[Foundation-l] Changes to the identification policies and procedures

[Teofilo]

2011/2/4 MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com>:
> Hi.
>
> This doesn't seem to have hit this list yet, so I'm posting here for general
> information and discussion.
>
> Effective February 1, 2011, there are two substantive changes to the
> policies and procedures surrounding identifying to the Wikimedia Foundation.

As a Commons user seeing every day the limits and the potential harm
there is in using any picture-authorizing E-mail system, I think that
the opinion of Commons users should be taken into account before
making any significant policy change affecting Commons.

Sometimes I think the pictures currently tagged with
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:OTRS cannot realistically
be reused by reusers (because the reusers are not allowed to see the
terms of the permission (1) and to know the identity of the E-mail
sender). This absence of conditions where the pictures are
realistically reusable by anybody apart from the Wikimedia Foundation
itself (which can read the E-mails) make these pictures objectively
unfree (even if from a legal perspective they are licensed under a
free license), not belonging to the kind of free works mentioned on
http://freedomdefined.org/Definition . The reusers must be in a
position to check by themselves that the work is free. I.E. know the
phone number of the person who reportedly issued the license and phone
there to check that it is true.

With the OTRS picture permission system, we are reinventing something
that is hardly different for the non-Wikimedia reusers than the
"Wikipedia only" permissions that had been banned by Jimbo Wales in
May 2005 (2).

If the foundation wants to identify more carefully its volunteers, it
could means that it is gearing up to retaliate against any volunteer
who would make a mistake. This in turn affects my relations as a
Wikimedia Commons user with the volunteers with the prospect that if I
ask a volunteer to do something difficult and if, for some reason, he
makes a mistake, he will be harmed when the Wikimedia Foundation
retaliates against him. In turn I should try less to rely on these
volunteers out of fear that they might be harmed.

The OTRS volunteers are left on their own in such a perilous situation
that concretely it is better not to involve them. So in fact they are
not as useful as you might think.

I think we should go back to the community self-reliance motto
expressed by Jimbo Wales in his New Statesman interview (3). And try
to do most of the communication between uploaders and the Commons
community on the wiki talk pages rather than on a Foundation-owned
private E-mail system nobody can read. The wiki being public is a
protection. If someone says something bad on a wiki, there are at
least witnesses, and people who can show support. The wiki being
public makes talks written on it available to non-Wikimedia reusers,
enabling them to make their own decision on whether the file is really
free, and licensed by a person who has enough authority to do so.

(1) While the licensing terms are often clear, the extent of the
permission (number of pictures, a whole website or not, whether the
permission applies to pictures made available in the future, what
happens if a discrepancy occurs in the future - not to say at present!
- between the agreed terms and the mentioned website's terms of use)
is not always so clear. The quality of the person (the boss of the
company or corporation, or a person with a low rank in the hierarchy,
a technical webmaster not usually having authority to engage the
company's assets, or even a volunteer not hired as a salaryman by the
licencing party, as was one envisaged hypothesis when dealing with the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) is never clear.
(2) http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-May/023760.html
(3) "thinking about community participation and involvement, a spirit
of volunteerism, a spirit of helping out, a spirit of self-reliance"
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/01/jimmy-wales-wikipedia-vote