Yes of course the WMF can contact those who are detected reusing our content without fully complying with licenses and encourage them to comply.
If a case were to go to court it would need to have one or more contributors who were willing to cooperate with WMF legal in the case. But I doubt there would be a shortage of contributors who were keen to do so.
As for why the WMF should do so, here are three reasons:
Each of our wikis is a crowd sourced project. Crowd sourcing requires a crowd, if a crowd settles down and stabilises it becomes a community. The community is broadly stable, but we need a steady flow of new wikimedians, and our only really effective way of recruiting new Wikimedians is for them to see the edit button on our sites. An increasing shift to our content being used without attribution is an existential threat to the project and hence to the WMF.
Our communities are made up of volunteers with diverse motivations. For some of us the BY-SA part of the licensing is important, personally I feel good when i see one of my photos used by someone else but attributed to me. If the de facto policy of the WMF was to treat volunteer contributions as effectively CC0 this would be demotivating for some members of our community. I'm also active on another site where every member regularly gets stats on their readership, something I very much doubt would happen if it wasn't an effective mechanism to encourage continued participation.
Every organisation needs money, the WMF gets most of its money by asking for it on wikipedia and other sites. Again, encouraging attribution back to Wikipedia etc tackles the existential threat of other sites treating wikipedia et al as CC0.
WSC
On 5 April 2018 at 08:04, wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi,
On 04/04/2018 08:36 PM, Anthony Cole wrote:
I'm curious also. I release my articles under "attribution, share alike" and rely on WMF to preserve those rights.
Why are you relying on the WMF? Wikipedia contributors (like yourself) are the ones who own copyright to the articles - the WMF doesn't. Unless you've granted/transferred copyright to the WMF (or some other license enforcement agreement), I don't think they can pursue legal action for you or other Wikipedians. (IANAL, etc.)
-- Legoktm