The ball is in your court
Last month Status Labs, a commercial paid editing company that has been banned on Wikipedia since 2013, was the main topic of this column. You should expect it to be mentioned here for a long time to come.
Following the column a request for comment was held and over the course of four days supported the proposal that “this RFC asks the Wikimedia Foundation to enforce the Terms of Use against Status Labs violations…” by a count of 100 to 2.
Ordinarily, such a lopsided vote would have prompted a snow close after the first day. It’s an important question - how do we enforce our terms of use against a company that absolutely refuses to recognize the authority of the community, or of the WMF, to enforce our rules? We need to take our time and consider how best to do this. WMF legal needs time to consider the best legal strategy. The Board of Trustees needs to sign off on any legal action. The WMF has been informed of the RfC both by Trustee James Heilman and by myself. They’ve promised to inform The Signpost promptly when there is an official announcement.
But the question is not "should we take action?" It is "how do we best take action?" Not taking action threatens the encyclopedia's very existence. If we allow a paid editing company to solicit rich customers to place anything they’d like into Wikipedia and we don’t enforce our rules against paid editing, then we no longer have any rules. Any rich person could put just about anything into Wikipedia and there’s little we could do about it. Wikipedia would no longer be an encyclopedia, rather it would be an advertising platform for rich people.
So what can we do while we’re waiting for the inevitably slow legal process to work? Here are a few suggestions.