On 16 June 2014 20:48, phoebe ayers <phoebe.w...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 11:17 AM, Risker <risker...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Not quite sure what you're shouting about, Gerard. The amendment clearly > > gives individual projects the right to have an alternative to this > > particular section of the terms of use, and that alternative can be > either > > more strict or less strict. > > > > That's correct. Members of various projects asked for this kind of > flexibility in the comment period, and the board agreed that we should add > the ability for projects to craft alternatives on a per-project basis to > this amendment. > > In the absence of a local policy, however, the ToU amendment applies to > every project. While this issue is a concern of many on the English > Wikipedia, the amendment was not crafted specifically for en:wp; this has > been an issue across many language communities. The terms of use > (amendments and all) apply to all of our projects. > > best, > -- phoebe > >
I'm so very disappointed in the Board and the WMF for this TOU amendment, which was obviously written to quell concerns about English Wikipedia, with extremely little consideration of any other project. Now projects *must* formally exempt practices that are perfectly acceptable to them: Commons in particular, where professionals (who link to their personal for-profit websites in their file descriptions) contribute a great deal of the highest quality work; MediaWiki and all its developer-related sites, where a large number of our best non-staff developers are financially supported by other organizations; Wikidata, which is pure data and no benefit can be derived; Wikisource, where no benefit can be derived; and a multitude of Wikipedias that have openly welcomed editors who receive financial support or are paid by various organizations without any issue whatsoever. It is extremely unlikely that it will ever be enforced in the vast majority of WMF projects. And the end result is an amendment that can't effectively be enforced without violating the internal rules of the amendment. [1] It's virtually impossible to make a supportable allegation of undeclared paid editing without violating outing or harassment policies. Of course, we all know there will be plenty of unsupported allegations. It would have been far more beneficial if the WMF and the Board had had the courage to work directly with the English Wikipedia community to develop a policy there instead of imposing it on hundreds of projects that not only don't care, they will now have to create policies to counteract the effects of this TOU amendment. Simply put, Terms of Use should never include clauses whose enforcement is undesirable in a significant portion of the overall site. I'll be off now to help Mediawiki create their RFC to essentially void this decision. Risker/Anne [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_use/FAQ_on_paid_contributions_without_disclosure#How_does_community_enforcement_of_this_provision_work_with_existing_rules_about_privacy_and_behavior.3F _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
