Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-06-18/News and notes

The Wikimedia Foundation has amended its terms of use to ban editing for pay without disclosing an employer or affiliation on any of its websites—including all Wikipedias and sister projects. The broad scope of these changes, which potentially go beyond regulating only paid advocacy, will force the WMF to selectively enforce them to avoid ensnaring well-meaning editors.

The new clause, "Paid contributions without disclosure", went into effect immediately. It is placed under "refraining from certain activities" and reads, in full:

“

These Terms of Use prohibit engaging in deceptive activities, including misrepresentation of affiliation, impersonation, and fraud. As part of these obligations, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation. You must make that disclosure in at least one of the following ways: a statement on your user page, a statement on the talk page accompanying any paid contributions, or a statement in the edit summary accompanying any paid contributions. Applicable law, or community and Foundation policies and guidelines, such as those addressing conflicts of interest, may further limit paid contributions or require more detailed disclosure. A Wikimedia Project community may adopt an alternative paid contribution disclosure policy. If a Project adopts an alternative disclosure policy, you may comply with that policy instead of the requirements in this section when contributing to that Project. An alternative paid contribution policy will only supersede these requirements if it is approved by the relevant Project community and listed in the alternative disclosure policy page. For more information, please read our FAQ on disclosure of paid contributions.

”

The only major difference from the originally proposed amendment is an opt-out clause, which came about in an extensive community discussion. It allows WMF projects to adopt an alternative disclosure policy if there is clear community consensus for it, similar to the licensing policy's exemption doctrine policy for fair-use content. The WMF-led vote was inspired in part by English Wikipedia editor Martinp. WMF legal counsel Stephen LaPorte stated that the goal was to create a "simple" process when "a project has consensus on a better alternative."

The language of this paragraph is already being put to use by Wikimedia Commons, whose users are currently voting in large numbers to void the effect of the default rule on the site. According to the proposer, the "very special nature" of the Commons means that they need to "adopt a policy that allows paid contributions without any disclosure whatsoever. / ... content submitted by users who receive compensation for it ... is often of excellent quality and educational value."

Aside from this single clause, the broadness of the overall terms-of-use update has survived from the opening proposal—the WMF's first major move against paid editing—rather than just paid advocacy. Under the English Wikipedia's policies, paid advocacy occurs when someone is "paid to promote something or someone on Wikipedia". Paid editing encompasses all of that and more, being broadly defined as "accepting money to edit Wikipedia", but this is not always a negative action: "transparency and neutrality are key".

Objections to the amendment have been raised on the talk page designated to discussing it. Andy Mabbett commented that "If I am paid to deliver that training, and make edits during it, such as posting welcome templates, or fixing formatting errors in trainees' edits to articles, I now have to declare that I've been employed to do so. I even have to declare if I'm simply provided with lunch ("an exchange of money, goods, or services"; no exceptions are listed.) Ditto an editathon participant who is given a copy of the GLAM's guidebook, or a free pass to an attraction for which there is usually a charge." Luis Villa, the WMF's deputy general counsel, replied: "the purpose of the terms is not to catch users who make occasional good-faith mistakes; we think most users, most of the time, will do the right thing. At the same time, since this is a general terms of use, we can’t lay out every potential case ahead of time."

Editors have also raised objections to altering the Wikimedia-wide terms of use to address what they see as an English-Wikipedia-specific problem. The Commons proposal directly states that "the issue of paid contributions isn't ... as touchy for us as it is on (the English) Wikipedia", since "we do not, for instance, require our content to be neutral, and highly value original works created by our own users." On the Wikimedia-l mailing list, Risker skewered the change:

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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.

”

These Wikipedias include the fourth-largest and fast-growing Swedish Wikipedia.

It appears that the WMF is crafting the amendment in broad terms to avoid another Wiki-PR situation, in which a public relations company created, edited, or maintained several thousand Wikipedia articles for paying clients using a sophisticated array of concealed user accounts. While the WMF insisted that Wiki-PR had breached the Foundation's terms of use (and Wiki-PR privately admitted to doing so), this relied on the "engaging in false statements, impersonation, or fraud" clause, specifically referring to part of the third bullet-point: "misrepresenting your affiliation with any individual or entity, or using the username of another user with the intent to deceive". It does not directly refer to paid editing or advocacy.

The wide scope of this amendment will cover a large number of good-faith editors—but it also grants the WMF's legal team a weapon that they will selectively enforce against bad-faith actors, such as the former Wiki-PR.