On 17 June 2014 12:56, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 6:16 PM, Risker
<risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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.
I'm sorry you're disappointed. But I don't really follow your reasoning. I
don't know of many people who get paid *specifically* to upload photos or
contribute to Wikidata. Perhaps a few cultural professionals.... who are
already, in general, following this best practice. And if someone is
specifically getting paid to upload photos to Commons (or contribute to
another wiki) it seems, in general, like a good idea to know about it. (If
a professional photographer that's not doing work for hire chooses to
donate some of their professional-quality photos to the project -- in their
spare time, as it were -- I don't think the amendment applies, though I
leave discussion of that nuance to the legal team and the commons
community).
The amendment has effect if someone decides to kick up a fuss about it; it
may not result in a determination of "paid contributions" but will create a
chill directed toward anyone contributing in a like manner. Substitute the
word "photos" in the above with "words"; if someone linking to their
personal site and contributing words from their published sources
(available at a fee, click "shop"!) is not essentially a self-employed paid
editor, then there is little point in this amendment.
Anyway, I'm not sure why you are assuming that the amendment will
automatically be abhorrent to every community that's not English Wikipedia.
Of course projects do vary based on size and cultural norms and other
factors; that's why we put in the local exemption clause however.
Editors from several non-English Wikipedia projects stated that their
projects are quite happy to have paid editors. Now in order for those
editors not to violate the TOU, those projects have to go to the work of
developing and approving an alternate policy, or they can just ignore it,
and refuse to enforce the TOU; either way, it's not cost-neutral, and
reduces the respect that the broad community has for the terms of use. I
cannot think of another site anywhere that creates opt-out terms of use.
Can you? Why does this need to be in the terms of use at all?
It would have been far more beneficial if the WMF
and the Board had had
the
courage to work directly with the English
Wikipedia community to develop
a
policy there instead of imposing it on hundreds
of projects that not only
don't care, they will now have to create policies to counteract the
effects
of this TOU amendment. Simply put, Terms of Use
should never include
clauses whose enforcement is undesirable in a significant portion of the
overall site.
I'll be off now to help Mediawiki create their RFC to essentially void
this
decision.
Of course you should feel free, though I'm not entirely sure how a
provision that a person should disclose if they are getting paid
specifically to edit that wiki (in mediawiki's case, it would likely be
something along the lines of "I work for the Foundation" or "I work for
someone else who has an interest in developing mediawiki and also
developing documentation on the wiki") is especially undesirable. I'm
pretty sure most paid developers do this anyway. (If someone is editing in
their spare time -- on any project -- and not specifically getting paid for
that work, the amendment doesn't apply). At any rate, I leave that specific
discussion to the mediawiki community, where I suspect it's basically a
non-issue.
There are actually a surprisingly large number of non-WMF employees who are
indeed paid to develop mediawiki. As well, for the majority of the
developer-related sites/software, they can't include the information on
(non-existent) userpages or edit summaries which are either non-existent or
specifically used for other purposes.
If it's not important enough to be a mandatory requirement for every single
user on every single project, then it really shouldn't be in the terms of
use.
Risker