Hi all,
A few notes from my own perspective:
1) I'm glad to see this lively debate! I hope the right solution comes out
of it and is iron-clad against contingencies, insofar as possible :)
2) I don't want to see the projects used and misused as a platform to
achieve goals other than our mission of sharing free knowledge -- and, as a
part of that, I want to discourage contributions to articles that have an
end goal other than making those articles better according to objective
standards (and, of course, encourage contributions that do have the end
goal of making articles better). Though I haven't checked with legal, I
don't think that's a controversial statement :)
*How* we discourage contributions that don't fit with our own goals is the
question -- policy changes Wikimedia-wide, project-wide, something else?
This is a proposal using one of the legal tools in our toolbox, the ToU,
which is one of the very few Wikimedia-wide policies that can address
contribution standards and is also one of the very few tools that is
recognized as legally valid by outside parties (unlike for instance our
internal policies like NPOV, which are just that, editorial policies).
3) I think this proposal is trying to addressing a long-standing issue of
COI editing. That issue was recently brought to the forefront again by the
actions of a few companies, but it's been an issue for a long while.
4) I'm glad to see Dominic weigh in with some issues from a GLAM
perspective. Of course I personally am interested in GLAM issues, but I
also think we collectively need to grapple with how to make the projects
friendlier towards all kinds of people with things to share, including but
not exclusively GLAMs and educators.
For my part, I would love to see a world where contributing to Wikipedia
was seen as a normal part of business for educational and cultural
institutions and the people who work there; I think that would be a win for
all of us, including the GLAMS. How to do that so we also preserve our
neutrality and values is the challenge facing us right now: and we need to
figure out specific things, like how we balance disclosure versus anonymity
for these contributors, and how we distinguish good motivations from
cluelessness or COI. I don't have a good answer for this personally, though
I have lots of thoughts (I've worked with plenty of researchers who are in
fact trying to work on Wikipedia during their paid time. And bear in mind
that for academics like professors, there's often no real line between "on
the clock" and "off the clock" -- you do work relating to your job all the
time).
Disclosure: I myself contribute hours and hours of work to Wikimedia during
my day job, including writing this email, because I've made the case to my
employer that my contributions to WMF as a trustee and volunteer can be
seen as a professional obligation, just like helping out with a library
association would be. That does not include my actual editing of Wikipedia,
which I do with my volunteer hat on and in my free time. But let's face it:
the lines are often blurry. For instance, I don't think my edits to
engineering articles are a COI simply because I also work as an engineering
librarian. But I do recognize that there are lots of different cases,
ranging from that kind of mild overlap of day-job interest and Wikipedia
work; to a researcher making an edit on a subject they study and
(unknowingly or knowingly) over-representing their own work in the
references; to someone making an edit to a company article to make it more
favorable because they were paid by the company to do so. So, having
clarity when we talk about these issues about what kind of cases we have in
mind is important.
best,
-- Phoebe
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