On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 12:15 AM, Dominic McDevitt-Parks
<mcdevitd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 20 February 2014 00:56, HaeB
<haebwiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Sorry, but I think these concerns are overblown.
I do not intend to fill everyone's inbox with a back-and-forth, but I do
want to clarify some of my points.
First, IANAL, but an "academic ... who makes
their first tentative
edit" or other normal newbies will most likely not fall under that
provision, unless they are instructed by their employer to make that
edit (but then, why would an organization such as an university spend
money to pay someone for work in which that person has no experience
whatsoever?).
I know that you are familiar with the Wikimedia Foundation's Education
Program, which did exactly what you are suggesting is so bizarre. Yes, many
professors over the years have made their first edits as part of their paid
work of teaching university courses,
Yes, but that comparison is a
mischaracterization of what the
Education Program does. Of course it does not pay (or suggest to pay)
professors to make clueless newbie edits "with no experience
whatsoever" in ignorance of community policies or the TOU. From its
beginning as the "Public Policy Initiative", the program included
guidance for the participating instructors (e.g. training by
Ambassadors), to help them understand policies and provide training
experience, before they engage in their Wikipedia course work. That's
far from how I understood the situation that you had been evoking,
where an academic is just toying around with editing. I know you
worked as a Campus Ambassador yourself, and I'm relieved to see that
the very first edits of the professor you were supporting back then
consisted of this kind of disclosure. I sure hope she was made aware
of basic Wikipedia principles before engaging in the paid work of
teaching that Wikipedia university course.
What's more, the Education Program has since even hardcoded such
disclosure into MediaWiki, in form of the Education Program extension
for MediaWiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Courses (click through to the
course pages and look at the "Instructors" field in the table)
and I doubt they were all diligent about disclosure,
or that many people minded.
Actually, a whole lot of people minded. The English
Wikipedia
community has become quite adamant about disclosure. Last year there
was a huge community controversy about a case where one Canadian
professor was (in his own words) "going 'underground'" with his
Wikipedia course, refusing to take part in the Education Program
because he felt that its disclosure requirements would bring
unwarranted scrutiny by Wikipedians. IIRC, in the lengthy discussions
on the education noticeboard, no community members supported this
position.
And it's not hard to imagine
other activities an academic, with a professional mandate to provide public
education, could legitimately perform on Wikimedia as part of their day
job.
Sure, I don't see this being disputed.
The president of the American Historical Association
wrote an article
saying that historians have a professional obligation to do so.
If you meant to say
that this article talks about day jobs:
http://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-hist…
...then I think that this is misrepresenting its content - it ends
with the words "Any volunteers?" and says that historians should
follow the example of "Scientists, engineers, and programmers [who]
have been contributing sophisticated entries to Wikipedia almost from
the beginning", certainly not as paid editors back then.
Sue Gardner
gave a keynote for the American Library Association suggesting the same
thing for librarians.
Could you cite the exact wording where she was talking about
editing
as part of their day jobs? (If it helps, here is the brief summary I
wrote back then for the Signpost:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-06-27/News_…
)
I believe the reason universities and scholars would
do this sort of thing and receive compensation for it is that, like an
academic's normal day job, it serves the public interest. These are all
mainstream and fairly well-understood concepts within the Wikimedia
community, even though they entail (non-advocacy) paid editing.
Dominic, nobody is
trying to prohibit this kind of activity per se,
and personally I agree it can be a good thing. But if we get these
universities to write the improvement of Wikipedia into scholars' job
responsibilities (instead of those of their PR staff, many of whom
engage in problematic advocacy editing), then I can't see why adding a
sentence to one's user page would be so big of a burden. My employer
requires that btw, even though I make no paid edits to article
content.
Second, you make it appear like every violation of the TOU is a felony
("outlaw mistakes") and likely to be
the target of legal action. In my
observation as a longtime editor, the reality is different. As a
comparison, the terms of use also forbid copyright infringement and
require proper attribution of content. Yet as we all know, newbie
mistakes in that area are very common, and even many experienced
editors violate [[WP:CWW]] without facing major consequences or
lawsuits ;) However, that doesn't mean at all that we should drop
these requirements - they help us achieving our goal of building a
body of knowledge that can be freely shared and reused.
I appreciate that you think I am overreacting, but you are putting words in
my mouth--I clearly understand that a Wikimedia TOU is not a legislative
action by the government, and I was only suggesting that the WMF would be
making a rule, not a literal law. By dismissing me in that way, you have
ignored my real point, which is that the proposed text sets up a situation
in which any reasonable, well-intentioned new paid editor is naturally
likely to violate the site's TOU. That is not itself a reason not to have
such a clause in a TOU, but it does seem like it would contribute to the
feeling that Wikipedia is overly rule-bound and unwelcoming to newcomers.
I appreciate that you feel Wikipedia needs more paid editors and must
not make even minimal additional requirements if someone edits
professionally to fulfill their job responsibilities. But it's still
worth being aware that the vast majority of new editors are volunteers
and therefore not affected at all by the proposal.
Last, you vehemently object to the text mentioning
that people "will
be subject to 'applicable law'(!)".
Well, the Foundation doesn't make
these laws, and not mentioning them in the TOU doesn't make them go
away. They are not mere "stumbling blocks" that WMF can remove in
order to make the life of GLAM professionals a bit easier. You should
instead complain to the FTC or the other (non-US) legal institutions
mentioned in the FAQ about this point.
I did not anywhere advocate for making laws go away, or thinking that this
is a TOU's role. Any person is always bound by all applicable laws in
anything they do, as you say. The fact that there may be an applicable law
does not necessitate making a TOU to state that unless it is constructive
in some way to do so.
Well, but then what's the downside in making paid editors aware of
this legal risk?
And thanks for clarifying your intention - I think it was reasonable
to have interpreted your wording differently ("Now, they... will be
subject to "applicable law"(!) As if there aren't enough potential
stumbling blocks for contributors ..."), but OK.
Instead, the discussions about this topic, even
on
this mailing list, often see heavy participation by the minority of
community members who do, or have done, professional PR work or paid
work related to content contribution, often without disclosing it in
these discussions.
It doesn't appear anyone described by the above sentence has weighed in
here yet (nor did such people dominate the recent "Paid editing v. paid
advocacy" thread), unless that is aimed at me. You probably won't be
surprised to hear that, from my perspective, these discussions are seem to
suffer from the conflation paid advocacy and paid editing in pursuit of
Wikimedia's mission. This discussion shows how the proposal promotes that
same conflation, except it is all "undisclosed paid editing" that is now
the enemy, still with no regard as to whether it is advocacy or not.
The goal in this discussion should not be to say why paid advocacy is bad.
That is a given for most people. The point of the discussion is to
establish what good this proposal for the TOU would do for Wikimedia's
mission, and if it is worth the potential harm.
It's also part of the discussion to assess the potential harm, and I
responded to your email because I think it vastly exaggerated it. And
the point about the imbalance in participation between these two
groups is that one of them (naturally) might focus their attention on
potential downsides if they feel their way of earning an income might
be negatively affected by such a proposal, and the other is in a
better position to assess whether it might help with the problem that
they are spending their volunteer time to mitigate.