Hi Jacob,
Thank you for following up.
I wonder what more Legal could to deter bad-faith editors from venturing
onto Wikipedia in the first place and engaging in inappropriate activity.
Keep in mind how much high-skill volunteer time is diverted into
investigating and cleaning up after bad-faith editors that could instead be
used to develop new features, train new contributors, or write more content
if there were fewer bad actors on the site. My thought is that WMF could
take a more proactive deterrent approach by amending the ToU to specify
financial compensation (or fines) to be paid to WMF, starting with the
first offense, for certain types of bad-faith editing, particularly
undisclosed paid editing. I believe that a number of ISPs and web hosts
have similar provisions in their terms of use for fines for when the
service providers determine that one of their customers is using the
providers' services to send junk email or other problematic content. The
deterrent effect is important to limit the harm to the integrity of the
encyclopedia, and to limit and deter the considerable "theft" of the time
of volunteers who investigate and clean up after bad actors. What do you
think about that suggestion? If you are not in favor of it, what
alternatives would you propose to limit the harms to the encyclopedia and
the diversion of community members' time?
Pine
On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 6:17 PM, Jacob Rogers <jrogers(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi all,
As I mentioned in my email earlier this month, we've put together a longer
statement regarding paid editing and how we see the balance of the
communities' role and the role that WMF legal can play in these cases. We
tried to address the concerns that people have raised to us, and explain
when it's helpful to contact us to assist on a case. Of note, it does
explain what actions we can take even in cases that don't involve the WMF
trademarks.
You can find it here: Wikimedia Foundation statement on paid editing and
outing
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikimedia_
Foundation_statement_on_paid_editing_and_outing>
Best,
Jacob
--
Jacob Rogers
Legal Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
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