Talk:Terms of use/Archives/2015

Paid editing

Hello all, I'm happy to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has approved an amendment to Section 4 of the Terms of Use to require disclosure of paid editing. This follows the extensive discussion of the amendment on meta in February and March, which resulted in 320,000 words of discussion in various languages. At the Board's meeting in April, they reviewed issues raised in this discussion, and approved the proposed amendment. This amendment is added to the Terms of Use effective immediately.

For more information, please see the following links:

• A letter from the Board
• A blog post summarizing the change and explaining the process
• An FAQ explaining the amendment

Thanks, Stephen LaPorte (WMF) (talk) 16:58, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Retrospective

I see the Paid editing TOU amendment has landed on the wmfwiki. (this meta copy should be updated to be in sync) Is the required disclosure retrospective? It does sound forward looking, but isnt explicitly so. John Vandenberg (talk) 15:54, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Hello John, the disclosure rules in the amendment to the Terms of Use apply from now on, but they are not retrospective. Thanks, Stephen LaPorte (WMF) (talk) 16:28, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick response. Even so, I think the WMF should force all users to receive a notice of this change that they must acknowledge receipt of before editing, as there are many people who edit topics they have a COI on and have edited for years happily, but today they must 'out' themselves if they edit those same pages. They need to know that to avoid the COI hounds they must discontinue editing those pages. John Vandenberg (talk) 17:39, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

We are notifying users through site banners and email list, as described in Section 16 (Modifications to these Terms of Use). These rules rules will work best when they are enforced sensibly and in good faith, consistent with guidelines on civility and other rules against harassment (and not through "COI hounding"). We cover enforcement in the FAQ: Users should first be warned and informed of the rules, and then take other action only when necessary. If you see any issues with enforcement, you can point to this in the FAQ. Thanks! Stephen LaPorte (WMF) (talk) 18:31, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Im not here to talk about wiki ideals. Enforcement will be unevenly applied, etc. Reality is that this will be a brand new weapon used in wiki wars. The people who will be clobbered by this new weapon need to be notified in advance. Email lists are of course useless to notify the majority of people who focus on content. Site notices are great. Where is the proposed site notice text so we can review it? This site notice should not be for a limited time - it needs to be seen, so WMF needs to track which users have 'seen' it, but as 'seen' is a fuzzy concept what this really needs is 'every' existing contributor to acknowledge receipt. (where 'every' is defined broadly but sensibly - e.g. everyone who has edited since the new ToU and has more than 100 edits since day dot) And someone needs to reach out to the people who have disabled the sitenotice via various means (such as these people). John Vandenberg (talk) 19:01, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

You can see the banner being run right now with this forced link. At the moment it is being shown a max of 2 times. Jalexander--WMF 19:19, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. Ensuring every user has seen it twice is nice, but the message isnt very descriptive. It needs to inform them why they should read it. IMO it needs to mention type of amendment so that, even if they ignore it, they know what type of changes have happened and cant latter say they didnt know there was a change related to the type of edit that they must stop immediately if they wish to avoid being dragged through the coals on a noticeboard. John Vandenberg (talk) 03:57, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Since you geht blocked in the german wikipedia when you out a paid editor flying below radar, this new rule ain't worth the paper it's written on. Weissbier (talk) 16:29, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

@Weissbier: can you link to the relevant German Wikipedia policie(s) or explain this a little more? (I don't speak German but would be interested to at least read via machine translation.) -Pete F (talk) 01:47, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Updates

Stephen, could a summary of what was added be appended to Talk:Terms_of_use/Paid_contributions_amendment -- I only had that page on my watchlist from 18 months ago and was wondering what in the end was decided. With 6,000 edits there, there are probably others who didn't know to look here for the resolution (and further updates were promised). Thanks for all the hard work! Mscuthbert (talk) 14:44, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Mscuthbert The Terms of Use were updated in June 2014 to include this. -Pete F (talk) 00:33, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. I realized that when I came to this page; I just wasn't sure if a note should go on the discussion page since the last line there was "We will keep you informed on the process and the Board's deliberations." and I'm someone, perhaps not the only one, who was following that page but never had this page on my watchlist. But if you think that updating this page is sufficient, I won't press for it. Thanks! Mscuthbert (talk) 05:48, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Impact for WMF employees and contractors

As all WMF employees, contractors and potentially supplier organizations, directly benefit from the Wikimedia projects (being the primary "product" of the WMF), so improvement to project content and even more relevantly, discussions and policies that result in functional changes or changes to community policy are directly related to the reason that the employee or contractor is being paid. One can presume that edits from "Joe Blog (WMF)" are automatically read as having an interest, however if the same person is editing under an anonymous or pseudonymous account of "Joe90", then most readers will be unable to see that there is an underpinning interest, particularly during community discussion. As far as I am aware, there are no constraints on employee and contractor use of anonymous or pseudonymous accounts on Wikimedia projects.

What are the expectations for employees and contractors for the way they must declare their interest under the revised TOU? Thanks --Fæ (talk) 09:39, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Hello Fæ, WMF staff should provide proper disclosure when using an account for work. This would be satisfied by the "WMF" flag in most staff usernames, or by a note on their user page. There is no general rule against using anonymous or pseudonymous accounts outside of work, however. Thanks, Stephen LaPorte (WMF) (talk) 01:22, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. This means that the changes in TOU have no impact on current practices. This also means that when people are paid by their institution to edit Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects, they should be free to contribute using the same WMF employee working practices; in that they should feel under no obligation to declare their interest when using "private" accounts in their spare time, even when this includes taking part in community discussion that is not directly part of their paid editing, yet may benefit their paid editing work indirectly. --Fæ (talk) 07:22, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

No, it doesn't mean any of those things, Fae. Please let me know if I'm mistaken, Stephen LaPorte (WMF). The changes in TOU do impact current practices. When people are paid by their institution to edit Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects, they are obliged to declare their interest when using "private" accounts in their spare time, even when this includes taking part in community discussion that is not directly part of their paid editing, yet may benefit their paid editing work indirectly.--Elvey (talk) 22:37, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

"There is no general rule against using anonymous or pseudonymous accounts outside of work". --Fæ (talk) 22:17, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Elvey, it is indeed a good summary of the implied position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation in passing this amendment, which is the core reason I opposed the amendment. The WMF's amendment singles out one specific kind of behavior as a TOU violation; by not commenting on the many related kinds of behavior that can be equally problematic, it gives the incorrect impression that "anything goes" when money is not changing hands. This is a substantial problem.

To Slaporte (WMF)'s point, the question of whether or not something is "outside of work" is itself often murky; treating the issue as though there is a clear determination of whether something is "part of one's paid work" or "outside work" does not reflect the day-to-day reality of people routinely interpreting their own actions through a favorable lens.

You may be interested in the op-ed column I wrote for the English Wikipedia Signpost last year; also, take note of the comment from Risker under the heading "We are all paid editors". -Pete F (talk) 19:35, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Terms of use on the WMF site

Could someone please explain me what's the difference between this "Terms of use" and the other one available on the Wikimedia Foundation site? Which of the two is official? The new TOU update 2014 sometimes points to this TOU, sometimes to the other. I also find it strange that we have a pt version here, but not pt-br, while on WMF it's the other way around. There should be a pt version there, too. Capmo (talk) 18:15, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

The version on the WMF site is the original approved in English; here we create informative translations, and the WMF site may host a few of them (if they have been approved by a local chapter), but the version on Meta reflects the current state of translations.

That's why all translated versions include a link to the last approved version. Sometimes there will be some fixes made here, but as long as they are not approved by the Board, the unmodifiable version on the WMF site will prevail.

Consider versions on Meta as drafts. Given the current state of translations, there may still be ambiguities revealed by translators, but the spirit of the conditions is now stable and there will be only minor fixes. If some changes are needed, they will be discussed here on Meta, and some fixes will be made here, translations will need to be updated (sometimes, if there were errors of interpretation of the English text or unexpected change of scope in a translations due to missing precision in the English source). Some minor changes will include fixing punctuations and targets of links for pages that have been moved or reorganized, or some fixes for the page layout (notably for some scripts), requiring the addition of a few formating templates or code, without changing the readable English text.

Then some localized projects will import one of the translated versions. and will stabilize it on their wiki (possibly changing some links or adding a few more references, where these changes are authorized on a specific project, but not globally for all wikis using that same language; on Meta-Wiki we should see only translated versions appropriate for all wikis and not tuned specifically for a given localized wiki project such as Portuguese Wikipedia).

Be careful: most "pt-br" translations are full of errors (most of them have been produced by someone using an automatic Bing translator, and that user did not stop, and did not understand any word of English, that Brasilian user has been banned from Meta-Wiki after refusing to change anything in her methods). In most case, the "pt" version should be better (there's little need to make difference Iberic Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese for this policy page that should be readable by all lusophones). verdy_p (talk) 20:46, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for the detailed explanations, now it's all very clear. Regarding the pt-br translations, I guess I know who you're talking about; I've come across a discussion on ptwiki regarding this subject. Thanks for the warning.

In fact I think that keeping two Portuguese versions of all these documents, banners, etc. is an enormous waste of time, especially now that the w:Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990 is in effect in both Portugal and Brazil, and spelling differences have reduced dramatically. I strongly believe that these versions should be merged everywhere with the exception of the user interface. Regards, Capmo (talk) 03:09, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

Could someone edit the talk page of the TOU on the WMF site to direct people to this section of this talk page? E.g. Under the heading "Editable version of these Terms", say There is an editable version of these terms at [link].--Elvey (talk) 20:42, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

Elvey: Done -- thanks, good catch. -Pete F (talk) 15:11, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

And thank you. What a coincidence crossing paths so soon after w:User_talk:Elvey#PD-ORGov.--Elvey (talk) 23:55, 25 July 2015 (UTC)

I'd still like someone edit the talk page of the TOU on the WMF site to direct people to this section of this talk page more in this manner: Under the heading "Editable version of these Terms", say There is an editable version of these terms at [link]. Or at least something that informs people that there's an editable version of these terms here. Also, it would be useful if there were more anchors: I'd like to be able to link to the section on Paid Editing, but I can only link to the larger section containing it.--Elvey (talk) 07:42, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Need some input

I need to point out that I have a question here, but I just don't know where to put it. I'd appreciate it if this is not the spot for this question to either tell me where to post it or move it for me and telling me where to go.

My Question: I was on the Talk page for Julian Lennon and one of the posts there had a, let's say, savory word. I feel that this is an encyclopedia that's widely used, especially by children. I realize that kids today know all about the so called 7 words you can't say on television, but I still feel that such language has NO PLACE on Wikipedia. I'm all for freedom of speech, but with the freedom comes responsibility. Any thoughts?Rricci428 (talk) 19:01, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

See W:WP:NOTCENSORED.--Elvey (talk) 20:39, 23 July 2015 (UTC)