Beesley, Creative Commons general counsel Mia Garlick, and Elizabeth Stark of the Free Culture student movement as moderators, after wiki discussion among Wikipedia users, open-source hackers, artists, scientists, and lawyers.

The text is not a license but a test of whether a license or a work is free. A license must grant four freedoms without limitation: to use and perform the work for any purpose, with no political or religious exception; to study it and apply the information, including by reverse engineering; to redistribute copies, including by sale, with no limit on quantity, recipient, or place; and to distribute modified versions for any purpose. Attribution, copyleft ("symmetric collaboration"), and terms that protect the freedoms are allowed. A work is free only if that legal status applies, source data and a free-format copy are available, and no technical measure or other legal limit, such as a patent, contract, or privacy right, blocks the freedoms.

The free-software definition requires freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve a program, "free" as liberty rather than price. The Open Knowledge Foundation's Open Knowledge Definition, later the Open Definition, reached version 1.0 in September 2006, having been in draft since the summer of 2005; Rufus Pollock wrote that its principles were "almost entirely identical" and that a merger had been discussed. Version 2.1 equates "open" with "free" or "libre" in the free-software definition and the Definition of Free Cultural Works, traces its criteria to the Open Source Definition and the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and adds reasonable-cost access and machine-readable form.

Adoption

On 23 March 2007 the Foundation's Board of Trustees, with seven votes in favor, required projects to host only material under a license meeting version 1.0, or otherwise recognized as free under the definition. Except on Wikimedia Commons, a project may adopt a narrow exemption doctrine policy for limited non-free media, machine-readably identified and replaced when a free file serves the same educational purpose. On 20 February 2008 Mike Linksvayer wrote that Creative Commons had added a seal to the Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons licenses because they meet the definition, that public-domain status also qualifies, and that NonCommercial and NoDerivatives terms do not, because they discriminate among uses. He noted that Wikimedia sites already used the definition and that Wikipedia was considering a move to Attribution-ShareAlike. The stable text is now version 1.1, which the site's versioning rules treat as a minor release that does not change which licenses qualify, while the 2007 resolution still cites version 1.0.

Board of Trustees

Election and executive secretary

In July 2006 Angela Beesley left the Wikimedia Foundation board after disagreements over the foundation's work, and the trustees called a special election for the rest of her term. From 1 to 22 September, editors who had registered by the beginning of May and had made more than 400 contributions could vote, and under the approval rules each voter could support any number of the 17 candidates. Officials reported 2,347 valid ballots. Erik Möller, also known as Eloquence or Xirzon, was supported on 987 of them (42 percent), ahead of Kathleen Walsh with 702 (30 percent) and Oscar van Dillen with 648 (28 percent). On 25 September the board accepted the tally and resolved to invite him to join on 26 September for a term ending 18 July 2007, with membership beginning only when he accepted and with Beesley leaving then.

On 21 October 2006 the board unanimously elected officers for at most one year: Florence Devouard as chair, Tim Shell as vice-chair, Michael Davis as treasurer, and Möller as executive secretary, while Jimmy Wales became chairman emeritus. Heise online, reporting that slate, wrote that the election was held in Frankfurt, where Wikimedia Deutschland had opened an office that month.

The June–July 2007 election, again by approval voting, drew 4,170 valid ballots. Möller placed first with 1,671 votes, Walsh second with 1,427, and Frieda Brioschi third with 1,254. A resolution of 12 July, passed with six votes in favor and Möller abstaining, stated that he would remain a trustee until 14 July 2009. On 7 October the board reappointed him executive secretary from 21 October 2007 to 21 October 2008: five trustees approved, Möller abstained, and Davis was absent.

From trustee to deputy director

On 17 December 2007 (UTC), Devouard told the foundation's public mailing list that Möller had resigned two days earlier in order to reorient his activities, and that the seat would be filled by appointment until the next elections. The note did not name a staff post. The next day executive director Sue Gardner announced that he would become deputy director, start on 10 January 2008 at the new San Francisco headquarters, and report to her, and she described the resignation as part of that move onto the staff. She wrote that chief technical officer Brion Vibber would report to Möller, that she would delegate projects to him, and that he would act for her when she was unavailable and help orient employees in the new office.

A press release datelined St. Petersburg, Florida, on 9 January 2008 confirmed the appointment effective the next day. It said he would lead technical strategy and specific initiatives, with full delegated authority in the executive director's absence, but it did not repeat the line of report for Vibber. It also said he would move from Berlin to San Francisco as the foundation left St. Petersburg, with the new headquarters fully established on 1 February 2008. Gardner was quoted as saying that, since arriving in June, she had been impressed by his dedication and his advocacy for Wikimedia. On 2 January, heise online had reported that Möller, identified there as a Berlin journalist, was leaving the board for the foundation office as day-to-day work shifted toward paid staff.

Leadership at the Wikimedia Foundation

Engineering and product

The Wikimedia Foundation appointed Möller deputy director effective 10 January 2008. Executive director Sue Gardner said that since the previous June she had been impressed by his dedication and "evangelism on behalf of Wikimedia." He was to lead technical strategy, with full authority in her absence, and he left the board to move from Berlin to San Francisco as headquarters left St. Petersburg, Florida.

In March 2008 the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded $3 million over three years, $1 million a year, for sustainability, quality, and participation. Gardner credited a January presentation that followed his seat on the Encyclopedia of Life council, a project Sloan also funded. "Without Erik, this would not have happened," she told the foundation mailing list. The announcement said staff had grown from 10 to 15, with a plan for 25 by 2010, and cited the grant for article-quality tools, outreach, and offline copies.

He later ran engineering and product together. In November 2013 he wrote that the department had grown in about two and a half years from roughly 35 people to more than 100, and that he wanted a separate vice president of engineering so he could focus on product. He named VisualEditor and mobile contribution tools among the work. At FOSDEM in February 2014 he said the technology department was "about 100 staff nowadays." That August The Guardian called him deputy director and vice president of engineering and product development, number two to executive director Lila Tretikov, and quoted him calling Wikipedia, in some respects, "a website following 20th century paradigms."

Mobile access, Wikipedia Zero and VisualEditor

Wikipedia Zero, launched in 2012 on the model of Facebook Zero, had operators waive data charges for Wikipedia, starting in Malaysia. Möller told The Guardian in August 2014 that an estimated 350 million subscribers were eligible, including in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Saudi Arabia. "By working with mobile operators, we can enable anyone to read and edit for free," he said, citing phone apps where mobile links outran fixed broadband. On 1 August he wrote of about 350 million people in 29 countries and more than 65 million free page views a month. He said the foundation supported net neutrality against commercial fast lanes, and described Wikipedia Zero as unpaid, unbundled, non-exclusive, and open to other public-interest sites. Access Now answered on 8 August that Zero "clearly violates net neutrality and is an attack on the future of the open internet," arguing that the trademark functioned as payment.

He told The Guardian that markup deterred new editors and that "a new visual editing environment without markup" was "the single most important technical change that's under way." The Register reported on 1 August 2013 that, after a December beta, VisualEditor had become the default for new users and that editors called it buggy, slow, and liable to discard work. The paper said 442 German Wikipedia voters, 87.7 percent, wanted it made opt-in, against 29 votes (5.8 percent), and placed "ultimate responsibility for the car crash" on Möller.

The 2010 Commons reports

In early April 2010 Larry Sanger, a Wikipedia co-founder who had left in 2002, wrote to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about images on Wikimedia Commons, in a report of alleged child pornography. The BBC said he alleged the organization was "knowingly distributing child pornography," then clarified that he did not mean photographs of children but "obscene visual representations of the abuse of children," including drawings and sculpture. On 27 April Fox News headlined the claim "Wikipedia Distributing Child Porn, Co-Founder Tells FBI." Sanger cited two categories he said broke a federal obscenity statute: "Pedophilia," which Fox described as 25 to 30 explicit drawings of children in sexual acts, and "Lolicon," described as similarly explicit cartoons. He said failing to report such renderings was itself an offense. Fox wrote that the FBI would not say whether it was investigating.

The same article reported Sanger's description of Möller as "well known for his views in defense of pedophilia." It quoted a 2001 Kuro5hin post, "Pleasure, Affection, Cause and Effect": "What is my position on pedophilia, then? It's really simple. If the child doesn't want it, is neutral or ambiguous, it's inappropriate." Fox said Valleywag had raised the writings in May 2008, and attributed to Möller a Wikipedia sentence that children can feel sexual pleasure before they can reproduce.

On 28 April the foundation called the story a smear of "serious falsehoods" taken "grossly out of context." Jay Walsh wrote that Möller's job had wrongly made him a target, called him "a principled and valued employee," and said the foundation obeys the law, had not been contacted by the FBI or any other agency, and that volunteers remove illegal material when identified. Fox then quoted Möller: "I do not defend nor support acts of sexual violence against children and have never defended pedophilia in any way." He said he had defended "children of comparable age" in "consensual, harmless" interactions, including "playing doctor" and safe sex among teenagers, and that children cannot consent to sex with pedophiles. He called the image claim false and "related largely to some historic early 20th century drawings," which he said counsel found did not violate federal law.

Fox also questioned donors, including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Jimmy Wales backed deletion of images "of little or no educational value but which appeal solely to prurient interests"; hundreds of files were removed, some later restored as educational, and Wales gave up some founder permissions on Commons after volunteers called the deletions undemocratic. General counsel Mike Godwin told The Guardian that talk of chaos was "simply nonsense" and called Fox's series a "self-congratulatory anti-porn-on-the-Internet campaign."

Media Viewer and superprotect

Rollout and community votes

In early June 2014 the Wikimedia Foundation made Media Viewer, a replacement for Wikipedia's image view, the default on the German Wikipedia. It showed pictures much larger, added a lightbox, and compressed license notices. Critics said the version in production was unfinished: description texts were hidden, very large files were not fully shown, and experienced editors were disadvantaged. A Meinungsbild found more than 70 percent of participants favoring an opt-in viewer, visible only to people who chose it. Such polls are not formal democracy, but they usually settle disputes and are treated as binding. The Foundation noted the result and refused to apply it. Project manager Fabrice Florin said readers would struggle to find and turn back on a viewer that was off by default, while experienced authors could disable it themselves. An English Wikipedia poll with fewer than 100 voters was set aside as unrepresentative. Spokeswoman Katherine Maher said the Foundation runs the sites for hundreds of millions of users and uses many sources in choosing features. Staff cited a survey of more than 15,000 people in which 56 percent called the viewer useful; 35 percent of the most active users rated the update favorably.

Superprotect

A volunteer administrator then tried to switch the feature off with JavaScript. heise online reported that the script went beyond the poll, which had wanted the viewer left available to anyone who asked for it. On 10 August 2014 the Foundation added a MediaWiki right, superprotect, held by its global staff group, so a page could be locked even against local administrators. Applied the same day to the German Wikipedia's MediaWiki:Common.js, it kept Media Viewer on. Deputy director Erik Möller said local administrators must not disable Wikipedia functions, and that the Foundation was prepared to remove administrator rights if necessary. German Wikipedia administrators then blocked his account. The Register reported a one-month suspension and called the episode a "class war," with unpaid volunteers overridden by paid staff.

The board backed Möller. Chair Jan-Bart de Vreede wrote that a top-five website needed matching rules, promised better communication, and would not yield now. Executive director Lila Tretikov said the German lock would be lifted only if Media Viewer stayed on. "We will not remove the Media Viewer," she wrote: it had been in production for months, and withdrawing it would add problems and confusion. A week-long poll found 87 percent of 767 participants wanting superprotect abolished at once and without conditions. Möller proposed 30 days of talks, on the Foundation's existing course, about improvements. He rejected the idea that the Foundation exists only to carry out community wishes. De Vreede wrote that the projects must act as one community, not a thousand, and could not follow a few hundred people instead of processes serving millions. He suggested critics take a temporary break.

On 19 August 2014 volunteers published an open letter. Signatories disagreed about Media Viewer and about whether superprotect should exist, but they asked the Foundation to unlock the German script page and to let local projects, including the German and English Wikipedias and Wikimedia Commons, set the default for logged-in and logged-out readers. The letter said the right, for the first time, reserved editing for unelected staff, and pointed to protests that included resigned permissions and talk of a fork. By 9 September, 817 signatures plus 80 on Change.org had been delivered; the second request was still unmet. In June 2017 The Register, writing critically about severance pay, said Möller had granted himself "superpowers" to shut volunteers out and that the Foundation ignored a letter endorsed by 1,000 volunteers.

Partial retreat

On 27 August 2014 the Foundation removed superprotect from the German configuration page. The right, and Media Viewer as the default, stayed. Möller and Tretikov said the tool had unintentionally implied distrust, which they denied, and that this was why the page was unlocked. They made no further concession on either point. A consultation until 9 September collected views on essential functions, quick fixes, and optional improvements, and the Foundation highlighted license-display repairs already made. It said that if agreed critical problems could not be fixed soon, it would temporarily make the feature a global opt-in beta. heise online noted that several hundred core contributors had taken part, a large number for Wikipedia, while the Foundation reserved decisions for more than 430 million readers. The JavaScript disablement was not restored. Möller gave up his English Wikipedia administrator role, and an English Wikipedia arbitration case was paused for 60 days.

On 5 November 2015 the Foundation removed the right from its servers. Engineering community manager Quim Gil wrote that it had not been used to settle a dispute since Media Viewer, and that earlier review should make a staff-only lock unnecessary. Tretikov said superprotect had "set up a precedent of mistrust" and that dropping it was meant to restore work as one community. The August 2014 settlement had not granted the letter's demand that each project choose the default: the viewer stayed on, and the right lasted more than a year.

Departure from the Foundation

Announcement

On 13 April 2015, Lila Tretikov, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, told the Wikimedia-l mailing list that Erik Möller would leave on 30 April. She wrote that he had told her the week before it was time "to explore his passions beyond our walls." She thanked him for more than a decade as a volunteer, a board member, and a Foundation leader, and called him her "personal guide" in her first months as executive director.

Möller replied the same day. He wrote that since January 2008 he had "worn many hats" on staff and that, in the six years before that, he had been a Wikipedian, a MediaWiki developer, and a trustee, having joined Wikipedia at 22.

He said it was "time now for me to do something different and new." As the leadership team coalesced under Tretikov, he wanted to "open up space for the organization to learn and explore anew" and to work outside his usual areas, including federated collaboration and making patterns of ethics, policy, and self-governance reusable. He said he would remain full-time through April and available afterward for institutional memory, and he signed as vice president of product and strategy.

Reported compensation

The Foundation's Form 990 for the fiscal year 1 July 2015 to 30 June 2016 reports pay for officers and the highest-paid employees for calendar year 2015. Part VII listed Möller, a former vice president of product, with $302,046 in reportable compensation and $2,863 in other compensation. Schedule J split the reportable amount into $93,344 of base compensation and $208,702 of other reportable compensation, with the $2,863 recorded as nontaxable benefits. A note stated that he received $208,306 in severance in 2015, and that D. Sicore, former vice president of engineering, received $100,000.

On 7 June 2017 Andreas Kolbe wrote in The Register that outgoing managers had received close to half a million dollars in severance, and he called Möller's $208,306 the largest share, a "golden handshake." He reported Sicore's severance as $100,000 and his total 2015 compensation as $292,258, matching the Schedule J total of base pay, other reportable compensation, and benefits, and contrasted the sums with donor funding and volunteer-written sites. A message sent on 24 May 2017 on behalf of chief financial officer Jaime Villagomez said severance was set case by case according to tenure and that the Foundation would not comment on "the specific nature of the severance payments or circumstances which may be related to them."

Later work

Freedom of the Press Foundation and SecureDrop

After his years as deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco, Erik Möller worked at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which builds open-source technology for journalists and whistleblowers. The foundation’s December 2018 annual report listed him as principal project manager, on a staff page that also named SecureDrop’s lead developer, and its 2019 impact report used the same title. On 19 December 2025 the foundation wrote that it had said goodbye that year to its previous vice president of engineering, Erik Möller, “after seven years leading the team,” and that Jennifer Helsby had rejoined as chief technology officer while John Skinner, the new engineering manager, led the SecureDrop team.

SecureDrop was already a newsroom tool before he joined. In 2011 Kevin Poulsen, then an editor at Wired, asked Aaron Swartz to write an open-source anonymous inbox for journalists and sources; Swartz agreed on the condition that the code be freely licensed, and the system, called DeadDrop, was far enough along by December 2012 for a review organized with the security specialist James Dolan. The New Yorker published the first instance, under the name Strongbox, on 14 May 2013, four months after Swartz’s death. In October 2013 the Freedom of the Press Foundation took over development, renamed the software SecureDrop, and hired Dolan to maintain it and help newsrooms install it, while describing it as safer than ordinary channels but not fully secure.

A news organization runs the system on servers it owns. Sources connect through Tor; the project says the design avoids a third-party intermediary and does not log a source’s IP address. Counts published by the foundation have varied. The 2018 report said SecureDrop was used by more than 75 media organizations, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, The New Yorker, The Intercept, USA Today, CBC, and The Guardian. The 2019 report said over 65 major news organizations, including the Times, the Post, NBC News, and ProPublica. The project’s overview page later states that it is used at over 60 news organizations worldwide, again naming the Times, the Post, ProPublica, The Globe and Mail, and The Intercept. The foundation does not charge for the software.

Sovereign Tech Agency and personal projects

Möller has said that he then decided to move back to Germany and that he has been director of programs at the Sovereign Tech Agency since April 2026. His website states that he lives in Berlin.

The agency, Sovereign Tech Agency GmbH, is a subsidiary of SPRIND and says it is financed by the Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation. It was announced on 4 November 2024 as the corporate home of the Sovereign Tech Fund, a program begun in October 2022 inside SPRIND—the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation—to pay for work on foundational open-source software in the public interest. Heise described the same step as the creation of a state-owned company affiliated with SPRIND, and reported that €23.5 million had already gone to 60 technology projects, with funding planned to rise to €29 million in the 2025 federal budget. The agency’s legal notice gives its seat as Gartenstraße 7, 10115 Berlin, and names Luisa von Beust as managing director. Programs it lists include the Sovereign Tech Fund, Sovereign Tech Resilience, a fellowship for maintainers, Sovereign Tech Standards, and Sovereign Tech Challenge.

On that team page Möller, with he/him pronouns, is director of programs, “responsible for the overall strategy, operations, and staff for all Sovereign Tech Agency programs.” In the August 2026 interview he described the fund as spending on components used globally, not only on projects in Germany, with the agency both receiving applications and approaching maintainers itself.

Apart from that post, his site says that in his free time he works on open-source projects under Permacommons, including lib.reviews. Permacommons describes itself as building a permanent home for shared resources maintained with AI assistance, and its FAQ names lib.reviews, a terminal chatbot called Chabeau, and wiki software called AGPWiki as current projects. lib.reviews describes itself as a free, open, and not-for-profit platform for reviews of anything, in any language.