I am interested to learn if WMF management or the board has discussed
taking legal action against companies that offer services to edit Wikipedia
and that have no on-Wiki presence disclosing their edits (in en-WP at
least) per the Terms of Use. We all know the companies and their websites,
where they use the Wikipedia name, etc. I have looked and never found
disclosure by any of those companies in en-WP. I have looked and found no
public evidence of WMF legal engaging with these companies, other than
Wiki-PR.
Some en-Wiki editors recently identified a long-term paid editor and
brought the matter to ANI: thread is here
<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&oldid=757170150#Earflaps_-_accusations_of_being_an_undisclosed_paid_editor_and_a_sock_puppet>.
This brought this whole thing to mind, and is something I have been wanting
to ask about.
Three questions:
Has this been discussed, and if so, what has/have the outcomes been?
Also, is there budget for WMF legal to take action against such companies?
If not, would you all please consider that?
Thanks.
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Forwarding to Legal. I'm aware of the general problem of undisclosed COI
editing, and agree that there should be some enforcement of this,
particularly given that WMF wants to use Wikipedia's NPOV and RS policies
as part of WMF's marketing. I also wonder if WMF might be able to recover
the costs of enforcement expenses somehow, perhaps by including a statement
in the TOS that says that people and their employers who engage in certain
types of undisclosed COI editing must (1) reimburse WMF for attorney fees,
court fees, and other related costs of investigations and enforcement, and
(2) forfeit all revenue from their related activities to WMF. My guess is
that significant financial penalties would be a bigger deterrent than
name-and-shame and cease-and-desist letters.
Pine