Risker 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.
From what I can tell, a few people thought there was a lack of ammunition
against paid advocates. This amendment provides a modicum of firepower.
Whether this amendment is a good idea or not, I agree with you that this amendment is unlikely to be heavily enforced, which is why I'm not particularly concerned about it.
I imagine most readers and editors have never and will never fully read the terms of use. I certainly haven't gotten through the whole thing. It's long. Plus it's one of many documents that I'm allegedly supposed to read before editing a wiki. I think I'm also supposed to read the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, the GNU Free Documentation License, and probably the privacy policy, as well as local policies and now policy overrides, of course.
So, uh, nobody does. And the world keeps on spinning. The general rule of engagement continues to be "don't be a dick," which is really a re-statement of the Golden Rule. And none of this is specific to Wikimedia wikis. "Don't be a dick" is pretty universal. Terms of use, terms and conditions, site usage agreements, etc. continue to go unread across the wired and unwired worlds. If it helps, there are worse things that the "Legal and Community Advocacy" group could be spending its time on. :-)
Are "black hat" paid advocates going to disclose their practices on their user page? Of course not. They're also not going to read or follow the terms of use. Perhaps a benefit of this will be that GLAM folks and similarly like-minded individuals will now be more cognizant of the need to disclose their paid editing, which seems like a decent practice in many cases. If that's the upshot here, that doesn't seem so bad.
At the end of the day, you don't need to register an account to edit. You don't need to provide an e-mail address. With a very small amount of patience, you can make as many accounts as you want (they're free!). We've already lost the battle and yet we continue to win the war. How about that.
MZMcBride