Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-06-18/News and notes
With paid advocacy in its sights, the Wikimedia Foundation amends their terms of use
The Wikimedia Foundation has amended its terms of use to ban editing for pay without disclosing an employer or affiliation on any of its websites—including all Wikipedias and sister projects. The broad scope of these changes, which potentially go beyond regulating only paid advocacy, will force the WMF to selectively enforce them to avoid ensnaring well-meaning editors.
The new clause, "Paid contributions without disclosure", went into effect immediately. It is placed under "refraining from certain activities" and reads, in full:
“ | These Terms of Use prohibit engaging in deceptive activities, including misrepresentation of affiliation, impersonation, and fraud. As part of these obligations, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation. You must make that disclosure in at least one of the following ways:
A Wikimedia Project community may adopt an alternative paid contribution disclosure policy. If a Project adopts an alternative disclosure policy, you may comply with that policy instead of the requirements in this section when contributing to that Project. An alternative paid contribution policy will only supersede these requirements if it is approved by the relevant Project community and listed in the alternative disclosure policy page. For more information, please read our FAQ on disclosure of paid contributions. |
” |
The only major difference from the originally proposed amendment is an opt-out clause, which came about in an extensive community discussion. It allows WMF projects to adopt an alternative disclosure policy if there is clear community consensus for it, similar to the licensing policy's exemption doctrine policy for fair-use content. The WMF-led vote was inspired in part by English Wikipedia editor Martinp. WMF legal counsel Stephen LaPorte stated that the goal was to create a "simple" process when "a project has consensus on a better alternative."
The language of this paragraph is already being put to use by Wikimedia Commons, whose users are currently voting in large numbers to void the effect of the default rule on the site. According to the proposer, the "very special nature" of the Commons means that they need to "adopt a policy that allows paid contributions without any disclosure whatsoever. / ... content submitted by users who receive compensation for it ... is often of excellent quality and educational value."Aside from this single clause, the broadness of the overall terms-of-use update has survived from the opening proposal—the WMF's first major move against paid editing—rather than just paid advocacy. Under the English Wikipedia's policies, paid advocacy occurs when someone is "paid to promote something or someone on Wikipedia". Paid editing encompasses all of that and more, being broadly defined as "accepting money to edit Wikipedia", but this is not always a negative action: "transparency and neutrality are key".
Objections to the amendment have been raised on the talk page designated to discussing it. Andy Mabbett commented that "If I am paid to deliver that training, and make edits during it, such as posting welcome templates, or fixing formatting errors in trainees' edits to articles, I now have to declare that I've been employed to do so. I even have to declare if I'm simply provided with lunch ("an exchange of money, goods, or services"; no exceptions are listed.) Ditto an editathon participant who is given a copy of the GLAM's guidebook, or a free pass to an attraction for which there is usually a charge." Luis Villa, the WMF's deputy general counsel, replied: "the purpose of the terms is not to catch users who make occasional good-faith mistakes; we think most users, most of the time, will do the right thing. At the same time, since this is a general terms of use, we can’t lay out every potential case ahead of time."
Editors have also raised objections to altering the Wikimedia-wide terms of use to address what they see as an English-Wikipedia-specific problem. The Commons proposal directly states that "the issue of paid contributions isn't ... as touchy for us as it is on (the English) Wikipedia", since "we do not, for instance, require our content to be neutral, and highly value original works created by our own users." On the Wikimedia-l mailing list, Risker skewered the change:
“ | I'm so very disappointed in the Board and the WMF for this TOU amendment, which was obviously written to quell concerns about English Wikipedia, with extremely little consideration of any other project. Now projects must formally exempt practices that are perfectly acceptable to them: Commons in particular, where professionals (who link to their personal for-profit websites in their file descriptions) contribute a great deal of the highest quality work; MediaWiki and all its developer-related sites, where a large number of our best non-staff developers are financially supported by other organizations; Wikidata, which is pure data and no benefit can be derived; Wikisource, where no benefit can be derived; and a multitude of Wikipedias that have openly welcomed editors who receive financial support or are paid by various organizations without any issue whatsoever. It is extremely unlikely that it will ever be enforced in the vast majority of WMF projects. | ” |
These Wikipedias include the fourth-largest and fast-growing Swedish Wikipedia.
It appears that the WMF is crafting the amendment in broad terms to avoid another Wiki-PR situation, in which a public relations company created, edited, or maintained several thousand Wikipedia articles for paying clients using a sophisticated array of concealed user accounts. While the WMF insisted that Wiki-PR had breached the Foundation's terms of use (and Wiki-PR privately admitted to doing so), this relied on the "engaging in false statements, impersonation, or fraud" clause, specifically referring to part of the third bullet-point: "misrepresenting your affiliation with any individual or entity, or using the username of another user with the intent to deceive". It does not directly refer to paid editing or advocacy.
The wide scope of this amendment will cover a large number of good-faith editors—but it also grants the WMF's legal team a weapon that they will selectively enforce against bad-faith actors, such as the former Wiki-PR.
In brief
- Wikipedia Library expands with new JSTOR accounts, others: Multiple new account signups for Wikimedia content creators have opened up courtesy of The Wikipedia Library. Chief among these is an expansion in the JSTOR program, adding an additional 400 accounts. Interest in the program is at (as of publishing time) 367 accounts, with requests dating to 2012, when a partnership providing 100 accounts was first announced. Credo Reference has given an extra 200 accounts. New entries to the Library include the British Newspaper Archive, which has digitized a large number of British and Irish newspapers from the 18th through early 20th century, and Keesings World News Archives, which has in-house summaries of many of the world's events since 1931. The Library is also offering a new intern position, where students will be hired by partner libraries to create content with the resources available to them at the partner.
- Wikimedia engineering report: The May 2014 engineering report from the Wikimedia Foundation has been published in summary, wiki, and blog forms.
- April board minutes: The WMF has published the minutes of the the Board of Trustees meeting held on 25 April 2014. Highlights include an investment policy (comprising three tiers: an operating fund, a short-term reserve fund, and a long-term reserve fund), along with the previously announced approvals of the privacy policy and paid contributions amendment to the terms of use.
- Tablet design gets a makeover: The WMF's mobile team has released a new design for tablet users. Based on their mobile design, the new look has received criticism on the blog post announcing the change.
- Think Like a Freak: The authors of the popular Freakonomics have lauded Wikipedia in their new work Think Like a Freak, p. 215: "Let's also raise a glass to Wikipedia. It has improved immeasurably over the years that we have been writing books; it is extraordinarily valuable as a first stop to discover primary sources on nearly any topic. Thanks to all those who have contributed to it intellectually, financially, or otherwise."
- ICANN: Top Level Design, LLC, with the support of the WMF, is proposing that two-letter domains for .wiki be released for linking to Wikipedia. .wiki is part of the expansion in generic top-level domains on the Internet, but ICANN has decided to initially withhold xx.wiki addresses. Top Level Design is asking ICANN to release the 179 two-letter language identifiers used by the various-language Wikipedias to the WMF, so that es.wiki will redirect to the Spanish Wikipedia, vi.wiki to the Vietnamese, and so on.
Discuss this story
In the recent furore over the Yank Barry page, it is noticeable that a number of single purpose accounts (SPAs) appeared, at first blush, solely to puff the subject of the article. These accounts are of course blocked. Given that a number of editors are potentially subject to suit by Barry, it would be interesting to see how the new policy will help identify if these SPAs were paid advocates, and if so whether this evidence can be usefully employed in defending the ideals of the community. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 01:34, 22 June 2014 (UTC).
TLD .wiki
One disadvantage of assigning the top-level domain ".wiki" specifically to Wikipedia is that it could worsen public confusion between "wiki" and "Wikipedia". Please see User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 99#Wikipedia, a wiki (February and March 2012).
—Wavelength (talk) 02:31, 22 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
fr:wikt:wiki/piano
. For https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano (), there can befr:w:wiki/Piano
. A table of Wikimedia wikis (with Wikimedia project codes and ISO 639 language codes) is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix. There can still be many web addresses available on .wiki for non-MediaWiki wikis, but the Wikimedia Foundation would need to think carefully about what to reserve for possible future expansion (in Wikimedia projects and in languages).POV, but paid, editors
I notice that the new conditions on paid advocacy and paid editors do not explicitly state conditions on their adherence to the Neutral Point of View. How is this condition to be integrated with paid advocacy. It goes without saying that the moral strength derived from editors who work for their love of the subject will not mix well with a community of paid advocates unless some conditions or rules of engagement are well known to all to those who edit. For those who read only, it's going to be all the same to them. How are the rules for objective contributors going to mix with this new policy? Those who edit for money will initially be riding on the goodwill created in the first 10 years of this encyclopedia. Ill-thought-through terms and conditions will damage the encyclopedia.
There is a precedent: employees of Wikimedia Foundation log-on with user names + (WMF). Are there going to be safeguards like this precedent? --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 03:08, 22 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I'm fine with the disclosing rule. Paid editors just have to add a message in their user page.
Now, the rule doesn't really prohibit paid advocacy, and that's an issue. --NaBUru38 (talk) 14:07, 24 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
No disclosure to the reader
While this move towards transparency is welcome, it kind of misses the point. We all know that many Wikipedia articles on minor companies and organisations are largely authored by principals, employees and agents of said companies and organisations. Per the German frankincense case (see Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-11-12/News_and_notes), EU (and possibly even US) law requires disclosure to the reader, who is after all – nominally at least – the beneficiary of the Foundation's charitable purpose. Did anyone ask readers whether they would like to know whether the articles they are reading are authored by their subjects (or their competitors or disgruntled employees, for that matter)?
The reader is as much in the dark about the provenance of Wikipedia's articles as ever. In this sense, Wikipedia is not transparent, but remarkably opaque. Andreas JN466 08:47, 22 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Andreas is correct that the reader must be informed on the article page when a disclosure is necessary. For paid editors it is necessary for both the EU, and in the US, if knowledge that the information is from a paid endorser (editor) might affect his or her purchase decisions.
But he is absolutely incorrect if he thinks a little dollar sign at the top of the article is going to inform the reader of this. The FTC says:
I think we're in the situation that a clear and conspicuous disclosure is required, but not possible, so no ads (paid edits from companies) are allowed. Smallbones(smalltalk) 02:32, 24 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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