On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 6:24 PM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 16 August 2015 at 04:06, rupert THURNER rupert.thurner@gmail.com wrote:
that is an impressive list, amir. WMF hast its terms of use: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use (TOU) . admitted, an illegible monster compared to the simple statements below, like contributor covenant. i honestly do not think that an open movement like the wikimedia movement should invent any new terms, licenses, codes, but influence existing ones. by putting your stuff on the mediawiki.org site you and all contributors are bound to the TOU. and we already see that the many rules contradict each other in little areas, they cannot be updated fast enough without an army of persons. the terms of use e.g. suggest to use CC-BY-SA 3.0, which lead to a collection of law suites in germany, while CC-BY-SA 4.0 would have prevented at least some of them, see here: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2015-July/078685.html .
I don't understand how the terms of use or copyright license relate in any way to codes of conduct.
If you mean "we should be looking for good examples of existing enforcement mechanisms or language", I absolutely agree, and that is part of what the Code of Conduct is trying to do.
i mean that we duplicate text in hundreds of slightly differing rules,
guidelines, policies, terms, codes, in different languages. this inflation of texts is very special to the wikimedia movement. my personal expectation would be that movement paid persons do have as main task to reduce the complexity for volunteers, readers, writers, photographers, coders, etc. and as second task, they support innovative techniques. we should not forget it takes time to write stuff, and it takes exponentially more time to read it. if we make a wikimedia policy, it has the potential to be read by 1 billion people. reading policies and writing policies can be considered as waste because it is not the mission of wikipedia, not the mission of WMF :) coming back to the example terms of use, they state: *Civility* – You support a civil environment and do not harass other users. paragraph 4 vastly elaborates on it. a 90% duplicate of the code of conduct. brion, civility _is_ enforced already today by the terms of use, nothing new necessary.
how does this relate to copyright license? directly not really, but i tried to hint that i would expect a technical solution from a technical person. as example where our written rules go wrong i cited the thread about licenses and reuse in commons, in two aspects. ONE, updating a lot of policies is a sisyphus task, and the WMF fails already today. the terms of use include still the old CC license, using the new one would prevent law suits in germany. TWO, you oliver, matt, quim and other technicians, would have the responsibility to come up with technical solutions to exactly this community problem, not paper. can we add metadata to images: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2015-July/078782.html. problem would be solved by a technical implementation and maybe adapting the license. which, in my biased opinion, has a huge impact and solves the problem at source for 120 million german speaking persons, and probably in many other countries as well.
best, rupert