Hi everyone,
This email is also available on meta : https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Terms_of_use/Paid_contributions_amendme...
Over the last few hours people asked me to re-share my mail from January regarding paid editing and to even elaborate on it : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-January/069717.html
I won't elaborate on that.
This amendment is all for show. This is the kind of amendment that is not enforceable. It's only use is that some board of trustees will be able to get in front of the press and vigorously claim "Paid editing is bad!".
Will it prevent people to edit without disclosing anything? No.
Will it encourage companies to embrace our values and improve articles in fields they're experts in? No.
Will it prevent biased volunteers to edit? No.
So if we look at what our main issues are (increasing the number of editors, increasing quality) I don't see any way where this amendment will help us in any of this cases. And this is an issue we've had for 7 to 9 years, our projects didn't collapse. I'm really not sure why it is needed to have such amendment now.
So, I don't care if this amendment is approved in the end, or not, as it will be useless and non-enforceable. Instead I'll keep on working with other people on proposing real solutions.
Though I do have a quick question for the legal team, is it ok for a hosting organization to enforce rules that have an editorial inpact on the services it hosts? I mean, lawyers have been trying for years to sue Wikimedia organizations and prove that WMF has some level of editorial control over Wikipedia. If WMF is the one deciding how a specific set of editors must behave when editing, couldn't they use that to prove that WMF does, indeend, have some editorial power? Much alike an editor-in-chief chooses who's published in its paper and how they're credited. Best,
Christophe