Hi
Having read through these long posts, I thought I would introduce myself for those who do not know me, and tell you a little bit about what I do.
My name is Danny Wool. I am 42 years old. I am one of two and a half employees of the Foundation--the others are Brion, who deals with hardware and software issues, and Monica, an intern, who assists me in the office. In past incarnations of my career, I have worked as a writer (I have a book coming out in a few months) and as staff in a New York City Museum. I have considerable experience in the not for profit sector.
I am also active in various Wikipedia projects, and have been for a rather long time. Officially, my user ID is in the 500's though I made anon edits before getting an ID. I have about 30,000 edits in the Wikipedia namespace. I have also been involved in some of the high profile Wikipedia policy cases, including helping to lift a life ban against one user, who is now contributing rather amicably to Wikipedia. I can usually be found in mIRC on #wikimedia, and I occasionally pop in to #wikipedia where my moniker is usally dannyisme. I also contribute to several other languages, some more than others, and to some of the other projects as well, most recently to Wikisource.
Officially I work five days a week, though I am usually in the office at some point or another seven days a week. On a standard weekday, I arrive in the office at 8 am and leave sometime after 6. Of that, at least one-third of my time is spent answering phone calls, between six and ten an hour. People who are involved in OTRS (the system by which the Foundation responds to email complaints) will have some idea of the kind of phone calls I receive. It is really a mixed bag, and some of them are quite funny. They include people trying to contact celebrities (no, I do not have Vana White's home phone number), to people mistaking us for various companies (no, we cannot supply a new carburetor for your Ford Pinto in Swaziland), to people asking for advice (no, I do not know how you can get the coyotes out of your backyard), to "eccentrics" (no, I do not know what God meant when he spoke to you this morning)--all of these are real phone calls--to press (lots and lots and lots of those).
There are two additional types of call that I get. One type is from people concerned about their articles. In these cases, I will attempt to assist the person myself, or ideally, to find someone on IRC who can assist them, though there are also times when I am forced to tell people that we cannot help them. Sometimes, they get upset. This happened most recently on Friday when a PR firm called to insist that we allow them to put up press releases about their clients as protected wikipedia articles. I said no. They said yes. Etc. Often there are very happy results, as happened with a prominent television commentator, who is now an ally of Wikipedia--I will not give names, but it was worth the half hour I spent with him on the phone. This kind of phone call happened all the more frequently when the Senate story was brewing.
Finally, there are the legal phone calls. These come in two varieties. People I can speak with, understand their problem, and resolve it, and people that I cannot help. Of the latter kind, one good indicator is when people call and say "What is your fax number." I ask them why and they tell me that they are sending us a fax. I tell them I would like to know who they are before they send us a fax, and they tell me that they do not want to say who they are. I then tell them that I cannot give them our fax number. That is when they identify themselves as a lawyer and they are suing us. As instructed by our own lawyers, I tell them that our fax number can be obtained from our website--we are not obligated to make it easy for people to sue us. The discussion begins.
Above my desk is a Roy Liechtenstein picture of a woman crying with a caption that reads "I should have called my lawyer." The Wikimedia Foundation has outstanding legal counsel, and my job is the first level of triage. In most cases, I will call or email our attorney and provide him with as much information as I can, including name, phone number, contact info, etc. He then responds accordingly, sometimes with instructions for me as to what should happen next.
So, why all the detail? Because this is exactly what happened in several instances. In fact, this happens about twice a day minimum. It is a credit to our attorney that we do not use WP:OFFICE more frequently, and he should be congratulated for this.
Anyways, this is a long email. I just wanted to introduce myself--I do lots of other things besides--and give you some idea of how the legal triage works from the office. I also want to thank a lot of amazing Wikipedians who step in to handle these problems quietly and discreetly, and especially all of the people who spend hours on OTRS, answering the endless queries by email, just as I am doing by phone. If I were to name them all, this email would be twice as long. I really believe that it is because of them that Wikipedia is such a huge success.
Danny [[User:Danny]]
Thank you so much for that intro.
One question: are calls to the Foundation considered confidential? What is the standard policy for disclosing the reasons for actions taken by employees of the Foundation with respect to content on Wikipedia?
My understanding from the above is that people who pick up the phone to get things edited on Wikipedia get to operate under a different set of guidelines from all other contributors.
How much does the lawyer bill, by the way?
Fuck. Bet most people reading this didn't even know Danny existed. But he does. Thanks, Danny.
The Cunctator wrote:
How much does the lawyer bill, by the way?
The lawyer Danny was talking about is a volunteer. If we do not take his advice seriously, and as a result end up in court, those lawyers will not volunteer, it will cost us a lot of money.
--Jimbo
daniwo59@aol.com wrote in message news:27f.703e3e1.3144c91d@aol.com...
Hi
Having read through these long posts, I thought I would introduce myself for those who do not know me, and tell you a little bit about what I do.
[detailed and extremely helpful description snipped]
Would it be a silly idea to suggest that this be posted on Wikipedia, possibly as something like [[wikipedia:How the Foundation Office works]] ??
I am also wrestling with the temptaion to design a special {{user wikipedia/office}} userbox just for Danny and Jimbo...would this be likely to be summarily deleted?
Hi,
Leaving aside the non-trivial issue of spurious license tagging, it is great that we are increasingly getting our unfree-copyrighted content identified. We're still left with a lot of images that are not album covers, logos, screenshots, etc. but are labelled with either the deprecated Fair use template or the newer Fairusein template.
I suggest that if we are feeling ready for a new initiative in the cleanup process, that we expand the image criteria for speedy deletion again. Adding "Any image that claims to be fair use without a complete "fair use rationale" per Wikipedia:Image use policy tagged with a template that places them in the category "No rationale" for more than 7 days, regardless of when uploaded."
The album covers, logos, etc. need proper rationales too, of course, but they can be largely done from boilerplate. The effect would be to remove unfree images that nobody is willing to defend at roughly the same rate at which we remove images with no source information.
I suspect that, if put to a policy straw poll, the idea would be unpopular; images at Images and media for deletion that are nominated for having no rationale often attract a majority of keep votes.
Thoughts?
Jkelly
On 3/23/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
The album covers, logos, etc. need proper rationales too, of course, but they can be largely done from boilerplate.
Personally I feel these are at least as problematic, if not more so, than general fair use claims. Partly because the availability of boilerplate for those categories has encouraged use outside the bounds of normal fair use (e.g. using Time covers to illustrate everything).
-Matt
Matt,
I think that this is largely true. My suggestion was meant to be more conservative, in that it would only expedite deletion of media where we are saying "This is fair use", and it is being used in an article, but we have no rationale whatsoever.
I suggest that a lot of people might feel that, as an example, the use of Time covers in articles requires deliberation. Does the article mention the Time appearance? Does the article mention the way the subject was posed on the cover?
I think reasonable people disagree about where to draw the lines on covers, logos, etc. and I was trying to get at the instances where we say "This image needs a hand-written rationale" but we don't have one.
Jkelly
Quoting Matt Brown morven@gmail.com:
On 3/23/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
The album covers, logos, etc. need proper rationales too, of course, but
they
can be largely done from boilerplate.
Personally I feel these are at least as problematic, if not more so, than general fair use claims. Partly because the availability of boilerplate for those categories has encouraged use outside the bounds of normal fair use (e.g. using Time covers to illustrate everything).
-Matt _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 3/23/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
I think that this is largely true. My suggestion was meant to be more conservative, in that it would only expedite deletion of media where we are saying "This is fair use", and it is being used in an article, but we have no rationale whatsoever.
Fair enough. Is it required that the original uploader provide the fair use rationale, or can someone else? If we require the original uploader, that might be a problem. If you're not the original uploader, but provide a rationale, are you thereby assuming responsibility for a copyright lawsuit?
-Matt
On 3/23/06, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
Fair enough. Is it required that the original uploader provide the fair use rationale, or can someone else? If we require the original uploader, that might be a problem. If you're not the original uploader, but provide a rationale, are you thereby assuming responsibility for a copyright lawsuit?
-Matt
No, because if you add a proper rationale there won't be a lawsuit.
Mgm
Quoting Matt Brown morven@gmail.com:
Is it required that the original uploader provide the fair use rationale, or can someone else? If we require the original uploader, that might be a problem. If you're not the original uploader, but provide a rationale, are you thereby assuming responsibility for a copyright lawsuit?
I have written rationales for images I haven't uploaded. The rationales specify which articles they pertain to. I feel pretty comfortable writing a rationale for an album cover image that specifies it is to be used in the article about the album regardless of whether or not I uploaded it.
Jkelly
jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
Matt,
I think that this is largely true. My suggestion was meant to be more conservative, in that it would only expedite deletion of media where we are saying "This is fair use", and it is being used in an article, but we have no rationale whatsoever.
I suggest that a lot of people might feel that, as an example, the use of Time covers in articles requires deliberation. Does the article mention the Time appearance? Does the article mention the way the subject was posed on the cover?
This is my poster child for why we don't want to pick fights before we have consensus. Fights are exciting and even energizing, but you get more accomplished if people grumble but go along with what's quietly become standard practice. Doing just one or two of the most egregious misuses of TIME covers would have set the precedent, which could then have been referred to for subsequent cleanups undertaken by multiple editors.
Stan
jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
I suggest that if we are feeling ready for a new initiative in the cleanup process, that we expand the image criteria for speedy deletion again. Adding "Any image that claims to be fair use without a complete "fair use rationale" per Wikipedia:Image use policy tagged with a template that places them in the category "No rationale" for more than 7 days, regardless of when uploaded."
I'm of two minds about this. While it would clearly get rid of a bunch of material we'd rather not have, the problem I see (which I've commented on in several places) is that we don't have any sort of consensus on what is a sufficient "fair use rationale". Many of the existing rationales are lengthy essays that are really rationalizations ("I don't see how anybody could be making money from this image" or "we're an educational non-profit resource that helps the orphan baby seals"), and if you start putting a 7-day clock on judging the quality of the essaymanship, it's just going to turn into one time-consuming fight after another.
Personally I think we have very few images that will be properly sourced, necessary, and not fall into one of our existing fair-use buckets. In my passes through the existing generic fair-use category, I find that at least 2/3 of the images are completely unsourced, and most of the remainder fit our existing types of accepted fair use, or are easily replaced with free images.
What I think would work is to put images with not a single word of rationale on the 7-day clock, while putting up poorly-worded rationales into a category that will get further review. Ultimately I would like to see all fair-use rationales come from a list of approved texts; if an image doesn't fit any of the pre-approved rationales, then we require it to be thrown out. We'll forego some images that might have new and creative justifications, but win overall by not having to have endless heated debates over fine points of rationale wording.
Stan
Stan,
What I think would work is to put images with not a single word of rationale on the 7-day clock, while putting up poorly-worded rationales into a category that will get further review. Ultimately I would like to see all fair-use rationales come from a list of approved texts; if an image doesn't fit any of the pre-approved rationales, then we require it to be thrown out. We'll forego some images that might have new and creative justifications, but win overall by not having to have endless heated debates over fine points of rationale wording.
Yes, I think that this would be a good way to go.
Jkelly