On 21 August 2015 at 21:11, rupert THURNER <rupert.thurner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 6:24 PM, Oliver Keyes
<okeyes(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On 16 August 2015 at 04:06, rupert THURNER
<rupert.thurner(a)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.
We shouldn't be adopting a technical code of conduct because it's
irrelevant because it already exists and ANYWAYS it's far more
important that a C++ and R programmer who does data vis for our Search
team work out how to insert metadata into images.
Okay.
best,
rupert
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