[WikiEN-l] Yet another PR company busted ... apparently it's all our fault

[Andreas Kolbe]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 8:14 AM, Charles Matthews <
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> On 17 November 2012 01:34, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Well, no, because the Foundation has made it abundantly clear that they
> > assume no responsibility whatsoever for content, or for questions like
> > whether we have flagged revisions or not. All of that is fully delegated
> to
> > the community.
>

> In a couple of misleading senses you could argue this. The legal buck
> stops with the WMF.



No it does not, except in very limited circumstances: if the Foundation
receives a DMCA takedown notice and don't respond to it, they become
liable, as in the recent Loriot case. And if they are advised of child
pornography and fail to remove it from servers, they become liable. But
beyond such limited cases, they do not have legal responsibility for the
content of Wikipedia articles, the Wikipedia main page, or Commons
categories or Wikiversity courses. That editorial responsitility is fully
delegated to the community. If you believe otherwise, you are wrong.



> (You clearly want to look further than the legal
> position, but in the context of PR editing it has been argued that the
> law is the standard, not "ethics"). What software is in operation is
> handled by the developers employed by the WMF. It has indeed been
> contentious whether the WMF should impose its view on the software, so
> it has backed off at present.
>


In cases of software features that affect fundamental editorial policy,
like pending changes/flagged revisions or the image filter, we have seen
very clearly that the decision to implement or not rests with the
community. And as a mere host for the projects, the Foundation is not
legally liable for the consequences of editorial community decisions.



> It does seem you want to target a "blame game" at the community,
> whatever bad actors do who are certainly not within the community by
> any reasonable standard of compliance with norms.
>


I am not talking about blame, but about recognising that the community has
a responsibility, and that there is no point in waiting for the Foundation
to come up with ways to deal with what you correctly call "bad actors".


 <snip>



> The third is about on-site politics, which I don't think is in a very
> satisfactory state, but about which I have adopted a "less is more"
> line in my own comments for a few years (for reasons that are obvious,
> at least to me). It is not closely connected in any case with dealing
> properly with complaints, which is the problem-solving approach to
> things going wrong on WP, as opposed to looking round for someone to
> blame.
>


I am talking about problem prevention rather than problem solving. That
does not require apportioning blame, but assuming responsibility.

The community needs to think further than saying "those bad actors are not
part of us". It needs to think about ways to minimise the impact bad actors
can have on the project's content and on subjects' reputations.


So can we discuss points arising in some other thread, please? All of
> the above may be worth talking about, but conventionally off-topic
> matters get a new subject line. Such as "If only the enWP community
> got its act together we would never have to worry about PR editing
> because it would be a Brave New World", perhaps.



Look, Charles, this thread is called, in part, "...apparently it's all our
fault". Can't we have a good-faith investigation of what things the
community might indeed do better to prevent justified complaints? The
Foundation will not manage what you called "bad actors": how to do that is
the community's job to figure out. Right now, as SmartSE demonstrated, one
guy and another guy who hates him can spend months reverting each other
without anyone else taking an interest, even if the wronged party asks for
help repeatedly. Flagged revisions would prevent this sort of slow edit
war, with improperly sourced reputation-damaging material being deleted and
inserted again and again.

In my opinion, the following are all things the community could do better:

1. We don't put enough obstacles in the way of bad actors.

2. We tell aggrieved organisations and their representatives to complain on
talk pages, but when they do post to talk pages, they often don't get a
reply.

3. We tell aggrieved organisations and their representatives to email OTRS,
but when they do, it sometimes takes weeks before they even get an answer.

4. We could build bots that recognise and flag slow edit wars between
subjects and their detractors, as SmartSE suggested.

There is one thing the Foundation could do: provide better software support
to OTRS. As far as I can tell, OTRS volunteers have unanimously complained
about the software for years, and to no effect.

Andreas