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This is an archived version of this page, as edited by Bilby (talk | contribs) at 22:36, 2 March 2023 (→Paid editing: strengthening disclosure requirements: cm). It may differ significantly from the current version .

Wikimedia Foundation Legal department/2023 ToU updates/talkheader/en

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Extended content

This section contain discussion regarding the Terms of Use page prior to the start of the 2023 update process.

Quotations

On the Dutch wiki, we are currently discussing the use of quotations from non-free content. Our questions for WMF are:

  • Do the Terms of Use (implicitly) prohibit the use of quotations from (non-free) content, not published under a licence compatible with Wikipedia? If so, why is this done?
  • How can some wiki's use such quotations e.g. as "fair use" (Wikipedia:Quotations, Wikipedia:Zitate, Wikipédia:Citation), although this seems to contradict art 7.c of the terms?

Wickey (talk) 10:10, 15 July 2022 (UTC)

At the very end of the current terms, there's a link to the archived 2009 version. Said link is broken as it's going to the wrong site. (it links to wikimediafoundation.org when it should link to foundation.wikimedia.org) 2600:4040:500D:5900:5584:5BB6:616C:A7E3 19:00, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 30 October 2022

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

I think we should change §7.4 to allow Wikisource to import GFDL books. This is because Wikisource should be able to import certain book-sized works (e.g. Free as in Freedom (2010)) that are licensed under GFDL. Matr1x-101 (talk) 18:14, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Please reach out to legal@wikimedia.org. The Terms of use can only be changed by WMF, not by the community. --Johannnes89 (talk) 06:57, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

2023 Terms of Use update

The Wikimedia Foundation Legal department is hosting a feedback cycle about updating the Wikimedia Terms of Use (ToU) from February 21 to April 24, 2023. Feedback regarding the proposed update are welcome in any language below this message.

On behalf of the Legal Department,
RamzyM (WMF) (talk) 10:53, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Minor copyedits

While the ToU are already being updated, there are a two minor changes I believe should made:

  • Section 7c says you must credit the author(s) in a reasonable fashion if you import text under a CC BY-SA license that requires attribution. All CC BY-SA licenses require attribution, but some licenses compatible with CC BY-SA do not require attribution. Is this what this clause is referring to? In any case, I think its meaning should be clarified. There is also the question of whether we wish to require attribution regardless of the legal requirement to do so, but that is a more substantive change.
  • Section 16 says in at least three languages. Should this be in at least three (追記) (3) (追記ここまで) languages?

Thank you for all the hard work you are putting into this process! Best, HouseBlaster (talk) 20:03, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

The line that would result in:
  • Engaging in ,threats, stalking, spamming, vandalism or harassment as described in the UCoC;
Should probably be:
  • Engaging in threats, stalking, spamming, vandalism, or harassment as described in the UCoC;
— xaosflux Talk 15:44, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Can confirm that the proposed change is in line with the original copy. Fixed. RamzyM (WMF) (talk) 22:40, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
1 Srbrazuk01 (talk) 14:48, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
  • What is a "revert disable"? I think this was trying to say "revert, disable"? — xaosflux Talk 15:38, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
    Can confirm that the proposed change is in line with the original copy. Fixed. RamzyM (WMF) (talk) 22:40, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
  • Section 4: to binding "Med-Arb" (a "Marketing Company Mediation"). As described should be to binding "Med-Arb" (a "Marketing Company Mediation"), as described. HouseBlaster (talk) 17:58, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
  • Section 10: probably the most minor change of all, Alternatively - if in doubt - you should read Alternatively – if in doubt – you (the hyphens should be en dashes. My former English teacher would be very happy that I brought this up!). HouseBlaster (talk) 18:11, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
    Oh yes, please. We need Halbgeviertstriche there. ToBeFree (talk) 18:31, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
  • Summary: "to the below Terms of Use, the Universal Code" --> "to the below Terms of Use, to the Universal Code" –SJ talk  13:58, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

"Part of our mission is to we offer websites and technical infrastructure to help you do this." – That's not a sentence. So why is the third bullet point part of the list? Simply remove the bullet point from "We offer websites..." to fix the issue. ToBeFree (talk) 18:28, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Another minor thing: obvious it is the intention to change "users like yourself" to just "users". But the wording "like yourself" is still found elsewhere in the text. Ziko (talk) 22:10, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Another, very very minor thing: „Content that is in the public domain is welcome!" Using an exclamation mark is rather unusual in such a text. Ziko (talk) 22:36, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
  • Section 7(c): compatible with CC BY-SA (or, as explained... should be compatible with CC BY-SA 4.0 (or, as explained..., as the abbreviation for "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International" was defined to be "CC BY-SA 4.0" (I agree that defining the version number in the abbreviation is an improvement). HouseBlaster (talk) 21:30, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

Section 10 contains a sentence fragment: Please note that these mailboxes are monitored by users of the Projects, not the Foundation(削除) . So (削除ここまで)(追記) , so (追記ここまで) they should not be threatened or issued with legal demands. "Issued with" also reads weird to me, but I think that's an English dialect thing. 3mi1y (talk) 07:39, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Insertion of "encyclopedic" in Section 1 a)

Changes in Section 1 a):

Because the Wikimedia Projects are collaboratively edited, (追記) the vast majority (追記ここまで) (削除) all (削除ここまで) of the (追記) encyclopedic (追記ここまで) content that we host is provided by users (削除) like yourself (削除ここまで), and we do not take an editorial role.

Unless you intend to take an editorial role on Commons, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, Wikisource, Wikiqoute ..., I'd like to suggest reconsidering the addition of "encyclopedic" here. El Grafo (talk) 13:36, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Ack, I was confused myself by this addition. Best, —DerHexer (Talk) 16:04, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Yes, me too. What is meant here is the "main content", different from the "auxiliary content" or "meta content" (talk pages, rule pages, election pages etc.). I think there is no established term; for my book I had to make one up. (It is not the same as the "main namespace", but close.) Ziko (talk) 22:13, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Yes - I think "content that it is the goal of the project to create" is what is meant, but there has to be a more elegant way of saying that (FWIW special:statistics defaults to "content pages"). However, I'm not sure its necessary as the vast majority of all the content is created by users. Thryduulf (talk: meta · en.wp · wikidata) 01:01, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
Ideed. It makes sense to move away from the absolute "all content", as we do import content from elsewhere (especially on Commons). But the "WMF does not take an editorial role" applies equally outside the main content namespaces. I'd suggest to just use "the vast majority of all content". El Grafo (talk) 07:53, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Third Party Resources Policy

Section 4 adds a new reference to the Third Party Resources Policy. Is this a new policy or something existing that I've never noticed? In general the meaning of the term uploading third-party technical resources is not clear to me. Taavi (talk!) 14:47, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Came here for this, only thing I came up with on search was an incomplete phab task, phab:T296847. — xaosflux Talk 15:17, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
@Samuel (WMF): can perhaps provide more on this? — xaosflux Talk 15:18, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Hello @Taavi and Bawolff:. The Third Party Resources policy is a work in progress led by the Foundation’s Security team. It is aimed at formalizing the use of third-party resources by gadgets and user scripts, so as to ensure better privacy and security for users. Here, "third party resources" should be viewed as ​​computer resources which are located outside Wikimedia production websites. They may include but are not limited to: executable scripts, style sheets, image and font files, JSON/JSONP data.
While this is still ongoing work, the Third Party Resources policy is expected to complement the ToU by covering specific aspects such as the risks related to user scripts and gadgets loading third-party resources, best practices for script developers and gadget makers, administrative and technical enforcement.
So far, the work on the Third Party Resources policy has mainly been discussed in Phabricator (phab:T296847). As per the latest updates, a draft of the policy was crafted and the Security team has been reaching out to a number of community members, including Interface administrators, to gather initial community insights and adjust the draft before engaging in a much larger public discussion on the policy. Once this phase is complete, the policy draft will be shared publicly for discussion.
For the time being, please feel free to subscribe to the Phabricator ticket (phab:T296847) for updates on this ongoing work. -- Samuel (WMF) (talk) 11:32, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
I'm not sure I like the wording of this section if that is the case. Its not really the running or uploading of third party software that this is trying to solve (At least i think), but its about communicating data (potentially including PII - certainly if we call IP addressess PII) to third parties and protecting the integrity of the browsing experience from third parties. If anything, the desired outcome is not to ban uploading the third party resources but to encourage it - Since running the software locally plugs the privacy risk [Sort of, somewhat, I'm over-simplifying here]. Bawolff (talk) 11:42, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
+1, upload does not seem like the correct term to use when we're talking about adding references to external sites. Taavi (talk!) 15:57, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Also, does this really need to be in ToU. It seems oddly specific. For comparison, we wouldn't include the gerrit +2 policy in the terms of use. Bawolff (talk) 19:30, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Further feedback

Der-Wir-Ing ("DWI") talk 15:47, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

@Der-Wir-Ing - regarding missing links, these have often been left out to make wiki-syntax with regards to translations less complex. They will be included in final versions. DBarthel (WMF) (talk) 18:33, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Yes, we will update the text with several links when we have it. Cheers, RamzyM (WMF) (talk) 00:20, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Marketing Company Mediations in section 4

A minor copy editing note: the last sentence in this section is an incomplete sentence. I suggest it be made an explanatory clause of the previous sentence, by changing ". As described in section 14 of these Terms of Use." to ", as described in section 14 of these Terms of Use." isaacl (talk) 17:07, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

This one is copied verbatim from the original copy that we received for upload to Meta, but your suggestion is well noted. Thanks! RamzyM (WMF) (talk) 22:44, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Section 4 says:

In addition, if you make a public posting on a third-party service advertising editing services on Wikipedia in exchange for pay, you must disclose what Wikipedia accounts you will use for this service in the public posting on the third-party service.

Should this be less specific? Something like:

In addition, if you make a public posting on a third-party service advertising editing services on Wikipedia in exchange for (削除) pay (削除ここまで) (追記) compensation of any kind (追記ここまで), you must disclose (削除) what (削除ここまで) (追記) all (追記ここまで) Wikipedia account(追記) (s) (追記ここまで) you will use for this service in the public posting on the third-party service.

It might also be a good idea to prohibit logged-out paid editing, as it makes disclosure a nightmare. Thanks! HouseBlaster (talk) 18:06, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

  • I agree, especially for logged-out paid editing, where adequate disclosure is for all practical purposes impossible. The addition of "all" for "what" also makes a meaningful difference. "compensation of any kind" replacing "pay" makes sense in writing Wikipedia policies, but I'm not sure if in a lawyerly document like this it needs to be said. Smallbones (talk) 23:07, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
    +1 for proposed text and +1 for logged-out paid editing. — Jules* talk 19:42, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
    • Agree for both proposed text and logged-out paid editing. Ninja✮Strikers «☎» 17:45, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
      Lots of +1s. Just confirming that we'll definitely take this into consideration. SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 19:30, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
      I concur. Why is this paragraph limited to Wikipedia though? ‐‐Kays (talk) 23:35, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

This is all great, but something similar has existed for some time on en. In that time I have noticed that almost no editors have done this, and that there seems to be no enforcement of this by the WMF on third-party sites - which have no need to follow our policies anyway. Given that this has been absolutely useless to date, why add it to the ToU? If you have no power or wish to enforce it, why include it? - Bilby (talk) 13:44, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

There is another section in this discussion called "Marketing Company Mediations" where the question of why this update is important is addressed. The short answer though is that the "rules" are not being updated. Instead, we are making changes to get a much faster and cheaper way of actually enforcing the existing rules off-wiki. In short, we do currently have a strong interest to enforce the rules but for years we have realized that we don't have the capacity to do it realistically via litigation. The proposed "mediation" process is much more realistic that litigation to force bad actors to change. Said differently, our proposed update is a response to your exact concern. SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 15:56, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

if you make a public posting on a third-party service advertising editing services on Wikipedia in exchange for pay, you must disclose what Wikipedia accounts you will use for this service in the public posting on the third-party service.

Is this including LinkedIn? And company websites? Or only freelancer, fiverr and similar? Thanks Cartago90 (talk) 18:17, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

  • IMHO if somebody is advertising Wikipedia services on LinkedIn or a company website it still needs to be disclosed. I'd go so far as saying it needs to be disclosed on a page that's readable to the public (or is public part of "disclosed"). Smallbones (talk) 23:12, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
    That is my reading, too. It says you must disclose "in the public posting on the third-party service" (emphasis mine). HouseBlaster (talk) 23:27, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

ملاحظات أولية

مرحبًا، قرأت هذا البند "هذا يعني أننا عادة لا تراقب أو نحرر محتوى مواقع المشاريع، ونحن لا نتحمل أي مسؤولية عن هذا المحتوى." كلمة عادة تعني أنه توجد حالات يُراقب فيها المحتوى وأجده مناقضًا لهذا البند "وهو يناقض هذه "انت مسؤول قانونا عن تعديلاتك ومساهماتك في مشاريع ويكيميديا " فكيف أكون حرا ومسؤولا ومراقبا في آن واحد؟ تحياتي Nehaoua (talk) 20:01, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

[for @Jrogers (WMF) and SSpalding (WMF):] "Hello, I have noticed these two statements: "Generally we do not contribute, monitor, or delete content...." and "....and have no responsibility for the operations of the website or its content.", the word "generally" means there are cases where the content is monitored, and I see that this contradicts with the statement " You are responsible for your own actions: You are legally responsible for your edits and contributions on Wikimedia Projects ... ". How can I be free, responsible and monitored at the same time? Regards". RamzyM (WMF) (talk) 13:15, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

Please let me know if there is a better place to ask this question. I'm sure we all know that almost nobody reads ToUs or Terms of Service, e.g. a majority of people reading this have been on Google today, but when was the last time you read their Terms of Service? I say it's been at least 15 years for me. With paid editing at issue here, I don't think just having the proper legal words in the proper format is good enough though. Every company in the world who might want to advertise here should have some idea that paid editing is prohibited here, even before they read the ToU. That's a lot of people who have to read it before it's effective in keeping out undeclared paid editors. In a legal sense, I'd guess, that it would be more effective as well, if when you get in front of the mediator and the paid editing company says "Sorry, I just never knew ..." that the mediator thinks "Oh really?" So I think to be really effective the WMF needs to thoroughly publish this in many places, in many cases. I'd feel very much more enthusiastic in supporting this if somebody near the top gave us an idea of how they are going to publicize this. Not just the wording of the ToU, but the ideas behind it. The WMF can do this better than anybody else in the movement. Smallbones (talk) 23:38, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

+1 Skimel (talk) 22:38, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
I also wonder how to enforce edits that might be paid while undisclosed. Meta:Requests for CheckUser information requires probable cause, so if we always assume good faith, then it is unenforceable.--Jusjih (talk) 02:11, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
Some of what's here has been addressed lower on the page (Marketing Company Mediations) in greater detail. To @Smallbones point, rules are most useful when they can be enforced. With these updates, the rules are mostly the same but we are hoping to drastically increase our ability to enforce those rules properly (making UPE companies feel like it's more likely that we will actually enforce the rules). One of the first efforts we would take, should the new language be supported by the community, would be that the Legal department would send notices to companies that the community has already identified as being systematic rule violators to directly let them know about the changes and that they would be a target for future enforcement. SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 18:49, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
This approach was accepted on en.wp in November 2020 [1]> I have noticed that of the 285 accounts which I know of on Upwork - one of the major freelance sites advertising WP editing - a total of 1 person (an en.wp admin) has disclosed their WP account. When this was proposed on en.wp it was argued that WMF Legal would use this to stop paid editing, but as far as I can tell this has had no impact. Can you give a rough number of how many paid editors have been contacted since this was added to the en.wp policy over two years ago, and how many subsequently added this disclosure to their advertisements? - Bilby (talk) 14:05, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
Although for both practical and confidentiality reasons, I can't provide exact numbers, I can say that enforcement letters go out every week from the Foundation to providers of undisclosed paid editing services (since I started at the Foundation in 2020). These bad actors sometimes comply with our requests and sometimes do not. The problem is that if these bad actors do not comply voluntarily, then WMF's only recourse (currently) is to file a lawsuit. Lawsuits are expensive, time consuming, and resource intensive. That means that, currently, we may begrudgingly decide to not litigate even against the worst actors.
This change would give us a much more effective way of encouraging bad actors in these demand letters to stop. And if they don't, it gives us a cheap and effective way to force them into a formal legal process to compel them to. Said differently, this update is a response to increase the effectiveness of our current process because there are limitations with it currently. SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 16:08, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
I don't understand why you can't even state a number due to confidentiality. Confidentiality would, naturally, entail not stating who those letters were sent to, but stating how often you tried to enforce existing policies seems like a completely different issue. However, I am unsurprised that you will not provide numbers.
That said, can you provide a case where this would work? Let's put forward a simple case - Y has been advertising their services on Upwork, and have picked up over 200 paid editing jobs on WP. All are undisclosed, and each time they have created a new account or used an IP address to make changes. You do not know their full name, address, or email. How is this to be enforced? - Bilby (talk) 20:05, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
Thinking about it, that might be unfair as it would be unenforceable anyway. How about I modify it. You are able to identify the Upwork contractor, and so have their name and are able to find contact details. You've contacted them and they have failed to add their WP details to their Upwork account. Based on what you said, it was not viable to litigate in order to force them to provide those details or to stop editing WP. So how do the proposed changes help? - Bilby (talk) 22:28, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

Chilling Effects website

https://www.chillingeffects.org/ just redirects to https://lumendatabase.org/... So while there's an addition of "Lumen Database" text, I suspect that should be the link target, not Chilling Effects, and update to avoid the redirect...

So <ins>Lumen Database</ins> [https://www.chillingeffects.org/ Chilling Effects] website should become <ins>[https://lumendatabase.org/ Lumen Database]</ins><s>[https://www.chillingeffects.org/ Chilling Effects]</s> website. Potentially even dropping the website at the end too.

Reedy (talk) 00:06, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Let me get back to you on this -- the copy for upload that we received did not strike the word "Chilling Effects" through. RamzyM (WMF) (talk) 00:52, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Replying here. Lumen and Chilling Effects are the same organization, they just changed their name a few years ago. We had originally left it since they kept the old URL, but I think we can update to have it say Lumen and use their main link instead of the chilling effects link. -Jrogers (WMF) (talk) 00:57, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Thanks, updated. RamzyM (WMF) (talk) 01:03, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Could it be worded in a more change-proof manner? Maybe referring to some text law that designate this organization for example? Psychoslave (talk) 10:39, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Day 1 thank you

Hi everyone, this is Jacob from the Foundation legal department. I want to say thank you for the initial comments! There were some good catches on the copy-editing, and helpful requests for adding and fixing links, which we'll review (including any more as they come in) and aim to produce an updated draft. I think we'll likely have that before the first office hour in March. I also reached out to the security team regarding the third party resources policy. Thank you Taavi and xaosflux. It looks like that is the correct phabricator task, but their policy isn't ready yet. We are likely going to keep this space in the ToU as a placeholder for the future when there will be a policy for how to use third-party resources without creating a technical risk for other users. -Jrogers (WMF) (talk) 00:55, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Password Security

I don't think we should get into specifics of password policies, good practices like using password managers etc (which are technical) here, but is it worth going a little beyond the current wording of "You are responsible for safeguarding your own password and should never disclose it to any third party." to include some wording about changing it if you believe it's been shared/compromised. Reedy (talk) 01:42, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Though, what is a "security credential"? Does that need defining or examples providing? Reedy (talk) 01:44, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Probably covers things like 2FA codes. Dreamy Jazz talk to me | enwiki 12:35, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
The longer the ToU is the less likely it is that people are going to read it. Why do you think it's valuable to add more words? What effect do you think the additional words will have? ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 14:07, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
I concur with Christian: Keep it short. However, I am sort of missing a frame of reference with respect to the current state of the art. So I agree with you, Reedy, too. Using weak or even compromised encryption for your password manager should constitute inadequate/insufficient password security. ‐‐Kays (talk) 23:38, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
The point of this line in the ToU is to remove the excuse of "I didn't do it, somebody else did it by using my password"-excuse in a legal context. The existing words do that. It's not to inform the user about the best way to keep their password safe. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 13:46, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Responsibility for laws where subjects written about are located?

The Overview section currently states, "you are legally responsible for all of your contributions, edits, and re-use of Wikimedia content under the laws of the United States of America and other applicable laws (which may include the laws where you live or where you view or edit content)." The proposal changes this to, "you are legally responsible for all of your contributions, edits, and re-use of Wikimedia content under the laws of the United States of America and other applicable laws (which may include the laws where you or the subject you’re writing about are located)." [Emphasis added.] This is a very substantial and disturbing change. Will editors writing about the Russian military be bound to follow the law of Russia, for example? Is the Foundation requiring editors to learn and follow the libel laws of foreign countries of people and corporations? And if they run afoul of those laws, does this proposed revision make editors liable for the consequences? The "About" page's Overview section says, "These changes are open to general feedback and can be removed or reworded if there are concerns." Yes, please! 2601:642:4C02:64B:CE6C:2AA:1BDB:EF2 05:07, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

i also share this concern. Bawolff (talk) 08:25, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
@Bawolff I'm not sure this guidance actually says anything unless it is an indication that WMF is going to enforce something themselves. It seems that it is just a warning to contributors that if you publish something it is on you, and some governments may not like it and go after you. — xaosflux Talk 12:01, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
The line that stood out to me was in the summary "Under the following conditions:...Lawful Behavior — You do not violate copyright, post illegal content or violate other laws.". I mean, I imagine the intention here is don't post CP type illegal content, but i can't help but think it implies that we are frowning on someone using a VPN to edit from china. Bawolff (talk) 12:20, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Historically, one of the tasks of the Wikimedia legal department was to defend Wikipedia editors when they are sued for the good intentioned work they do on Wikipedia. Using wording like this is what the can use to say "You are on your own, it's not our problem that you got sued". ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 13:35, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
The current version of the ToU (which went in effect 2014) has a similar wording, with exactly the meaning Xaosflux suggested. This wording doesn't mean „it's not our problem", the WMF might of course offer help, but it's very important to warn editors about potential legal risks when living in or writing about authoritarian regimes. Johannnes89 (talk) 13:50, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
To confirm, we added this to help editors know to be careful when working on BLP articles. It won't limit the Foundation's legal fees assistance or cause the Foundation to take any action against editors. We've seen a number of courts around the world over the past decade find jurisdiction based on the location of the subject of an article rather than the editor's location and we thought people should know that's a risk. -Jrogers (WMF) (talk) 19:22, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
@Johannnes89 and Jrogers (WMF): Does WMF have a legal obligation to warn users? I’m cautiously questioning whether the ToU are the right location for a mere "courtesy warning". ‐‐Kays (talk) 23:39, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
I'm not a lawyer, and am a relatively new editor, but the text in section 1 (immediately following the section quoted) says "Although we may not agree with such actions, we warn editors and contributors that authorities may seek to apply other country laws to you", which seems pretty important to this point. Skyvine (talk) 23:24, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Whatever the Foundation "may not agree", I understand it could agree in some case, or not agree and accept any legal attempt. I share the two concerns (first one and ChristianKl's one - "You are on your own, it's not our problem that you got sued"). --Pa2chant.bis (talk) 06:11, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Third party resources

The new section about "Unauthorized Uploading of Third-Party Technical Resources" is very unclear to me. Like, i am a developer-definitely more technical than most, and i have no idea what that is trying to get at. Are we trying to ban people from reusing open source js libraries in gadgets? Installing rootkits on the servers? Something else? Bawolff (talk) 08:22, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Hello @Bawolff:, please see the comment I made in Taavi's section a bit earlier: Special:Diff/24608405. Thank you. -- Samuel (WMF) (talk) 11:35, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Sui generis database rights

One of the key changes in the proposed Terms of Use is the new sentence about contributors waiving their "Sui Generis Database Rights". This is one of the key issues that delayed the move from 3.0 to 4.0 for so long (see answer by Jimmy Wales in a 2021 conversation with the WMF Board of Trustees).

The background here is that Wikidata has a CC-0 (public domain) licence that does not require re-users to attribute the content to Wikidata, whereas re-users of Wikipedia do have to attribute content to Wikipedia. Because of this licence incompatibility, it was originally thought that it would be a licence infringement for Wikidata to harvest data from Wikipedia, as has been happening for the past ten years. (In fact, because of the licence incompatibility, the community were told in 2012 that no such harvesting would ever take place.) The licence incompatibility would have been even more of an issue under the 4.0 licence, which explicitly protects database rights. As the Creative Commons update for Version 4.0 said:

In particular, the fact that sui generis database rights are not explicitly covered by the 3.0 unported licenses has led to confusion in jurisdictions that recognize those rights. Version 4.0 removes any doubt, pulling applicable sui generis rights squarely within the scope of the license unless explicitly excluded by the licensor. It also allows database providers to use the CC licenses to explicitly license those rights.

Per the video linked above, the decision to go ahead with the move from 3.0 to 4.0 now is in part due to the UN's decision to adopt 4.0. Andreas JN 466 11:38, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Per the video linked above, the decision to go ahead with the move from 3.0 to 4.0 now is in part due to the UN's decision to adopt 4.0. - that's not how I understand that part of the video. It was a response to a questioner who brought up a *potential* decision of the UN to adopt 4.0 for its text content - has that actually happened in the meantime? - alongside the fact that lots of academic journals have already do so. I read the response as Jimmy, in his usual affable way, agreeing with the questioner that that might be an argument for speeding up (or reviving) a process that had already been set in motion earlier based on the positive community feedback in 2016 ("this is clearly the direction of travel"). But your causality claim seems unfounded.
Personally I think that the second part, about open access academic journals, is much more important. I regularly encounter peer-reviewed research papers with 4.0 licensed text (on arXiv and elsewhere) that I think would be useful for Wikipedia (especially from literature review parts where authors are summarizing other people's research), and am very much looking forward to the ToU update enabling us to reuse them.
Regards, HaeB (talk) 08:04, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
Listening to it again, I think you're right.
I'm not au fait with the developments at the UN that the questioner was referring to. But the United Nations University for example certainly does release a lot of material under the 4.0 license, as do the many other academic journals you mention. Andreas JN 466 09:49, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
And regarding Wikidata and "harvesting", you may want to define that term more precisely, in particular to substantiate your claim that it was originally thought that it would be a licence infringement for Wikidata to harvest data from Wikipedia, as has been happening for the past ten years. (In fact, because of the licence incompatibility, the community were told in 2012 that no such harvesting would ever take place.) - Denny may be able to clarify his 2012 comment that you are citing here (although he's not a lawyer either AFAIK). But my guess is that by "Wikidata does not plan to extract content out of Wikipedia at all" he was referring to copyrighted content from individual Wikipedia articles. In any case he can't have meant the large-scale creation of Wikidata items for all Wikipedia articles, since that had already been a core aspect of the plan for Wikidata at that time. - Either way, even if your theory were correct that the Wikidata project has been a huge violation of Wikipedia's database rights all along for the past decade because of the limitations of the 3.0 license (and I doubt that this is true), that would be a very strong argument for adopting the 4.0 license now, to avoid having to shut down Wikidata, which (warts and all) has been a successful and valuable addition to the Wikimedia movement. (I'm also confused why you claim that the 4.0 licence [...] explicitly protects database rights. That's not what the quoted text from Creative Commons means.)
Regards, HaeB (talk) 08:50, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
If what you say were true, the WMF would not ask us to accept the addition of a new sentence about waiving database rights:
Where you own Sui Generis Database Rights covered by CC BY-SA 4.0, you waive these rights. As an example, this means facts you contribute to the projects may be reused freely without attribution.
What Denny said ten years ago was consistent with WMF Legal's assessment, which is copied and linked below, in a section in which you commented (#Creative Commons imports and sui-generis database rights): The sui generis right is infringed when "all or a substantial part of the database" is transferred into another document or database. ... the Directive also prohibits the "repeated and systematic extraction" of "insubstantial parts of the contents of the database".
As I read it, it is only because 4.0 now pulls database rights (which were "not explicitly covered by the 3.0 unported licenses") "squarely within the scope of the license" that the WMF wants us to accept the above sentence about waiving database rights.
Incidentally, I believe the sentence the WMF aims to add to the ToU means two things:
  1. Wikimedia projects would not be able to harvest 4.0 databases.
  2. If any government body or other organisation were to add the content of their 4.0 database to a Wikimedia project they would thereby automatically give up their sui generis database rights, including the right to attribution. That is an end run around the actual intent of the 4.0 license, and a bullying move.
I don't like that. The Oxford Internet Institute's Mark Graham and Heather Ford have written eloquently about what it means when people have no way of telling any more where the data they are presented with actually comes from. We should resist rather than encourage this trend.
It's a problem that's presently getting far worse, by the way, courtesy of AI tools like ChatGPT – another potential customer sector currently being eyed by Wikimedia Enterprise. Regards, Andreas JN 466 09:37, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
You haven't answered my suggestion above to clarify what you mean by (the rather loaded term) "harvesting". Do you think that Wikidata has been (or is) in violation of database rights for Wikipedia, or not? If yes, what precisely is the "substantial part" being "harvested"? Also in that case, would you really prefer having to shut down Wikidata for legal reasons over going through with the proposed ToU update?
If what you say were true - I said several things above, can you be more specific about which of these you think may not be true? ... the WMF would not ask us to accept the addition of a new sentence about waiving database rights - my guess is that this is to ensure that the default version of the 4.0 license will be consistently applied (i.e. without individual contributors applying the "unless explicitly excluded by the licensor" exceptions on a case by case basis in their edit summary or such). I don't see it as a tacit admission that Wikidata would need to be shut down for legal reasons otherwise. Also, I don't understand how the proposed ToU change would mean that Wikimedia projects would not be able to harvest [any] 4.0 databases, apart from those that have applied that exception and "explicitly excluded" some rights from the 4.0 license? By the way, while I'm not a Wikibase expert, it seems to me that tracking and maintaining such extra database-rights based requirements on content imported to Wikidata might be very cumbersome and onerous anyway, requiring substantial technical investments at least. In any case, I entirely disagree with your end run and bullying move characterizations.
Furthermore, considering that individual facts are not copyrightable (also not in the EU), it seems clear that the "facts you contribute" part would not affect the reuse of facts gleaned from Wikipedia (my emphasis) that you talk about below, anyway (only possibly database-like aggregations of such facts); that's what my comment there was about. Apropos, while I'm a huge fan of citations and attribution and en:WP:BURDEN myself, I have doubts about the existence of this alleged "trend" that people have no way of telling any more where the data they are presented with actually comes from - as if every newspaper article, book or TV documentary came with footnotes in the past.
Lastly, a major problem with your way of thinking about these topics is that you appear to constantly imagine reusers of our content as evil capitalist tech predators (AI! ChatGPT! or whatever other bogeymen there may be). But making dumps of our entire projects freely available without restrictions beyond the CC license has been a core practice since Wikipedia's very early years. Contrary to your insinuation, dumps aren't something that was recently started for the corporate customers of Wikimedia Enterprise. This ability to copy and reuse the entirety of a Wikimedia project's content has enabled countless mirrors and forks by amateurs, research projects by academics, etc. Preserving this right to fork is also very important for the community itself, to limit the power of WMF, something which I think you care deeply about. (For example, the famous 2002 Spanish fork has been claimed as a major reason why Wikipedia doesn't have ads today. Conversely, the absence of database restrictions - at least in the US - also enabled the Wikitravel community to fork the entirety of their CC-licensed project content after the site had been sold to a rather exploitative commercial wiki provider owned by a private equity investor, to reestablish it as a Wikimedia project, and to prevail in the ensuing lawsuits.)
Regards, HaeB (talk) 12:26, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
As I understand it, under 3.0 there was "wiggle room". This was acknowledged by Creative Commons in their "What's New in 4.0" release notes – "the fact that sui generis database rights are not explicitly covered by the 3.0 unported licenses has led to confusion in jurisdictions that recognize those rights" is how they put it. This uncertainty was also reflected in WMF Legal's Wikilegal/Database_Rights#Conclusion (my emphases): It can be difficult to determine whether, or the extent to which, a database or its contents are protected by law. Concepts like creative choice and substantiality are inherently subjective and it is rarely easy to predict how a court might rule under either US copyright law or the EU Database Directive.
Note, however, that they continued (again, my emphases): Whenever possible, the best course is to use only content that is made available by the author under an open license. In particular, for EEA and UK databases, the license should include a license or express waiver of the sui generis database right. In the absence of a license, copying all or a substantial part of a protected database should be avoided. Extraction and use of data should be kept to a minimum and limited to unprotected material, such as uncopyrightable facts and short phrases, rather than extensive text. For EEA and UK databases, bots or other automated ways of extracting data should also be avoided because of the Directive’s prohibition on "repeated and systematic extraction" of even insubstantial amounts of data.
This speaks to what I said earlier about importing data from 4.0 databases. It was also exactly the point that was at issue back in 2012 in that licensing discussion. The German user, User:Alexrk2 (who hasn't edited since 2021) said: CC0 won't be compatible with other projects like OpenStreetMap or Wikipedia. This means a CC0-WikiData won't be allowed to import content from Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap or any other share-alike data source. The worst case IMO would be if WikiData extracts content out of Wikipedia and release it as CC0. Under EU law this would be illegal. As a contributor in DE Wikipedia I would feel like being expropriated somehow. This is not acceptable!
It was in response to that comment that Denny said, Alexrk2, it is absolutely true that Wikidata under CC0 would not be allowed to import content from a Share-Alike data source. Wikidata does not plan to extract content out of Wikipedia at all. Wikidata will provide data that can be reused in the Wikipedias. And a CC0 source can be used by a Share-Alike project, be it either Wikipedia or OSM. But not the other way around. Do we agree on this understanding?
As I mentioned years ago in The Signpost (see Whither Wikidata?), this understanding then appears to have changed. A decision was made that there was enough ambiguity in the legal situation to risk performing large-scale, systematic imports of data from Wikipedia, thereby potentially infringing the Wikipedia community's database rights. After all, how likely was it that the Wikipedia community would sue Wikidata? Not very likely.
You ask me what I would like to see done with Wikidata. My preference has always been that Wikidata should have the same licence as Wikipedia, the main reason being that there should be traceability of provenance. Freebase had a CC attribution licence, so why not Wikidata? (Note that Freebase too was hoovered up by Wikidata and converted to CC0 ...) We are currently subordinating everything to tech companies' convenience and bottom line. Why?
The situation we're moving to is a gargantuan, hugely profitable data soup dished out by Big Tech via voice assistants and chatbots as "The Truth", without the public having the ability to trace and verify where these data actually come from. That does not empower the public – on the contrary. I couldn't find a review of Mark Graham and Heather Ford's 2016 paper in your Recent Research rubric in the Signpost; perhaps you missed it at the time (pity, I would have loved to see what you thought about it then ). It was preceded by a Slate article; have a look and see whether any points they make there about the importance of provenance ring true. (I wrote about that aspect too, years ago in the Signpost in the context of the Knowledge Engine, see "The times, they are a-changing".)
Lastly, you mention that pre-Internet newspaper articles etc. didn't come with footnotes either. The difference is that – even with all the problems around newspaper ownership – no newspaper had a similar market dominance to Big Tech. People always had a choice of Telegraph or Guardian, taz or Welt or what have you. As I see it, Big Tech is asking us to trust them to deliver the full breadth of opinion to us, neutrally – but even if they did that today, I wouldn't trust anybody to do that long-term.
People are human, which is why people have tried to build systems with checks and balances. That system is undermined if a lot of power ends up concentrated in a handful of trillion-dollar companies that then use their wealth to influence global politics and public opinion in a way that benefits their bottom line. (That is just as true with data as it's been true for oil.) To my mind, requiring answer machines of all kinds to say where they get their data from would make a small but important difference. It would make tech companies more accountable and transparent and reduce the likelihood of problems down the road. Andreas JN 466 18:07, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
I sense some fundamental misunderstanding here: As I understand it, under 3.0 there was "wiggle room". This was acknowledged by Creative Commons in their "What's New in 4.0" release notes – "the fact that sui generis database rights are not explicitly covered by the 3.0 unported licenses has led to confusion in jurisdictions that recognize those rights" is how they put it. - It sounds like you think that 4.0 is stricter (grants less rights to reusers) than 3.0 in that regard, i.e. removes "wiggle room" because the 4.0 licence [...] explicitly protects database rights. But the quoted part refers to the opposite: Under 3.0, database rights were (at least according to some interpretations) not covered by the license, meaning that no permission was granted for them. That 4.0 is "pulling applicable sui generis rights squarely within the scope of the license" means that permission is now explicitly granted for them. (Remember, a license is basically a permission to do something that would otherwise be disallowed by existing rights - but never a tool to impose additional restrictions. Something being under the scope of a license means that it is covered by the permissions granted by the license.) This becomes clearer when looking at the full context of your quote from https://creativecommons.org/version4/ (see also their explanatory links within the text there, left out in the quote below):

Rights outside the scope of copyright
Other rights beyond copyright can complicate the reuse of CC-licensed material. To the extent that those rights are not addressed directly in a copyright license, the situation for users of works can be even more confusing. Version 4.0 addresses this challenge through an open-ended but carefully tailored license grant that identifies categories of rights that could (if not licensed) interfere with reuse of the material. Accounting for these and other unenumerated rights will more fully enable users of CC-licensed works to use the work as they expect and as intended by licensors.
In particular, the fact that database rights are not explicitly covered by the 3.0 unported licenses has led to confusion in jurisdictions that recognize those rights. Version 4.0 removes any doubt, pulling applicable sui generis rights squarely within the scope of the license unless explicitly excluded by the licensor.

Also, regarding This uncertainty was also reflected in WMF Legal's Wikilegal/Database_Rights#Conclusion : That Wikilegal page talks about an entirely different kind of uncertainty in that regard, namely what uses are covered by database rights - not whether the permissions granted by CC licenses cover these database rights (the subject of the confusion that Creative Commons' explanations refer to).
Regarding Wikidata, you still haven't responded to my question what precisely is the "substantial part" being "harvested", or in the wording of your most recent comment, which large-scale, systematic imports of data from Wikipedia you are referring to concretely. This makes it difficult to discuss how much they might really be affected by legal restrictions, and what the benefits and drawbacks of the proposed ToU update might be in that regard. Again, assuming that Denny was reasonably sober at the time of his 2012 comment, with "Wikidata does not plan to extract content out of Wikipedia at all" he can't possibly have meant that Wikidata would not import the entire list of the (around that time) tens of millions of Wikipedia articles (without text content but with interwiki links), because that was already a core part of the plan for Wikidata at that time, as a central first step to initialize its database, so to speak. Please don't keep simply repasting your favorite quotes (as you are wont to do), especially if it has already been pointed out that they may be taken out of context.
As for your thoughts on Big Tech, news media and the articles by Heather and Mark that (via the cited Signpost op-ed) amplified the theses from your Signpost piece, I think we're developing some off-topic tangents here (my fault too). But I'll be happy to respond a bit later because I do agree that these are important and interesting topics in general. I'm not here to defend "Big Tech" or to dismiss your concerns entirely, but I do think that some frequently proposed arguments are questionable, and partly based on flawed assumptions.
Regards, HaeB (talk) 03:30, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
PS: Concerning your fundamental misunderstanding about 3.0 providing "wiggle room" and the 4.0 licence [...] explicitly protects database rights, what I said above was actually already explained by the legal team in 2016: Terms_of_use/Creative_Commons_4.0/Legal_note#Waiving_database_rights (The update in the 4.0 version of the license additionally provides permission to use material that is not eligible for copyright protection, but is eligible for protection as part of a database, etc.). Regards, HaeB (talk) 03:54, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
My head hurts. How then would you interpret the following passages from https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/data (my emphases):
How does the treatment of sui generis database rights vary in prior versions of CC licenses?
[...] In the CC version 3.0 licenses, the legal treatment of sui generis database rights varies, but the practical result is always the same: compliance with the license restrictions and conditions is not required where sui generis database rights - but not copyright - are implicated. This means that if a substantial portion of a CC-licensed database is extracted and used in a way that does not implicate copyright (e.g., by rearranging purely factual data), the license does not require the user to attribute the licensor or comply with any other restrictions or conditions, even if the database is protected by sui generis database rights. [...]
Cf. the last section on that page:
If my use of a database is restricted by sui generis database rights, how do I comply with the license?
If the database is released under the current version (4.0) of CC licenses, you must attribute the licensor if you share a substantial portion of the database contents. Andreas JN 466 23:46, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
Well, we've been talking about the unported licenses in this thread ever since your first comment (which makes sense, considering that that's what the Wikimedia projects are using). Regarding your last quotes from https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/data , as every so often, context matters. To repeat with the last "[...]" expanded and emphases changed:
How does the treatment of sui generis database rights vary in prior versions of CC licenses?
[...] In the CC version 3.0 licenses, the legal treatment of sui generis database rights varies, but the practical result is always the same: compliance with the license restrictions and conditions is not required where sui generis database rights - but not copyright - are implicated. This means that if a substantial portion of a CC-licensed database is extracted and used in a way that does not implicate copyright (e.g., by rearranging purely factual data), the license does not require the user to attribute the licensor or comply with any other restrictions or conditions, even if the database is protected by sui generis database rights.
While this result is the same across all CC version 3.0 licenses, the reason for this outcome varies. In the 3.0 licenses ported to the laws of EU jurisdictions, the scope of the licenses expressly covers databases subject to copyright and/or sui generis database rights. The conditions of the license are explicitly waived when use of the licensed work only involves the exercise of database rights.
By contrast, the 3.0 unported licenses and all other ported licenses do not expressly license sui generis database rights. As a result, those licenses do not apply when sui generis database rights alone are implicated. This means a licensee may need separate permission to use the database in a way that implicates sui generis database rights (although arguably an implied license to exercise those rights may be deemed granted in some jurisdictions). [...]
So in other words, yes, Wikipedia's current 3.0 license does not require attribution for these kind of "substantial" extractions - but it does not provide permission for them in the first place ;-) (at least not explicitly)
In related news, I do not require you to fill up the gas tank after you drive my car. But I haven't permitted you to drive my car. (Also, I don't own a car.)
Regards, HaeB (talk) 03:10, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
Well, forgive me, but that is precisely the point, isn't it? The Creative Commons licences were created to make it easy to define re-users' duties. They were created so commons creators would have an easy, widely understood and enforceable way to say, You are welcome to re-use our stuff – as long as you do x, y and z (for example, attribute, i.e. credit us).
We both agree that 4.0 expands the scope of CC-license-defined attribution requirements to cases where only sui generis database rights (based on the "sweat of the brow" argument) are involved. Right? We agree 3.0 didn't say anything about attribution in such cases. This means that 3.0 was of little help to anyone wanting to ask for attribution in cases where only sui generis database rights were involved. (And I think I am correct in saying that there is no universally agreed, easy-to-understand, well-tested alternative legal framework in place that would enable people to demand attribution based on sui-generis database rights: that is precisely the gap the CC licences are meant to fill.)
The example of your car is somewhat misleading because people generally don't want others to drive their car. This is not the situation we have here.
If the car is Wikipedia, or Wiktionary, etc., we want people to drive our car, because we made it for other people to use. But the CC BY-SA licence expresses our wish that people should (1) credit us while doing so (say where they got the car they're driving) and (2) share alike (leave the car somewhere others can pick it up when they're done with it, so they can use it as well).
If I had to come up with an analogy involving your car (it's difficult ...), I'd say that under 3.0, people only had to say "I got this car from HaeB" while using it to drive to work; under 4.0, they also have to say "I got this car from HaeB" when they repaint it yellow, stick their own name on it and use it to provide paid taxi services.
At any rate, adopting the 4.0 licence would increase our CC-based rights to attribution. The CC BY-SA 4.0 licence expands re-users' attribution and share-alike duties defined in the licence to another, previously uncovered set of circumstances (sweat of the brow).
And that is precisely the increase in rights the WMF wants us to agree to waive. Well, I don't agree. Regards, Andreas JN 466 09:43, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
Andreas, you are continuing your fundamental misunderstanding. To repeat from the part of https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/data I bolded above, under 3.0 unported a licensee may need separate permission for this kind of reuse - i.e. it remains prohibited by applicable database rights laws. In contrast, 4.0 permits it (the current version of the CC license suite (4.0) licenses sui generis database rights in addition to copyright and other closely related rights), with attribution requirements. You are only focusing on the attribution requirements for the reuse and are forgetting about whether the reuse is permitted (covered) by the license in the first place. So no, we do not agree that 4.0 expands the scope of CC-license-defined attribution requirements except in the utterly meaningless sense that it expands their scope to something that wasn't permitted by the license before anyway.
Hence it is wrong to claim that adopting the 4.0 licence would increase our CC-based rights to attribution. Since 3.0 unported doesn't cover these reuses, we could currently already demand attribution for them in any form we want (say in oscillating multicolored letters that include the phrase "ALL GLORY TO THE WIKIPEDIA", or alternatively ask for a donation of 10 trillion USD to the Wikimedia Endowment), when negotiating that aforementioned separate permission. 4.0 reduces that ability to demanding attribution in the very confined form specified by the BY licenses, which still may not even be practical for other reasons as per the legal team's rationale for this proposed ToU change (which you appear to have been ignoring entirely so far). Regards, HaeB (talk) 06:13, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
You say So no, we do not agree that "4.0 expands the scope of CC-license-defined attribution requirements" except in the utterly meaningless sense that it expands their scope to something that wasn't permitted by the license before anyway. Firstly, who is "we"? Secondly, and more importantly, I don't agree that this case where 4.0 does expand our CC-based rights is "meaningless". You argue as though people always asked for permission before putting stuff online. That's not how the Internet and the related case law have grown (Luis' 2016 blog post actually touched upon this). 4.0 is a powerful lever to help build an Internet where end users can see where information originated. The WMF wants us to give up our right to use it. Andreas JN 466 08:08, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
Just to not stay silent: I'm firmly against such a change. I would rather like to see the exact inverse move: to use this right as extensively as possible. Promote and defend the diffusion of free-libre-open-works (FLOW) through licenses which dispense inherited resistance. But I don't think it would happen even if a majority of active contributors would come and say "I agree let's do that" following this message, so I won't waste my time further on this lost battle. To my mind, the forces causing this change are not community driven nor done for the benefit and defense of the community. Psychoslave (talk) 23:28, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
I don't think it is a "lost battle"; the WMF has already shown willingness to change parts of the proposed ToU update based on community feedback. However, if you want to make a convincing case against this particular change, you should really first read the legal team's rationale for it (including the blog posts linked there, by Luis, who long before and after his time as WMF's Deputy General Counsel has been known as a free/libre/open source advocate), and explain how you would handle the difficulties that they want to avoid with it. To be clear, I haven't gone through these rationales in detail myself either. (I'm mostly just jumping in here to point out some obvious misunderstandings.) But generally speaking, there are things that sound great in theory but in practice would create a mess of inconsistent and unworkable requirements on the one hand and do not even achieve the desired goal on the other hand (say if the particular reuses one worries about are covered by fair use anyway).
Also, what does licenses which dispense inherited resistance even mean? Regards, HaeB (talk) 06:50, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
I don't know Luis, but it is only to be expected that a lawyer with a significant history of work for Google and other tech companies will come up with arguments that are aligned with those companies' interests. No disrespect to him, but on matters such as this I am more interested in hearing the views of independent experts, people who are less used to seeing and presenting things just from tech companies' perspective. Andreas JN 466 09:09, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
Also, what does licenses which dispense inherited resistance even mean?
A license that preserve copyleft on derivative works, such as GPL, CC-*-SA or ODBL. Psychoslave (talk) 09:31, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
That is an important point, because each time CC BY-SA rights are waived the result is that work done for the commons ends up being transformed into proprietary products. Andreas JN 466 09:40, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
Looking at the rationale, I respectfully but strongly disagree with it.What if we were saying "ok not every country have the same protection rules for employees, so let’s align with the lowest common denominator". It might be great for the evil-big-corp Leviathan which crave for the cheapest right-less possible workforce, steered as it is with only a narrow purely financial view of the world. But for evolution of societies at large, my opinion is that this is an awful line of conduct.I wonder how the legal team would react if we would propose to align their own professional conditions to the combination of the worst professional equivalences in the world. 😏I think we should strive for putting the bare as high as possible regarding respect of each human not at lowering it. In present context, preserving attribution and an equitable conservation of the same rights on derivative works would be the minimum fairness we should expect. Psychoslave (talk) 09:53, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
I don't think it is a "lost battle"; the WMF has already shown willingness to change parts of the proposed ToU update based on community feedback.
Well, I have no doubt that inputs like the ones I made how some sentences are formulated have their chances.But for that kind of topic, I am so confident that I’m peeing into a violin, that I very willing to bet with you that nothing substantial will be change on this statement. So, tell me, what would you like to bet? 🙂 Psychoslave (talk) 10:33, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
Ok, I couldn't resist to waste a few more minutes and come with a divergent proposal:
Where you own Sui Generis Database Rights covered by CC BY-SA 4.0, you retains these rights to the full extent defined in the license. As an example, this applies to your contribution in novel data schemes as well as any contribution in original collect and curation of factual information, including in the form of cohesive data set. Thus guarantying that derivative works remains freely reusable, preserve attribution and help to improve data traceability.
Sure, I know this won't happen. But at least no one will be able to say that is just because no one in the community proposed something else. Psychoslave (talk) 23:51, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
No, that's not how this works, we can't use the ToU to expand sui generis database rights to anything we would like attribution for, as you attempt to do here: As an example, this applies to your contribution in novel data schemes as well as any contribution in original collect and curation of factual information, including in the form of cohesive data set. Thus guarantying that derivative works remains freely reusable, preserve attribution and help to improve data traceability. For example, I would assume that almost no manual Wikipedia edits are covered by these database rights, and also don't forget that they only apply in certain jurisdictions (e.g. not in the United States). Regards, HaeB (talk) 06:50, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
Keep in mind that I’m not a layer while reading the following answer. 🙏
No, that's not how this works, we can't use the ToU to expand sui generis database rights to anything we would like attribution for
Maybe this is misreading "retains rights to the full extent"? This is not intended to mean "extending beyond", but preserving completely what is already defined so far.
For example, I would assume that almost no manual Wikipedia edits are covered by these database rights
Maybe the hypothesis inducing this assumption is that database should be thought in term of informatics, like a SGBD, when here its actually taken here in a far broader legal sense. I would be extremely surprised that even subset of wikis like categories curated by the community doesn’t match Sui Generis clauses.
they only apply in certain jurisdictions (e.g. not in the United States).
So what? This is just a less appreciative way to say that in many jurisdictions, like all European countries where it does apply.ToC should not be a place used to explicitly lower the the bar at every opportunity. Because, as we all know, the extend of US free speech is rather exceptionally high. I don’t see anyone pretending that we should lower the bar of expected speech rights that contributors possess just to align with those of European countries, let alone North Korea. Psychoslave (talk) 10:24, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

For the record, my preference would be to replace

  • Where you own Sui Generis Database Rights covered by CC BY-SA 4.0, you waive these rights. As an example, this means facts you contribute to the projects may be reused freely without attribution.

with the following wording:

  • Where you own Sui Generis Database Rights, you agree to license these rights under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Andreas JN 466 14:47, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

Lawful Behavior

"Lawful Behavior — You do not violate copyright, post illegal content or violate other laws." this seems a bad idea. Totatlitarian states have all sorts of laws that limit free expression. I vaguely remember a case in the past where the Ugandian Wikipedia wanted to stop users from saying that they are homosexual on their user pages and the Wikimedia Foundation had a problem with that. Given that homosexuality is illegal in Uganda the current wording likely require such a policy from the Ugandian Wikipedia.

In the last month we saw Twitter censor links to BBC's Modi documentatry under the idea that it violates Indian law. A policy where Wikimedia would also censor that links seems like a violation of the values for which Wikimedia was created.

When totalitarian governments attack freedom of expression the role of the Wikimedia Legal Department shouldn't try to minimize legal exposure but to fight for freedom of expression. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 13:32, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

An interesting point - it would also seem counter to the human rights policy, at least if read in its expansive form. Nosebagbear (talk) 17:01, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
This is a helpful comment, thank you for flagging it! The wording change in section 10 (which is what led to the updated summary this is quoting) is one of the requirements of the Digital Services Act, which requires a more broad unlawful behavior analysis than just copyright law. In practice, the risk of censorship here should be mitigated by a couple things. One is that the applicable law to the Foundation doesn't cover every country in the world, so problematic laws may not apply. Second is that the human rights policy should actually guide the Foundation's behavior here and the Foundation should not try to assist with the enforcement of a law that violates human rights if at all possible. I'll take this one back to review by the team to see if there's a way we can update the wording here to more clearly reflect the human rights aspect while still meeting the needs of the DSA. -Jrogers (WMF) (talk) 19:31, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Also makes me wonder about the fate of the en:Illegal number article or mentions of Bloody Sunday's "Soldier F"; "illegal content" without specifying a jurisdiction or other context is really pretty broad. --20:01, 22 February 2023 (UTC) Dogcow (talk) 20:01, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
  • I also wanted to do illegal things like sharing general LGBT+ info and medical information of the sort which is conventional and would be taught in any Western medical school. As a general guide, the kinds of information in university research libraries is in the interest of Wikipedia, even when censored in some countries. It seems like WMF is on this though and the intended interpretation is to mean illegal content outside the scope of Wikipedia as presently understood. Bluerasberry (talk) 00:49, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

I suggest the following alternative:

  • Lawful Behavior — You do not violate copyright or other laws (追記) of the United States of America (追記ここまで).

Long5563 (talk) 08:21, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

The WMF seems to want to write the policy in a way honors the Digital Services Act. To do that, it would require honoring EU law.
Generally, I think violations of the Official Secret Act of the UK should not be violations of the Wikimedia terms of use. Linking to BBC Modi documentatry as Wikipedia seems to do in violation of Indian law should be possible. Free speech is under attack in many parts of the world.
When it comes to LGBT+ info, violation of the Ghanian and Ugandians laws should be legal, but I expect that there are also other countries that have laws that forbid content we want to allow. If a country like Russia has a law that restrict information about LGBT+ we want the Russian Wikipedia to be still be able to provide that information.
Wikimedia should not only help users in the US or EU to write such illegal content in such jurisdictions but also give users in countries where their freedom of expression is limited a way to publish information.
The key jurisdiction in which the WMF operates is the United States, so requiring complying is United States law makes sense. Fortunately, the First Amendments is good at protecting speech. You seem to count EU law also as applicable law to the foundation. It's unclear to me which jurisdictions the foundation considers to have applicable law. The terms of use would be exactly the location where it would be worth to be specific so that users know what's allowed or not allowed in Wikimedia projects. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 20:20, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
NLT and uncensored are the considerations for me. Long5563 (talk) 05:06, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
I agree that explicitly stating under which jurisdictions the WMF considers content to be illegal is paramount if this clause is accepted. Else, almost everything will be illegal — DaxServer (t · m · c) 08:56, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
@ChristianKl: May I remind you this is in the preamble. This summary is explicitly not legally binding. I think "don’t infringe laws" is a fair summary, like, generally speaking. We certainly don’t want to encourage people to break the law, right? ‐‐Kays (talk) 23:48, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
@Kays: I do want to encourage people in totalitarian countries to publish important information that's censored in their countries on Wikimedia. Providing ways for people in totalitarian countries to inform themselves about important issues is a valuable function that Wikipedia fulfills. Resistance against totalitarianism is about breaking the law and it's worthwhile to encourage.
Take the Ukraine war. Do you want to encourage Russians on the Russian Wikipedia to break the law and call it a war or do you want to discourage them from doing so? If they have a discussion about whether or not to allow that on the Russian Wikipedia I don't want the argument "The ToU says we don't violate laws" to be there. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 02:06, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
I was also struck by this vague clause and agree with User:ChristianKl that it is probably especially problematic for people who come from countries with bad/archaic/problematic laws including those relating to blasphemy, nationalist symbolism, traditions, positions of power etc. "Whose law?" would definitely be a question that would arise. Shyamal (talk) 03:54, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
I would suggest this: Lawful Behavior — You do not violate (追記) United States (追記ここまで) copyright (追記) law (追記ここまで), (追記) post content that is illegal under the law of the United States of America, or otherwise do anything that violates the laws of the United States (追記ここまで).
The US's expansive understanding of free speech under the First Amendment is a major reason why Wikimedia is incorporated here. This would mean that it is not per-se a violation of the terms of service to violate foreign laws that suppress free expression.
--Rockstone35 (talk) 00:06, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
  • I also came to comment on this. It would be helpful to define concepts like "lawful" or "illegal" in the terms of which specific legal system. If left open to "any legal system" that leads to contradictions as various legal systems have laws that clearly contradict each other. Is there a way to clarify if, when using terms like "lawful" or "illegal" or "violate laws", the document means "of the United States" or "Of the jurisdiction you are located in" or whatever? Because one could read it either way. --Jayron32 (talk) 16:37, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
  • I am deeply concerned about this provision and would echo the perspective that others have shared above, that much of the content of Wikipedia would violate the laws of authoritarian regimes. Wikimedia shouldn't give such regimes legitimation in this way. Jmbranum (talk) 03:15, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Age of Majority

Generally, it's good to keep policy documents short so that it's easier to read them. What changed in laws around the world that necessitates the change in wording about the age of majority? "Soliciting personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 18, or under the age of majority where you are if higher than 18, for an illegal purpose or violating any applicable law regarding the health or well-being of minors." ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 13:39, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

  • To my knowledge, there is at least one state in the US (possibly two) where the age of majority is above 18. This does produce a weird situation though; does it violate the Terms of Use if you live in a jurisdiction where the age of majority is 18, but you're trying to solicit personal information from someone who is 18, but lives in a jurisdiction where the age of majority is older? --Rockstone35 (talk) 22:49, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
    • @Rockstone35: No, it’s referring to the potential solicitor’s age of majority in their current jurisdiction. ‐‐Kays (talk) 00:00, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

Marketing Company Mediation

Regarding the proposed terms of use update, what's the idea behind "Marketing Company Mediation"? The way UPE currently works is paid editors ignore the ToS, astute Wikipedians spot them and create a sockpuppet investigation, the UPE's current account gets blocked, the UPE makes a new account. Is there a situation where UPE would ever end up in court, and if so, why would mediation be superior to other processes? Thanks for your time. –Novem Linguae (talk) 15:33, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

I'm also confused. One interpretation is that the WMF seems to think it can compel anyone it suspects of UPE to travel to California. Although I have never carried out paid editing (declared or not), and am confident that any extradition hearing you might request would be laughed out of court, I would not wish to continue editing Wikipedia under those circumstances. Please clarify. Certes (talk) 19:33, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Hi. I am also a bit confused about what Marketing Company Mediation is all about. — Jules* talk 19:45, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Good questions. I'll try to be as simple as possible, but feel free to ask for more details.
1. The way UPE currently works is paid editors ignore the ToS, astute Wikipedians spot them and create a sockpuppet investigation. Yes it's true that editors diligently spot and rectify a large and meaningful amount of UPE, so that wouldn't change. But even in this best-case scenario, bad actors are only found out "after the fact." They've already created headaches for the good-faith editors who need to identify them, revert their edits, and potentially debate with these bad actors. This new process won't change the need for that, but to help relieve some of the burden and heartache that editors cleaning up this mess to deal with, the Foundation is asking for better tools to -- in parallel -- take affirmative action against the largest-scale bad actors.
There are -- for example -- large marketing firms that make hundreds of thousands of dollars every year just from charging people to create or edit Wikipedia pages. Some are outright scams (for example, guaranteeing pages to anyone and then taking their money). Some are much more sophisticated: using dozens of socks, using otherwise "clean" sleeper accounts, hiring sub-contractors to attack good faith editors. Some are even responsible for international corporate disinformation campaigns.
2. If so, why would mediation be superior to other processes? Mediation is superior to litigation for several reasons. Litigation is expensive and time-consuming, and the Foundation has not filed litigation in the past despite high-profile UPE controversies on the projects. This is not necessary because it lacks the interest to: for example, the en-Wiki community once overwhelmingly requested that the Foundation help take action against a particular bad UPE actor in the past. We were not able to act upon it because of the huge amount of time and cost barriers.
Mediation, on the other hand, would be much less costly and time-consuming than litigation. It would also require bad actors to reimburse the Foundation for the cost of their actions and legal expenses related to taking them to mediation, further lowering enforcement costs. The outcome of the mediation could be legally enforced in their jurisdiction as a court order if the entity does not comply. Overall, the mediation process could lead to an outcome with a fraction of the cost and time it would take for litigation.
3. One interpretation is that the WMF seems to think it can compel anyone it suspects of UPE to travel to California. There would be no traveling involved: mediations would be teleconferences according to the terms as currently written. In terms of jurisdiction, the marketing company would be subject to the same laws that govern contracts in that jurisdiction. Said differently, if the company is lawfully bound to the TOU, then they'd be lawfully bound to comply with the dispute resolution terms in the TOU should they create a dispute.
Should a marketing company believe that they are not bound, then that would be a matter for a court to decide in that relevant jurisdiction. We would attempt to get a court order in the company's jurisdiction, asking the court to compel the entity to show up to video-conference mediation (in any country of their choosing). This is a standard practice to enforce, so although we cannot predict it would be 100% effective in every circumstance in every jurisdiction, it's an effective practice with lots of precedents in international contract law. And even a failed court order would be magnitudes cheaper than litigation. There'd be no sort of "extradition" involved.
I have to head to a meeting, so sorry for the truncated reply, but I hope that addresses some of the questions at a big-picture level. SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 19:59, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Question: response to the general question: what Marketing Company Mediation is all about.
The Foundation hopes to strengthen its tools to support existing community policies against marketing companies engaged in systematic, undisclosed paid editing campaigns. A "Marketing Company Mediation" would require a company providing services the community has identified as rule-violating UPE to submit to binding mediation to resolve the issue. The outcome of the mediation could be legally enforced in the company's jurisdiction as a court order should the entity not comply.
Even without lots of enforcement from the Foundation, we believe the language update alone would force many marketing companies into greater compliance with on-project rules. Rules against UPE already exist on the projects and in the TOU itself. But companies that make six figures a year providing these services have lawyers who may counsel them that it's worth the risk of a lawsuit (under the current difficult and costly enforcement process). Making it much cheaper for us and much more costly for the bad actors (should they lose) may change their risk tolerance for breaking project rules.
One of the first actions we'd likely take (if this TOU addition is seen as useful to the community) would be to send notices of the companies engaged in the most egregious scams telling them about this new enforcement mechanism. We would let them know that we know what they are doing and would be ready to enforce should these activities continue. SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 21:18, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the (crystal clear) answers! Those proposed changes seem welcome, as UPE are a pain. — Jules* talk 21:38, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
There's a part of me that worries that this could inadvertently benefit companies at the expense of volunteers and our broader commitments to accuracy and RS. If specific language for a Wikipedia article is agreed to in an arbitrated contract, do we have to put a notice for editors on the article "Don't touch this language at all or risk ToU violation"? What if new reliable sources suggest the agreed upon info is outdated, do we have to keep it pending a new agreement? Will the arbitrator have sufficient knowledge of how Wikipedia works to be a good guide for both parties? All I can say is I hope the WMF legal team will know what it's doing and not basically turn UPE into corporate pay to play. -Indy beetle (talk) 22:34, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
I'd like to +1 Indy's query. @SSpalding (WMF): - does this mediation/arbitration risk having content for any of the articles those UPEs working on being included within the outcomes? US arbitration law not being my Mastermind specialist subject, could use some reassurance on this regard. Cheers - Nosebagbear (talk) 23:42, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
I understand the idea, but despite the explanations, I am not sure of the implications of this new clause and share the concerns. In the event of claims by a group of users in relation to the damage caused, does the Foundation have the power to force an unwilling UPE to arbitration? (I'm not a lawyer, but I'm afraid not). Conversely, in the case we apply the policy "Don't think, and erase all", could the UPE come and complain, arguing that we made it lose money by following this policy? Or by revealing the names of their clients? I'm afraid so. And if their lawyer's fees are very high, am I wrong thinking they know that they can be reimbursed if the mediator decides that such an article or such a sentence should be reintroduced ? Or that the name of their clients should not be revealed, for example in the name of "business secrecy" ? Additionally, could Wikipedians fighting UPEs be considered one of the parties? Just asking because I know I could not afford the fees splitting. --Pa2chant.bis (talk) 07:10, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the excellent reply. I was falsely assuming that UPEs would be suing us. Looks like it's the other way around. Sounds like it boils down to "WMF sometimes wants to sue UPEs, but in the past it has been cost-prohibitive to do so. If we force them to do mediation, and to pay for the legal costs, then this makes WMF taking legal action against UPEs a new, practical possibility." Sounds good to me! 👍👍 –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:47, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

I don't quite understand what the aim of mediation is. If it turns out that someone has violated our terms of use, we block the account and discuss if the contributions should be deleted. What is the point of mediation? What would be a situation where mediation would make sense and what would be the result? If WMF reaches an agreement with a company in such a mediation, would the community have to accept contributions from that company? --Holder (talk) 08:15, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

I've tried to address this question in response to a similar question above under the heading: "1. The way UPE currently works is paid editors ignore the ToS, astute Wikipedians spot them and create a sockpuppet investigation." No, we would never be forced to accept contributions from anyone. I've addressed this now below in greater detail under the heading "1. response to questions about whether or not this would affect editors ability to change content". Thanks for the feedback. SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 18:09, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Probably a rather stupid question, but am I right to assume that the parties involved in such a mediation will be in any case WMF on the one hand and a UPE company on the other hand? And, to repeat Holder’s question, what will be the aim intended by WMF? Some sort of cease-and-desist declaration from the UPE company which in case of future violations makes it easier for WMF to sue them? --Jossi2 (talk) 16:58, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

In addition, many UPE spammers reside in third world countries where the legal system shows varying degrees of dysfunction. How will the mediation result be enforced? Will this new system be effective in these circumstances? MER-C 17:33, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
Good question. See my response above under the heading "3. One interpretation is that the WMF seems to think it can compel anyone it suspects of UPE to travel to California..." There's no guarantee that we would be dealing with a jurisdiction with predictable and functional legal systems. This would be a problem with litigation in the same way it's a problem with mediation. There's actually a huge benefit to mediation in dysfunctional legal systems because we don't have to rely much on the formal legal system to make it work.
Said differently, litigation requires us to work within a country's unreliable legal system through the entire complaint, judgement, and settlement enforcement process. Mediation would only require us, in theory, to rely on that country's legal system for the "settlement enforcement" process. This is another one of those "cost saving" and "time saving" things I allude to in my response above under the heading: "2. If so, why would mediation be superior to other processes?". I hope that addresses your question! SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 17:59, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
It does help and is better than the current process - although I am not convinced that it will be effective against third world spam. MER-C 20:17, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
Noted. We will take that into consideration to assist us with for the final wording as well as in our day-to-day choices for how to enforce the language (should it be supported by the community) SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 18:58, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
No worries. There are no "stupid questions" and many of your questions overlap with @Pa2chant.bis @Indy beetle and @Nosebagbear's questions so I will try to address everyone here before my next meeting :p . I think something that might address all of the content related questions above:
1. response to questions about whether or not this would affect editors ability to change content
No, it would not. The mediation would determine a very specific question: did this company breach the contract (TOU) by what they did, yes or no?
If yes, then we can legally compel them to stop violating the rules and hold them responsible through a court order.
If no, then the company can continue using the projects, but the community and/or the Foundation's ability to stop their actions doesn't change if either believes they have violated a rule again. It also doesn't change the disposition of the community on the previous rule violations.
Either way, article content wouldn't be locked or frozen. A mediator couldn't reverse a community edit/takedown. There would not be a hold or limitations on editing if the company "won" the mediation. Old community rule enforcement edits would not be reverted. Finally, a marketing company successfully defending against our accusation could never end in a situation that would grant a company the power to violate the TOU or community rules in the future. What happens to article content after it's done would never be at issue.
To give a simplified analogy: imagine a company gets audited by the IRS for suspected tax evasion for the year 2010. During the hearing, the IRS doesn't find enough information to prove the company violated tax rules. That does not give then the company free reign to violate tax laws from 2010 forward now that they've "won" against the IRS. It also doesn't prevent the IRS from auditing the same company again in 2015 if another rule violation is suspected.
Finally, the IRS would never be in a position where a judge could force the IRS to change the tax laws only for that specific company moving forward because the company survived the audit. This is an inelegant analogy, but hopefully it makes it more clear explain why a pay-for-play situation where a company gets preferential content treatment during a settlement is not the type of thing we could be forced by the mediator to do.
2. what will be the aim intended by WMF?
Any settlement with a marketing company would likely include:
A. Stop all of the activities that are against the rules that you're currently engaged in.
B. Promise you won't do the same or similar things in the future under penalty of a court order.
C. Disclose the comprehensive list of (i) all accounts you've used and (ii) all companies you've worked with (so we can provide misinformation back to the community to do any necessary future clean up and investigation)
Assuming after mediation may renege on their promises, then we can take the settlement to be enforced in a court in the company's jurisdiction. A firm specializing in selling UPE services would see this new language as an existential threat.
3. Additionally, could Wikipedians fighting UPEs be considered one of the parties?
No, the TOU is a contract between the company that agreed to it and the Foundation. In mediation, there is no "impleading" (where someone could be "brought in as a party"). There's also no "calling witnesses" etc. Those are two more reasons that make mediation more viable than litigation in these kinds of disputes. SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 17:50, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
Thank you for clearing that up SSpalding. -Indy beetle (talk) 18:05, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for your answers @SSpalding (WMF), appreciated.
Presumably we (or, more likely, either SPI-equivalents or CUs, would need to provide the original evidence - which WMF CUs may or may not duplicate for confirmation later), with that evidence wanting to demonstrate that x editor had broken the rules and there was reasonable reason to think that x editor worked for y company?
It wouldn't need to be in the TOU, but assuming it goes in (and I can't see any reason it shouldn't), it would be useful for Legal to be able to say at some point what they are looking for...and possibly what would be counterproductive. I mention the latter, for example, because there are things like "mystery shopping" that I believe fr-wiki uses, amongst others, and would be useful to know if that would render a request for Legal to take this action in a specific instance more or less likely. Nosebagbear (talk) 18:44, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
Noted. Interesting that you bring up fr-wiki because there's no shortage of targets for exactly these types of mediation actions that they've already identified on Antipub The type of information on a page like that may be the catalyst to identify the marketing companies involved in the activity who could be targeted. The Foundation also regularly gets messages notifying us of meaningful problems related to UPE especially when it's a scam (someone stole money from someone who didn't know better that Wikipedia pages weren't for sale). If I understand your comment correctly, I would confirm that we'd likely give general statement (possibly in a Diff post that people can refer to) about what information might be helpful in these types of actions. Hopefully, that would guide people to reach out to us if they see a problem that they believe is connected to a wider network of undisclosed paid editors. SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 18:56, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
Dumb question: can volunteers - or the WMF on our behalf - seek compensation from undisclosed paid editors for cleaning up after their edits via this means? MER-C 20:17, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
Thanks SSpalding (WMF), that sounds great.

Some questions:

  1. Is there precedent for a binding med-arb in website TOS as opposed to just arb?
  2. Same question about requiring only a half-day or full-day: is that a reasonable limitation?
  3. Same question about requiring teleconferencing... is there legal precedence for this? What if the party doesn't have the technology required for a teleconference?
  4. Is this the first time a major website has put a mandatory one-day teleconference med-arb clause in its TOS or has this been done before? (It's a cool idea, but seems novel.)
  5. The second paragraph seems to be one-sided... will the WMF also agree to timely provide any documentation, etc.?
  6. Why doesn't the agreement specify who will run the med-arbitration, how many arbitrators, what rules will govern the proceedings, etc.?
  7. Is any of this enforceable against non-US persons? Should there be one clause for domestic parties and another for international, to increase its scope/enforceability?

Thanks, Levivich (talk) 00:25, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Also, a sidenote, but I couldn't figure out if the TOS was w:browsewrap or w:clickwrap, I guess the latter is intended, but FWIW I noticed that when I edit using w:WP:WIKIPLUS, it doesn't have a notice saying by publishing I agree to the TOS, and I don't see one on the account registration screen at enwiki. Thought I'd mention that. Levivich (talk) 00:32, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
  1. Many people philosophically do not like arbitration. Also, arbitration is more expensive and has more procedural requirements than mediation. For both reasons, we thought the best approach would be to default to mediation (with a negotiated settlement) before the matter turned into a arbitration (which would force settlement) on any remaining open issues. Med-Arb is unique to online platform TOUs, since other platforms don't have ethical barriers around forcing their users into arbitrations or cost barriers against litigation. That said, there is lots of precedent for mediations escalating toward arbitration in U.S. contract law.
  2. This is both reasonable and standard. U.S. mediations are almost always half day (4 hour) or full day (8 hours). This stipulation is mostly to avoid the other side suggesting that the mediation be stretched out inappropriately (e.g. two weeks of one hour sessions) to artificially raise our costs or otherwise subvert the process.
  3. Generally, commerical platforms force companies in disputes with them into going physically to a specific jurisdiction. For various reasons, we wanted to avoid this and allow any dispute to be handled to be decided in the location of the company's choice (i.e. via teleconference). We believe that this lowers a barrier making it more likely that the company will voluntarily comply rather than needing to use extra judicial process to force the company into a specific jurisdiction through court orders.
  4. Teleconference is common when alternative dispute resolution is suggested. "Arbitration" is very common. Med-Arb is uncommon. So some of this is novel, but then again, a lot of the way Wikimedia projects work doesn't (and shouldn't) take cues from other commerical platforms. 🙃
  5. There is an implication to act in "good faith" in all U.S. contract law. So if we ask someone to mediate under the contract, we have to at least act a minimally to make sure that the company isn't unduly prejudiced. Should we not do that, then the other side could have their own recourse against us. Even if this weren't the case, the mediator is a neutral third party. They would require a mediation brief to be filed with them which, usually, is accessible (in some form) to both parties. It would be a very bad look to have intentionally withheld information in that brief when the point of the process is supposed to be a good faith settlement. (To be continued)
SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 01:44, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Broad WMF flexibility of interpretation

Regarding the lines We reserve the right to exercise our enforcement discretion with respect to the above terms. Where required, enforcement of these terms may include actions not listed in the Wikimedia Foundation Office Action Policy. If enforcement is required in new circumstances, we will make an effort within at most one year to update the Office Action Policy to catalog the new type of action, I have a mixed bag of questions and comments

  1. "enforcement of these terms" appears to specifically mean "we can take additional unspecified actions to act against a user, but not additional unspecified grounds on which to act" - is that interpretation correct? It goes off the same definitional split that the UCOC and UCOC enforcement guidelines are using.
  2. "We will make an effort" seems rather vague - I'm aware that with a need to create an operational viewpoint and get legal signoff timelines can run, and perhaps longer still if needing to seek functionary and/or community advice, but it feels like within a year we should either have an addition or have had it declined (at least, declined for future actions "we did it once, it wasn't ideal, not again")
  3. The reasoning [side note - big fan of the whole about section] states This is to account for new requirements under changing laws. - is that the WMF saying that it doesn't take actions outside the OAP (or won't) except as required by changing law? It won't carry out actions before adding them to the OAP in order to resolve issues generated from other reasons?

Cheers, Nosebagbear (talk) 17:28, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

I see what this is supposed to mean, but it reads like an oxymoron. Also, linking to a non-authoritative information page, a non-policy, a non-guideline, from the Terms of Use is not ideal. Just link to en:WP:COI instead... if a link to a specific wiki's page from the global TOU is needed at all. ToBeFree (talk) 18:15, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Accessibility edits

A small point, but it would be really good to change several links to follow accessibility guidelines.

Instead of "you can contact us [link]here[/link]", it is much better to expand the link text to be more like "you can [link]contact us here[/link]". This means the eye is drawn to the meaning of the link rather than just the word "here"; similarly, assistive technologies can (for example) read out a list of links rather than a list of "here, here, here" and so on.

Thanks! — OwenBlacker (Talk) 19:20, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for this suggestion! -Jrogers (WMF) (talk) 18:12, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Applicable legislation

The phrase I want to discuss is:

Please be aware that you are legally responsible for all of your contributions, edits, and re-use of Wikimedia content under the laws of the United States of America and other applicable laws (which may include the laws where you or the subject you’re writing about are located (削除) live or where you view or edit content (削除ここまで)).

While I understand the new phrasing is more inclusive, as a non-native English speker, I also consider it less clear. I suggest the following alternative:

Please be aware that you are legally responsible for all of your contributions, edits, and re-use of Wikimedia content under the laws of the United States of America and other applicable laws (which may include the laws where you live, where you view or edit content, or where the subject you’re writing about is located).

Strainu (talk) 19:22, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

"Where the subject you're writing about is located" is incorrect, though. Russian law is not applicable to an article about Putin, for example. --Rockstone35 (talk) 00:12, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

capitalization

Attorneys love to capitalize words that feel important, but there are reasons why this should be rejected in favor of downcase. First, there's no grammatical reason to capitalize what's not a proper noun, or the first word of a sentence, in English. Second, and more importantly, capital letters are not pronounced. When they are used as a form of emphasis or to hint at importance of a term, that inference is lost on 1) anyone who cannot see, 2) anyone who otherwise is reviewing the terms in an audio format, and 3) anyone who understands how English capitalization works and doesn't understand that attorneys sometimes use capital letters for reasons unrelated to grammar and orthography.True Pagan Warrior (talk) 19:45, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Useful observation. Some things that are capitalized are purely discretionary: For example, "Empower and Engage" is in title case. For those, I've made a note to think carefully about capitalization choices. Other things that are capitalized are not as discretionary. For example, "APIs" is a "defined term," so anytime we need to refer to it we have to capitalize it as a technical matter. Finally, something like "Privacy Policy" is both a defined term and referring to the specific project Privacy Policy (rather than privacy policies in general), so for both reasons, it's capitalized. If you have specific words that would make things more clear, then very open to suggestions. If not, your point is still well-taken and we'll consider this when revising. SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 21:33, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Creative Commons imports and sui-generis database rights

First, let me say I consider the move to CCBYSA 4 as a huge step forward for content reuse! Happy to see this change which will open troves of data for reuse.

However, section 7, points a seems to go beyond the license requirements. It says says that for the text the user owns, it's possible to reuse the facts from the projects without attribution. As far as I understand (from section 4), the CCBYSA 4 license does not allow such reuse without the attribution.

This raises 2 issues:

  • a moral one: we're weakening the copyleft part of the license
  • a technical one: with the current attribution rules of most projects, it's virtually impossible to correctly identify imported vs original facts 100% of the time, which makes such reuse impractical on the large scale (read: with bots)

I suspect this phrase was introduced to help with the porting of data from Wikipedia to Wikidata, but it seems to leave us in the same spot as before. Perhaps we should consider other options that do not weaken the SA clause. Strainu (talk) 20:26, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

See #Sui generis database rights above. I agree with your concern about attribution. The licence should require reusers –
  • to attribute facts gleaned from Wikipedia to Wikipedia at least in some minimal way, and
  • to share alike, to retain the viral aspect of the CC licences rather than having the information locked away in proprietary boxes.
Andreas JN 466 00:43, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
To attribute facts? That's a bit silly. If I bring something up in conversation and I happened to learn it from Wikipedia, do I have to include a notice of attribution? What if I'm not sure where I read it? Also, facts per se are not covered by copyright, unless I greatly misunderstand. No one should own a fact or rights over someone's knowledge of that fact on the basis that the person learned it from a certain source - we only have rights to our actual writing, not all understanding which can from it be gleaned. And Wikipedia is supposed to get its facts from sources anyway. CharredShorthand (talk) 03:12, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
Attributing individual facts is not required by the license either. What is required is attributing when reproducing "all or a substantial portion of the contents of the database". For example, when bulk-moving information such as the population for settlements from a whole country from Wikipedia to Wikidata.
Don't get me wrong, I support such information reuse, but in many countries (all of Eastern Europe, at least) attribution is still considered critical for reusing open gov data. The EU just recently started encouraging countries to use CC licenses for releasing such data, before it was even worse. Strainu (talk) 08:00, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
Exactly. Perhaps it'll be helpful to reproduce here WMF Legal's assessment from some years ago (Wikilegal/Database Rights):
The sui generis right is infringed when "all or a substantial part of the database" is transferred into another document or database. Unfortunately, the Directive does not define substantial, but does say that "substantial" is "evaluated qualitatively and/or quantitatively". [1] Extracting and using a insubstantial portion does not infringe, but the Directive also prohibits the "repeated and systematic extraction" of "insubstantial parts of the contents of the database".[2]
When there is large-scale extraction of Wikimedia data the volunteer community should be credited somewhere. --Andreas JN 466 08:38, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
Indeed, facts are not copyrightable, so Andreas' demand that The licence should require reusers [...] to attribute facts gleaned from Wikipedia to Wikipedia at least in some minimal way is rather pointless, since the license is about our copyrights and can thus only require (i.e. withhold permission for) things that we have a copyright for. Regards, HaeB (talk) 08:20, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
You're talking past us. It is abundantly clear from what has been said above that this is not about individual facts, but about "repeated and systematic extraction". Andreas JN 466 16:24, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
I was specifically talking about your own suggestion for "the licence" (I think you meant ToU) where you used the word "glean" (Wiktionary: "To gather information in small amounts, with implied difficulty, bit by bit"), and I was merely adding ("Indeed") to the concerns that others had already raised about your this suggestion of yours. See the #Sui generis database rights section above for my more general questions about your apparent interpretations of the database rights issue. Regards, HaeB (talk) 17:52, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
No, I did indeed mean the Wikidata licence. On English Wikipedia, for example, the WMF added a little notice some time ago to the Edit window, saying: "You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license." This is in practice a slight modification of the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence, to make attribution less cumbersome for re-users. What I had in mind was that a similar note could be added to a CC BY-SA-licensed Wikidata as well, to specify a non-cumbersome method of attribution.
By "gleaning" I was simply referring to the activity of bots importing Wikipedia infobox contents, category systems, interwiki links and so forth. To glean = "to gather (something, such as information) bit by bit, to pick over in search of relevant material", per Merriam Webster. Andreas JN 466 00:27, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
Sorry, now you are suddenly talking about a CC BY-SA-licensed Wikidata, i.e. you propose to relicense all of Wikidata from CC0 to a CC BY-SA license? That wasn't on the agenda here and it's also not how one could have reasonably understood your original proposal above (The licence should require reusers ...).
But even setting that aside and assuming that you were instead talking about a project like Wikipedia whose (text) content is indeed under a CC BY-SA license, there seems to be a disconnect (probably also related to your fundamental misunderstanding about the difference between the 3.0 and 4.0 licenses regarding database rights). Sure, you could conceivably be right that adding such a little notice to the edit window amounted to making the content available under a license that is slightly more permissive than the CC BY-SA 3.0 license that is "officially" stated in the site footer (by allowing reuse with a form of attribution that would not be sufficient under the original license, if that is indeed the case). But we can't use that mechanism to make the license more restrictive by adding requirements such as your two bullet points. Regards, HaeB (talk) 09:28, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
That's what happens when you carry on a conversation spanning two sections. You asked me above what I'd want to be done about Wikidata. Given the "Share Alike" aspect of Wikipedia's licence, the Wikipedia and Wikidata licences would come to the same thing if the special waiver is rejected and Wikidata systematically extracts data from Wikipedia, as it surely has been doing.
So: A Wikipedia published under CC BY-SA 4.0 would require Wikidata to be published under the same licence, requiring attribution and Share Alike compliance. And the type of attribution required for Wikidata could be specified in a similar way to how the attribution burden was lightened through that edit notice for Wikipedia, so it does not become too cumbersome. It could perhaps be something as simple as displaying the phrase "Powered by Wikidata" to the end user, combined with a meaningful link to Wikidata. Don't you agree it would be worthwhile having our re-users acknowledge the vast community effort ("sweat of the brow" indeed ...) that went into these projects? Andreas JN 466 12:14, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
1. You continue to be fundamentally mistaken about the differences between 3.0 and 4.0, see my detailed explanation above.
2. I don't recall asking you would want to be done about Wikidata, that's a rather poor excuse for hijacking the conversation about this particular ToU change to advocate for your grand project of relicensing all of Wikidata over a decade after its launch. ...
3. ... Rather, I had asked you twice before to explain what you mean exactly by phrases like Wikidata systematically extracts data from Wikipedia or large-scale, systematic imports of data from Wikipedia. You have consistently failed to do so, not even providing just one concrete example. This makes it difficult to discuss how much these extracts might really be affected by legal restrictions (i.e. whether Wikidata has really been violating them for many years), and what the benefits and drawbacks of the proposed ToU update might be in that regard.
4. Your suggestion that attribution could perhaps be something as simple as displaying the phrase "Powered by Wikidata" is in stark contrast to your own claims above that lack of attribution for data(base) contributors to our projects like a government body or other organisation would be an end run around the actual intent of the 4.0 license, and a bullying move. So rather than a simple "Powered by Wikidata" label, under your own logic we would have to imagine that as such a reuser, one might have to display a list of possibly tens of thousands of past data donors to Wikidata, extracted from billions of Wikidata edits, so as to not "bully" some provincial European town who a decade ago uploaded a list of their council members or such.
Regards, HaeB (talk) 17:48, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
1. You are not listening. CC BY-SA 4.0 requires attribution in cases that were not (or weren't clearly) in the scope of CC BY-SA 3.0. You say those cases are meaningless because 3.0 did not licence re-use in those cases anyway. I say it is not meaningless, because 4.0 provides a new tool to demand attribution and sharing-alike in those cases which were previously uncovered by the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence. Having such a new tool seems valuable to me, given that there is a lack of readily available alternative means to demand attribution and sharing alike from re-users.
2. The questions you asked me above were, "Do you think that Wikidata has been (or is) in violation of database rights for Wikipedia, or not? If yes, what precisely is the "substantial part" being "harvested"? Also in that case, would you really prefer having to shut down Wikidata for legal reasons over going through with the proposed ToU update?"
3. I didn't answer because the question struck me as absurd. When I wrote that Whither Wikidata? piece in The Signpost, more than half of all citations in Wikidata were to Wikipedia (and phrased in the most generic way, i.e. "Italian Wikipedia", "English Wikipedia", without linking a specific article version of even a specific article, for that matter). These were all Wikipedia imports.
4. I said "Powered by Wikidata" combined with a meaningful link to Wikidata, just like the Google Knowledge Graph panel just displays the word "Wikipedia" with a relevant link. I am not interested in listing data contributors. I am interested in having us – the WMF and the community – find ways to enable users to track provenance, because I believe it's vitally important for a healthy and socially beneficial information ecosystem.
I think at this point I don't feel like discussing this topic with you any further. It seems to me we have exhausted the potential for any possible benefit to be derived from this discussion by either of us. This is not to say that I haven't derived any such benefit, just that the discussion has run its course. I thank you for your comments and hope you know that I value and appreciate your deep knowledge of Wikimedia affairs and their history. Regards, Andreas JN 466 21:12, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
For reference and clarity, the full text of this change in section 7 is:
Where you own Sui Generis Database Rights covered by CC BY-SA 4.0, you waive these rights. As an example, this means facts you contribute to the projects may be reused freely without attribution.
So first, the example sentence is, while technically accurate, a bit misleading IMHO: As discussed above, facts are not copyrightable and can thus already be reused freely without attribution except when they are covered by restrictions other than copyright, here database rights. These only come into play in special situations and certain countries, but not e.g. for almost all non-bot edits on Wikipedia, where this distinction is thus immaterial. It does seem that everyone in this thread is aware of this. But general readers of the ToU might well come away with the mistaken impression that facts would generally need to be attributed except for this waiving.
Anyway, wording issues about the example aside, the legal team gave a rationale for the first sentence at Terms_of_use/Creative_Commons_4.0/Legal_note#Waiving_database_rights and a blog post series linked there, which expands on the difficulties they want to avoid with this. (And no, porting of data from Wikipedia to Wikidata is not mentioned there as far as I can see.)
Regards, HaeB (talk) 09:28, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
The legal note says: The proposed amendment to the Terms of Use waives potential database rights (where applicable) covered by CC BY-SA 4.0 to keep barriers low when sharing information.
That's simply not achieved, not as long as reusers need to dig through all the history of an article in order to determine whether the content was imported (therefore the exemptions does not apply) or was otherwise created before or after the new ToS applies. This also raises the risk that the data will be reused in good faith without attribution and some rights holders will decide to enforce the license.
With all the dual licensing and such Wikipedia reuse is already a mess, why make it an even bigger one? Strainu (talk) 11:09, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
  1. ↑ See Database Directive art. 7(1), (2)(a). The term "quantitatively" "refers to the volume of data extracted from the database and/or reutilised, and must be assessed in relation to the volume of the contents of the whole of that database". The term "qualitatively" "refers to the scale of the investment in the obtaining, verification or presentation of the contents". Case C-203/02, Brit. Horseracing Bd. Ltd. & Others v. William Hill Org. Ltd, 2002 E.C.R. I-10415, §§ 70 et seq.
  2. ↑ Database Directive art. 7(5).

triggering of epilepsy: seriously?

"Posting or modifying content with the intention to seriously harm others, such as deliberate inducements to self-harm, or deliberate triggering of epilepsy." Unless it's some US norm saying that this text must be included in any ToU, this sentence sounds science fiction to me. I have very strong doubts that any text written on any Wikimedia projects would push someone to hurt himself. Any person able to self-control will not do self-harm (and the ones that cannot control themselves probably are on the wrong website).

Same for triggering epilepsy. It is written that some combination of images and sound (e.g. in videogames) have more chances to trigger epilepsy, but nothing coming from any media will trigger a crisis for sure. Thus this sentence has no sense.

I thus suggest to point to a different direction. What we want to avoid is to willingly posting of modifying content with the intention to seriously harm others, such as deliberately spread false information, or hateful contents. Manipulating information is central when we talk about hurting people, and protecting minorities. What is meaningless is try to prevent actions that have no scientific basis or that assume a very high level of stupidity from users. Ruthven (msg) 21:34, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

  • The epilepsy thing is a plausible hypothetical, but I agree it's an odd one. I would say the old English Wikipedia essay "Beans" applies to that one. "Deliberate inducements to self-harm" is an actual phenomenon that happens on nastier corners of the internet and in other settings, so it seems an applicable example. I don't think language specifically against "deliberately spread false information, or hateful contents" would cover anything not already in the UCOC, plus what constitutes "false" or purely "hateful" information is often hashed out in volunteer discussions, so dragging the WMF more directly into that would give them a greater role over content I don't think anyone is asking for. -136.56.145.246 22:27, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
    This aspect reads as specifically handled to handle directly injurious content - regarding inclusion, a reason is given in the about section. In terms of whether it actually happens, epilepsy charities deal with posted media attempts to do it all the time on their social media, and I believe an attempt was made in the last two years on en-wiki's epilepsy page. Guaranteed, not at all, even for the 3% of those with photoepilepsy, but wilful attempts are made.
    I'm also confused @Ruthven: by but nothing coming from any media will trigger a crisis for sure. Thus this sentence has no sense. - someone who posted a flashing media at a common photoepilepsy frequency on en:Photosensitive epilepsy without a reasonable legitimate reason has the intention to deliberately trigger a seizure - whether they succeed or not doesn't undermine their intention. So it remains coherent and retains its sense. Nosebagbear (talk) 23:37, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
    Just to add, re photoepilepsy triggering - those of you in the UK may have been following the Online Safety Bill debates, including this recent development: https://epilepsysociety.org.uk/what-we-do/campaigns/zachslaw . WP:BEANS is an important point to consider, though. We'll do so. PBradley-WMF (talk) 12:40, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
    Ok, Ok, if triggering epilepsy is plausible, then lets forbid it. But I feel that this is a matter that shouldn't be covered by the terms of use: posting a flashing media in order to trigger photoepilepsy would be out of the scope of the project anyways, and treated as a regular vandalism by our admins. In the same way, I reckon that inciting self-harm on Wikimedia pages is also completely absurd, and would be considered something close to a personal attack by the admins. The case of Conrad Roy, who was incited to kill himself by his girlfriend, is very specific, as its emotional context. Nothing to do with usual interactions among users (hopefully). Discussing suicide (or self-harm) on Wikimedia projects is just using the wrong platform. This is why I think that focusing on such specific aspects (that are already covered by other rules, the main one is "being in scope", which is already covered by 1. Our Services, 3. Content We Host and 4. Refraining from Certain Activities) "distracts" from what we really want to forbid. Namely: Uncivil interactions between users (already covered by previous points), and using the platform for attacking minorities (or any group in particular, it shouldn't be a minority finally). This is why I suggested to rephrase the sentence to aim at these aspects. Ruthven (msg) 13:19, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
    Sure, and the grounds of "it's already prohibited" is far more reasonable and I'd agree with it, if it hadn't been for the reasoning on the about page. Although other sections, too, would seem to cover the areas you note. Nosebagbear (talk) 15:26, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
  • I also thought it was weird, and also thought of beans. Bluerasberry (talk) 00:42, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

It might be helpful to give the respective explanation in the "About"-page a read on this matter: "[...] we added a line regarding contributing content that’s intentionally designed to hurt a reader such as by causing them to harm themselves or triggering an epileptic seizure. This was already prohibited under the more general terms, but we believe it is likely that upcoming laws, the UK Online Harms Act in particular, will require an explicit reference to this. DBarthel (WMF) (talk) 13:47, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

So what does this mean for Commons? I think we may have a couple of these flashing images somewhere. Do we need to delete them or can we keep them if they were not uploaded with the intention to trigger anyone (but to satisfy the curiosity of non-affected people)? --El Grafo (talk) 08:10, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Oxford comma, or lack thereof

Under Management of Websites, the new ToU lists "if such correspondence was made in bad faith, repetitive, unfounded, and/or abusive" but in most other places (such as "do not create an employment, agency, partnership, (追記) joint control (追記ここまで) or joint venture relationship" under Other terms) there is no Oxford comma. This is truly a trivial point but I do believe formatting should be be consistent within the document. Thanks, Novo Tape (talk) 21:44, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

  • In retrospect, I should probably add a list of examples on the revised ToU, so I will. Under the summary,it says "violate copyright, post illegal content or violate other laws" which is without an Oxford Comma. Ditto for "You adhere to the below Terms of Use, the Universal Code of Conduct and to the applicable community policies." Under overview, there is " contribute, monitor, or delete content" which does use an oxford comma."a contributor, editor, or author" It also says "posting, modifying or reusing" "medical, legal, or financial issues" "growth, development and distribution" "offensive, erroneous, misleading, mislabeled, or otherwise objectionable" "medical, legal, or financial issues" "threats, stalking, spamming,vandalism or harassment" "harassment, exploitation, or violation" "Knowingly accessing, tampering with, or using" "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" "page footer, page history, and discussion page" "availability, accuracy, or the related content, products, or services" "Detect, prevent, or otherwise address" "Refuse, revert, disable, or restrict access" "bad faith, repetitive, unfounded, and/or abusive" "be safe, secure, uninterrupted, timely, accurate, or error-free "directors, officers, employees, and agents" "direct, indirect, incidental, special, consequential or exemplary" "damages for loss of profits, goodwill, use, data, or other intangible losses" I believe these are all the instances where an Oxford comma should or should not have been used, depending on the guidelines. I retract my earlier statement and instead believe that an Oxford comma should be added to those few places where there is not one already. Novo Tape (talk) 21:33, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Automated Editing

With the rapidly increasing complexity of OpenAI type software, I think that not including a clause about disclosing the usage of such a program is a mistake. I also feel a clear distinction should be made between "using bots" and "using an OpenAI".

DarklitShadow (talk) 00:19, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

I don't see the need for using legal tools. Each Wikiproject should be able to make their own rules about what disclosure they require for AI usage. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 20:28, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Limitation on Liability

This is legal language capping lawsuit limitations at 1000ドル.

Something about this is not synced with other WMF legal programs, offers to help, and offers to intervene.

I can understand lawsuit limitations for readers being capped, but where the WMF, Wikipedia, and Wikipedia editors intersect, the editors have asked for and expected more WMF liability. Sometimes wiki editors have been harassed, exposed to violence, arrested, detained, or had other problems as a result of typical Wikipedia use. The Wikimedia Foundation has the Legal Fees Assistance Program to help with some of this - not the harassment part for example - and although the Wikimedia Foundation might be framing this as a possible favor to editors the Wikimedia community would like this as a commitment and liability from the WMF as an organization.

Going further - I think it is the case that sometimes WMF programs encourage Wikimedia community members to take risks and put themselves in harm's way by organizing Wikipedia programs and making themselves more visible than they might have done otherwise without WMF staff intervening in community activities. WMF's diversity programs especially, while well intentioned, do not have third party ethics oversight and may have different rates of attracting harassment than Wikimedia community organized outreach programs for the same demographics.

I wonder what the distinction is between the terms of use of Wikipedia as a website and WMF staff interventions with users of the website. With sites like Facebook and YouTube, their terms of use apply to a community in which almost none of the users interact with company staff. In Wikipedia a relatively high percentage of content contributors interact with WMF staff in personal ways. I routinely question the safety of WMF staff encouragement for users to do things that their peers would not recommend doing, like running outreach programs with higher risk of negative attention.

I am not a lawyer but I think the principle here is en:moral hazard. WMF is claiming a limitation on liability, while staff personally go into the platform and encourage users to increase their risk, and there is no community advocate reviewing the WMF interventions. When WMF staff encourage community to increase their risk then I wish there were another commitment somewhere that WMF increases their liability for such cases. Bluerasberry (talk) 01:04, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for flagging this concern Bluerasberry . I think in this case, you do actually have a misunderstanding of the relevant law here. The Terms of Use are the legal contract for people using the websites. A limitation of liability like this section protects the Foundation from legal claims arising from the sites as covered in these terms and makes the community editing model safer. Absent this kind of waiver, a reader or article subject could argue along the classic reliance on a windmill crankshaft case that they relied on something on Wikipedia under the ToU and then it changed or was deleted and it caused them harm. Nearly all contracts have a limitation of liability provision as a result of that case to make clear that some unknown reliance by others won't cause huge damages. If we didn't have a section like this, the risk is that the Foundation would have unexpected risk urgent situations where we'd have to intervene on project content to limit liability. On the other hand, the examples you give (legal fees assistance and staff-coordinated activity) aren't affected by this provision at all. They are separate legal issues not covered under the contract represented by the ToU. -Jrogers (WMF) (talk) 18:25, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
@Bluerasberry: where the WMF, Wikipedia, and Wikipedia editors intersect, the editors have asked for and expected more WMF liability - I don't recall seeing such demands, do you have links documenting such a community consensus about the need to be able to sue WMF for sums larger than 1000ドル? Regards, HaeB (talk) 09:36, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Mission

"We offer websites and technical infrastructure to help you do this."

The Wikimedia Foundation's current social infrastructure is vast and highly influential. I wish that social infrastructure were invested in the Wikimedia community Global Council and I interpret this statement to be thoughtful in limiting the Wikimedia Foundation to technical infrastructure as it moves away from social infrastructure.

Comments on why social infrastrucure is not mentioned here? Specifically, is this thoughtfully and intentionally phrased to focus on technical infrastructure? Bluerasberry (talk) 01:09, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

The intent behind this is simple: the 2012 language mentioned "websites" but not APIs. The APIs are now increasingly important ways that knowledge on the projects is transmitted. As a result, the "technical infrastructure" addition is a nod to the other mentions of the API later in the document. It is definitely not intended as a comment on any of the social structures the Foundation supports or the Global Council. SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 01:27, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Refraining from Certain Activities, removal of reference to information being false

Seems strange and counterproductive to remove "that is false or inaccurate" from the subsection "Engaging in False Statements, Impersonation, or Fraud" - especially since that was the only use of the word "false" in the very section addressing false statements. Mahonhughes (talk) 01:20, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

This is spread out over too many documents

In particular the many newly inserted references to a "Universal Code of Conduct" would require someone to navigate back and forth far to many times to figure out what the rules actually are. Get rid of UCoC and just say what the rules are all in one place. --ManaUser (talk) 07:10, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

I do agree that UCoC should be direct attached to document or ask the reader to read UCoC before read this document Meganinja202 (talk) 07:52, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
Worth noting if you were taking this position (I don't render a viewpoint either way), you'd also need to include things like the office action policy and the privacy policy within it Nosebagbear (talk) 15:30, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Licensing and attribution of Wikisource translations

In 2018 a very substantial translation of mine, bearing my real name, was deleted from Wikisource, without my being contacted, because it bore a GFDL license rather than a CC BY-SA 3.0 or 4.0 license.

If 3.0 licenses are discontinued in favor of 4.0 + GFDL, will provision be made to automatically upgrade current 3.0 pages to 4.0 + GFDL, so that more pages are not deleted without the authors' knowledge; or at least to notify the authors of planned deletions?

Is there a way I could consult appropriate staff about any possibility of restoring my deleted page? When I contacted a Wikisource staffer, I was informed that its resuscitation would require substituting "Translated by Wikisource" in place of my real name. I'm willing to contribute Wikipedia texts anonymously, but I feel that translators should, if they wish to, be allowed to contribute translations to Wikisource under their real names, and I would be glad to present my arguments for that.

Could I please be contacted at my Wikipedia talk page, if there should be any responses to my questions?

Thank you.

Nihil novi (talk) 07:42, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Some Questions and feedback of mine

Questions 1- In overview, what would be a "urgent threats of serious harm" ? Also, I find this part very vague and TOO MUCH open to interpretation, i think it should be more objective and clear, to avoid unfair decisions

Feedback: 1- In overview, "we generally require that all content" should be kept

2- in 1a, users like yourself should be keept or edited so the friendly part of text is kept

3- In 1b, keep WMF I think that it is clearer this way

4- In 10,

We reserve the right to suspend (temporarily, or permanently)

Please, Remove permanently or make the language more clear about the theme, WMF should never leave the door open to turn off the possibility to future FAIR questions or responses to reports, as it is right now, I fear it would open door to unfair and authoritarian decisions in the future

If anything be free to talk with me in my Wiklipedia Page or replying this, also have a nice day Meganinja202 (talk) 08:01, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

I agree with all of this. Carpimaps (talk) 10:13, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the feedback here, we can look back through some of the small changes. The last point about being able to refuse to receive reports is actually in the Digital Services Act. It's something it allows any web host to do whether we put it in the ToU or not, primarily to protect against repeat spammers and bad faith requesters. The Foundation does, unfortunately, receive emails like that, where someone tries to lie to us repeatedly to change something they don't like. The purpose of the language in the ToU is to inform people about how it works so they know not to send spam or fraudulent demands. -Jrogers (WMF) (talk) 17:58, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
I agree with all of this Kalesh (talk) 15:20, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Full support for move to CC-BY-SA-4.0

I offer full support for the move from Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0 to CC-BY-SA-4.0. For some background on my thinking, please see:

  • Morrison, Robbie (February 2023). "Which open data license?". openmod forum. Open Energy Modelling Initiative. Retrieved 2021年05月06日.  Evolving blog.

In particular, version 4.0 of that license provides much better legal provisions for data and datasets than version 3.0.

The remainder of the changes all look very sensible too. Good luck. RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 08:36, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

@RobbieIanMorrison Thanks, interesting. What do you make of the waiver that the WMF would like to add to its Terms of Use when 4.0 is adopted? (The proposed wording is "Where you own Sui Generis Database Rights covered by CC BY-SA 4.0, you waive these rights. As an example, this means facts you contribute to the projects may be reused freely without attribution.") Would it impact provenance tracking? Would it impact the ability to import data from EU databases? Regards, Andreas JN 466 14:02, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

Minor copyedit

In section 4, the first list reads as:

Engaging in harassment, threats, stalking, spamming, or vandalism or harassment as described in the UCoC;

Transmitting chain mail, junk mail, or spam to other users.

Posting or modifying content with the intention to seriously harm others, such as deliberate inducements to self-harm, or deliberate triggering of epilepsy.

The second full stop should be changed to another semicolon Grimmchild (talk) 09:22, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

vollkommen unverständlicher Passus / completely incomprehensible passage

Dieser Passus ist vollkommen neu in den Benutzerrichtlinien:

> (追記) Unbefugtes Hochladen von technischen Ressourcen Dritter (追記ここまで)
> * (追記) Hochladen von technischen Ressourcen Dritter unter Verstoß gegen die „Richtlinie zu Ressourcen Dritter", die von den technischen Teams der Foundation verwaltet wird. (追記ここまで)

Der Autor/Übersetzer verkennt hier vollkommen, was für einen Otto-Normalwikipedianer verstehbar ist. Letzterer hat vielleicht mit Mühe gelernt, dass man Text bei Wikipedia "Bearbeiten" kann. Schließlich klickt er auf den so bezeichneten Button. Ob es jedem klar ist, wenn das als "Hochladen" bezeichnet wird, kann bezweifelt werden. Manche wissen zudem, dass Hochladen auch für Bilder, Audios und Videos geht. Aber warum erklärt der Autor nicht für jeden verstehbar, was er unter technischen Ressourcen versteht und wie man die bei Wikipedia hochladen kann? Nur wenn man weiß und versteht, was nicht erlaubt ist, kann man es vermeiden. Offenbar war der Autor des Abschnittes noch nie auf einem Stammtisch mit Normalwikipedianern oder ist Coder und kann sich nicht in jemand hinein versetzen, der das nicht ist. Tirkon (talk) 11:39, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

This passage is all new in the Terms of Use:

:> (追記) Unauthorized uploading of third-party technical resources. (追記ここまで) ::> (追記) Uploading third party technical resources in violation of the "Third Party Resources Policy" managed by the Foundation technical teams. (追記ここまで)

The author/translator completely misses the point here, what is comprehensible to the Average Joe Wikipedian. The latter may have learned with some effort that one can "edit" text on Wikipedia. After all, he clicks the so designated button. Whether it is clear to everyone that this is called "uploading" can be doubted. Some also know that uploading also works for images, audios and videos. But why doesn't the author explain in a way that everyone can understand what he means by technical resources and how to upload them to Wikipedia? Only if you know and understand what is not allowed, you can avoid it. Obviously the author of the section has never been to a meeting with regular wikipedians or is a coder and can't put himself in the shoes of someone who isn't. ) Tirkon (talk) 11:39, 23 February 2023 (UTC), translated by DBarthel (WMF) (talk) 11:33, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Otto-Normalwikipedianer liest sich ja auch üblicherweise die Nutzungsbedingungen durch und wundert sich darüber, dass er Begriffe darin nicht versteht. ToBeFree (talk) 17:45, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
The Average Joe Wikipedian usually reads through the terms of use and is surprised that he does not understand terms in it too. ToBeFree (talk) 17:45, 23 February 2023 (UTC), translated by DBarthel (WMF) (talk) 11:33, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
I'm sorry this section was confusing. We had noted concern about it from some comments above as well and are currently looking at how we can rephrase it to be more clear. -Jrogers (WMF) (talk) 18:02, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
Es tut mir leid, wenn dieser Abschnitt verwirrend war. Wir haben auch in ein paar Kommentaren oben Bedenken dazu gefunden und prüfen gerade, wie wir ihn umformulieren können, um ihn klarer zu machen. Jrogers (WMF) (talk) 18:02, 24 February 2023 (UTC), translated by DBarthel (WMF) (talk) 11:13, 27 February 2023 (UTC) @Tirkon, @ToBeFree

The cancel of the alternative disclosure policy page

In a nutshell: Removing the need for a decision to turn a local paid contribution policy into an alternative policy explicitly and specifying it on a dedicated page, may change the status of those that have not been defined in this way until now.

Hello, I would like to point out a problematic change.
In the proposed change, it is suggested that the following condition be removed from the terms of use:

(削除) 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. (削除ここまで)

Currently, (at least on the Hebrew Wikipedia) there is local paid contribution policy. The policy was not defined as an alternative paid contribution policy, and were not listed on the alternative disclosure policy page. It is only an additional local policy that the community has defined like any other local policy, so it has never been determined that it will replace the policy of Wikimedia Foundation from the terms of use.
Removing the quoted sentence as currently proposed may retroactively change the status of such policies, prevent them from adding to the terms of use without detracting anything, and causing them to override the terms of use from now on, without the community determining that it is interested in this. —מקף−ණ‎‏ (Hyphen) 14:36, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

حذف کلمات انگلیسی، عربی و بیگانه

در ویکی پدیا پارسی کلماتی بیگانه وجود دارد که معادل برای مثال شرح=توضیح، منبع=سرچشمه و غیره. حتی کلمه‌ی فارسی درست نیست و پارسی درست است که شما میتوانید با یک جست‌وجوی ساده به آن پی ببرید. من درخواست دارم تمام این‌گونه کلمات حذف شوند و معادل پارسی آن جایگزین شود و به بنده کمک شود. Amz86 (talk) 14:54, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

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.

One of the concerns I had when this was implemented was that someone checking whether a given edit was paid needs to check all three locations because of the "at least" requirement. Could the WMF elaborate on whether this is still fit for purpose, and if so explain why? MER-C 17:29, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Interesting. Would you say that requiring disclosure in all three places would meaningfully relieve burden on editors checking for disclosures? SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 22:20, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
Not just editors, but also the public. This is important information for determining the trustworthiness of Wikipedia content. In addition, there have been anecdotes of paid editors removing disclosures from their user pages months after the edits were made. MER-C 11:31, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
Thanks. That's really useful information. SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 16:33, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
I would give a big +1 to this. HouseBlaster (talk) 20:53, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
Agree with MER-C as well. Andreas JN 466 14:33, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
Totally agree with MER-C. Perhaps we could also add that every account used for paid editing should be of the form User:Example (PAID). In general, I don't see paid editors complying with the requirements as stated, and those that do "disclose" do so in a very confusing or incomplete way. Smallbones (talk) 19:49, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
Interesting. Community local policies would need to be updated should this be enforceable in the context of on-wiki contributions.
That said, in theory if rules like that were in place, it does create a bright line that would give editors and readers much less work to review contributions for proper disclosure.
When we present the revised text, I've made a note to myself to see if there's any way to deal with "incomplete or confusing" disclosures within the limited scope of the TOU. SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 20:36, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
The easiest way to deal with this would be the following text"

You must make that disclosure in (削除) at least one of (削除ここまで) the following ways:

  • a statement on your user page,
  • a statement on the talk page accompanying any paid contributions, (削除) or (削除ここまで) and
  • a statement in the edit summary accompanying any paid contributions.

The individual projects should then be able to introduce the User:Example (PAID) as an equivalent acceptable way of more conveniently doing the same thing. It would also get rid of the problem of undeclared (and almost undeclareable) paid IP editing. Smallbones (talk) 03:28, 2 March 2023 (UTC)


Is there any evidence that this part of the Terms of use has improved the quality of participation in the wikis? Nemo 06:59, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

I have found frequent occasion to refer to its language in dealing with paid editors, and would find it much simpler to spot snd explain if all 3 were required./ DGG (talk) 10:04, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Also agree with this. The problem for a reader is that they need to check three different locations - page history, page talk and the user page of each contributor - to determine if an article has involved paid editing. The only place they are likely to check is the page talk, if that, so mostly they won't realise. From an editor's perspective, knowning that a particular edit was paid for is helpful, especially if you are otherwise unaware that the editor is paid, because if it wasn't mentioned there you would need to check the userpage and the article talk page to find out, and thus it is likely to be missed. From an admin's perspective, having a list of pages that were edited for pay on the user page gives a very useful overview - otherwise, once again, you need to check every article talk page they have edited or look at their list of contributions and try to find it in there. Having all three covers all three use cases. - Bilby (talk) 22:36, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Licensing change in overview

In the Overview section, there’s a change:

[...] (削除) we generally require that all (削除ここまで) content you contribute is (追記) made (追記ここまで) available under a free license or (削除) in (削除ここまで) (追記) released in (追記ここまで) the public domain.

This is

  • confusing. [C]ontent you contribute is made available under a free license or in released in the public domain – which one? How do I know whether content I contribute will be made available under a free license or it will be released in the public domain?
  • I think legally problematic. Now you don’t require that content is available under a free license, but rather you make it available under a free license, whether its copyright owner did so previously or not. What happens legally if they didn’t?

Tacsipacsi (talk) 02:12, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

Minor consistency and formatting notes

  • The summary includes the full email info@wikimedia.org, section 10 contains info[at]wikimedia.org, and section 8 info(_AT_)wikimedia.org.
  • Section ten states Detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, false or unverifiable information security, or technical issues [...]. I think a comma is missing and the passage is intended to read Detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, false or unverifiable information, security, or technical issues [...].
  • Section 7(c) is set to read in part in such case you warrant that the text is available under terms that are compatible with CC BY-SA (or, as explained above, another license when exceptionally required by the Project edition or feature). This sounds ungrammatical to me. Maybe something more like this is intended: in such cases you warrant that the text is available under terms that are compatible with CC BY-SA license (or, as explained above, another license when exceptionally required by the Project edition or feature).
  • The terms editor and author are removed from the Our Terms of Use, but are set to still appear in the Overview section (join as a contributor, editor, or author, a team of contributors, editors or authors. Sections 1, 4, 7 are also set to still use the term editor as well. Sections 7 is set to still use the term author

—The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 08:25, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

Accidently submitted early, here are two more notes:
  • The phrase licensed or qualified is removed from the overview, but still appears in section 3.
  • The phrase live or where you view or edit content is removed from the overview, but still appears in sections 1 and 4.
—The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 08:29, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

Commons and paid editing

  1. I see that "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" has been struck, but "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" remains. I can't make sense of how that affects Commons, which does not currently require disclosure of paid editing. What is the intent here, and what problem is being solved by striking that sentence?
  2. The new text, "In addition, if you make a public posting on a third-party service advertising editing services on Wikipedia in exchange for pay, you must disclose what Wikipedia accounts you will use for this service in the public posting on the third-party service": is this intended to be specific to Wikipedia (as against other WMF projects) or was that just sloppy wording?
Jmabel (talk) 20:41, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
1. Commons is one of the largest projects with a distinct policy that does not require disclosure. We want to honor that. If a marketing company is following the rules of the project, we want to make it clear that they're not violating the TOU by doing so. Said differently, imagine that there are (1) on-wiki project rules, and (2) the terms of use. A bad actor may violate one or both. With that remaining language we want to say that should a company act in a way that seems like a violation of #2 (TOU), but it turns out to acceptable under #1 (local community rules), then we won't consider it as a violation of the TOU.
2. In drafting, we have tried to narrow the scope as much as possible before presenting this to the community. We want to make sure that the community is on board with the minimal amount of changes to achieve the maximal effect. The vast majority of systematic UPE problems relate to Wikipedia (especially because, as you noted, Commons has less strict policies). So we limited it to the more clear and present issue. If you support broadening the language to (for example, "Wikimedia projects") then that'd be a good point to know. SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 18:18, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
  • @SSpalding (WMF): it's mostly that from a Commons point of view, these changes have been very confusing. People there thought the striking of "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" meant that Commons no longer could have such an alternative policy. Glad to see that they were wrong. - 07:18, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

Avoiding violate

Can we get rid of the term violate, please? To my mind, it supports a strongly legislative moralism point of view. As if law was always legitimate, and not blindly following law was necessarily an infamous act made through bodily or mental violence, which is always comparable to rape in term of gravity and ignominy.

Skimming through the already present comments, I see that how some references to totalitarian states, so I guess that by now arguments were already well exposed to express a divergent theory that, yes, law can be the illegitimate tool of perfidious oppression.

I see the term infringe was already mentioned in discussions too, but I think contravene would be a better option here. Psychoslave (talk) 22:44, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

Click "help" on the left side of most pages

Actually, we don't know if the user is gonna click a mouse, touch the smartphone screen or press entry on its keyboard after due keyboard focus.

Let's put apart that in left-to-right languages, your link might just as well be on the right side, translators might think about it after all. Still, we don't know what skin the user prefers, or if the user is actually using a screen reader for which case spatial orientation is meaningless.

As an alternative Follow the link labelled "help" which is present in the main menu of most pages could do the trick. Psychoslave (talk) 22:54, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

API Terms, "..which are incorporated into these Terms of Use by reference"

The proposed TOU incorporates 3 wiki pages by reference. Will any editing restrictions be placed on those pages as a result? Obviously someone shouldn't be able to vandalize the page and that automatically be part of the TOU, but I think requiring any change to those pages require going to a burdensome review process (vaguely defined) would be pretty annoying. Legoktm (talk) 05:06, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Relatedly, there's supposedly a project to improve API policy documentation, is that supposed to be done before the TOU update and supersede the 3 listed policies? Mostly asking because the linked Robot policy especially needs some work, so it would be nice to know whether myself and hopefully others should continue working on improving it. Legoktm (talk) 05:17, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
@Legoktm I just responded on Phabricator, but your observations there were correct about the wording. It's unclear whether or not efforts will be made to reconcile API related policies into one page or continue with the different pages, some of which are referenced in the TOU. It seems like many of the API related policy documents are older and need some work to align them with current norms.
For the purposes of the TOU language, we just wanted to be as explicit as possible as to what would constitute a policy so we included the three pages that we did as examples. SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 18:33, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

API Terms, "...to enable users to build products that promote free knowledge"

I don't see why the API users' intent needs to be stated, my impression we don't really care what people do with the data they get from us, provided they comply with the CC license terms.

Like, if I created a hypothetical app that used the API to pull snippets of factual errors in Wikipedia articles and compared them to a paper encyclopedia in order to disparage Wikipedia and free knowledge rather than promoting it, I think we would be OK with that and not consider it a misuse of our APIs? Legoktm (talk) 05:14, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

I don't think this refers to the users intent, but the intent of those that created the API: "We make available a set of APIs to enable users to build products that promote free knowledge.". If the terms forbade what you could use the API for, that could be considered non-free.
As-is, this seems an empty description. It could as well say: "We make available a set of APIs that enable Weapons of mass destruction to query Wikipedia".
Although not really harmful, I do agree that such part should probably be removed. Moreover, I don't think it is accurate. If I remember right, the API was not made "to enable users to build products that promote free knowledge", but to make the life easier for developers of client/bots (that already existed, but used the more cumbersome GUI), MediaWiki developers (which could then more easily change the interface without breaking bots) and, much more recently, even the software itself (core or extensions), that now use the API, too.
Yurik or Roan might want to provide more historical context.
Platonides (talk) 21:08, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

"all of the content" -> "the vast majority of the encyclopedic content"

Re this:

We do not take an editorial role: Because the Wikimedia Projects are collaboratively edited, (追記) the vast majority (追記ここまで) (削除) all (削除ここまで) of the (追記) encyclopedic (追記ここまで) content that we host is provided by users (削除) like yourself (削除ここまで), and we do not take an editorial role.

I am concerned by this change. The WMF does not write any part of any of the content pages on the wikis, all is written by volunteers. Why is a change being made that seems to imply that it might no longer be the case? --Yair rand (talk) 07:38, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Agreed. The impression generated is that some of the encyclopedia content is not generated by users but by the WMF. What is the thinking behind that proposed change? Andreas JN 466 14:40, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
I would expect that point of the change is to prevent someone to argue in court that WMF violated the terms because there's some content that a WMF employee contributed somewhere to which someone could refer in court. I think it makes sense to write a Terms of Use with possible court cases in mind, so that change seems fine. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 14:45, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
But the statement says that content comes from "users" which would include WMF employees who are also users, yes? If taken literally, the current wording does not exclude WMF employees from editing content, but merely means that in doing so, they are not acting in their capacity as employees of WMF. The proposed change does give the impression that WMF intends to contribute, as an organization, to the encyclopedic content. Ashorocetus (talk) 15:59, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
Based on previous suggestions from earlier discussions, the most likely updated language will be "Because the Wikimedia Projects are collaboratively edited, the vast majority of the content that we host is provided by users, and we do not take an editorial role." This omits the word "encyclopedic." Based on previous feedback, we agreed it was unnecessarily confusing since there are projects that aren't encyclopedic but are hosted where we don't take an editorial role. SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 18:41, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
SSpalding (WMF): That leaves the question – What content is not provided by users?
The WMF occasionally uploads its own internal documents, logos, etc., but I would argue that this is not "content" in the sense implied here. I would propose the following wording for 1a:
a. We do not take an editorial role: The Wikimedia Projects are collaboratively edited, and the content we host is provided by users. This means that we generally do not monitor or edit the content of the Project websites, and we do not take any responsibility for this content. ...
That's unless there is a WMF-sourced content category I've missed, in which case could you please give some examples? Regards, Andreas JN 466 12:49, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
With the edit ommitting the word "encyclopedic," I hope it's now more clear that we are referring to all content that the Foundation hosts on its servers (which includes Meta wiki). So a good example of content that we edit which has not provided by users is this post here -- which is written by me, a staff member. 🙃 Other examples contest rules for logo contests. It also includes the internal documents, logo, etc that you mention since that is also material that resides on our servers that we host that Foundation staff put there. These are edge cases and we are using the term content broadly. But that's also why the suggested re-wording is currently written as, "the vast majority of the content that we host is provided by uses." SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 15:17, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
Yes, come to think of it, there is MediaWiki as well, for example, where Foundation staff are major contributors obviously.
The Overview at the beginning of the ToU states: Generally we do not contribute, monitor, or delete content (with rare exceptions, such as under policies like these Terms of Use or legal compliance, or when faced with urgent threats of serious harm). This means that editorial control is in the hands of you and your fellow users who create and manage the content.
So given that context I'm inclined to say we're good. Thanks! Andreas JN 466 15:45, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

What is meant by "false or unverifiable" in section 10?

The change would read "In such cases, we reserve the right, at our sole discretion (or where legally compelled) to... Detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, false or unverifiable information security, or technical issues or respond to user support requests;"

Is "false or unverifiable information" meant to stand on its own or is it part of "false or unverifiable information security"? If the former, there should be a comma after "unverifiable". If the latter, I do not know what that would mean.

In the former case, does this give WMF authority to arbitrate what is "false"? How does this square with the principle of verifiability, not truth? Ashorocetus (talk) 16:12, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Mer tekst som ikke er oversatt

På Wikipedia på bokmål har vi allerede en lenke til Bruksvilkår som ikke er oversatt, dvs. at den er på engelsk. Nå skal denne allerede lange erklæringen bli enda lengre.

Det er vel og bra, og sikkert svært gode grunner til det, men mitt enkle spørsmål til Wikimedia Foundation er dette: hvordan henger en slik lang tekst, ikke oversatt, sammen med ønsket om å få flere bidragsytere? Dersom det er et krav at man må kunne engelsk for å kunne bidra til Wikipedia, bør ikke det også legges inn i teksten? Ulflarsen (talk) 12:23, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

You point has been heard and noted. We are an international project and each language supports the greater whole, so your critique is valid. Here are some steps WMF has taken or plans to take to promote understandability across languages.
For this terms of use consultation, WMF translated the terms into approximately 8 languages other than English. These languages represent a cross section of the most spoken languages in the world and on-wiki. After the consultation process is over, the final text will likely be translated by the Foundation into around that number as well. From what I understand, this represents more official translations than the existing terms of use. Additionally, all communities are invited to make unofficial translations as well into their own languages of the whole document or just the most important provisions. Finally, machine translations are better than ever (which is one of the reasons I am able to reply to your comment 🙂).
We are open to suggestions though, so if you believe that the machine translation ecosystem is not robust for Norwegian, or that average Norwegians may not be able to avail themselves of other language translations (e.g. German, French, Spanish), or that your community wouldn't have the capacity to create its own unofficial translations into Norwegian in the future, then feel free to let us know. There is always a potential to add new languages to our official translation list if there's an overwhelming need to do so. I'm not familiar enough with Norwegian to know these things, but I am willing to learn. Thanks for your feedback. SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 15:47, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
To SSpalding (WMF): There are of course not "an overwhelming need to do so" (to quote you), as Norwegians managed in many years with encyclopedias on Norwegian, that the ones who could afford it paid for, and the rest could read in libraries. We also have the Great Norwegian Encyclopedia, free of charge. But if we in spite of that think that it could be of use having versions of Wikipedia in Norwegian (that is Nynorsk and Bokmål), then the user terms and related texts, in my opinion, must be in Norwegian. If not, how am I to encourage someone to volunteer as a contributor, when they can not even read such basic documents in their own language? Ulflarsen (talk) 17:00, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
To answer more generally for both you and others who represent Wikipedia's with languages that we may not do official translations for, I would say the best way to do this would be, (1) encourage the potential contributor to use machine translation; or (2) determine if there are any volunteers in your language community who can hand translate either the TOU or just the public explainer document describing the changes; or (3) reach out to WMF movement communications about the problem should neither of these two options be available; or (4) request a grant from the Foundation to subsidize a translation (either encourage the local chapter to do so, or do so as an individual). As an example, there are languages like Catalan where machine translation is still rather buggy, so an option like #3 wouldn't be available there.
Unfortunately, this is not a problem that is unique to this specific TOU updates. Even with the current terms, there are not hand translations for every project language. This something we are attempting to address with the resources we have available to do so. Your feedback helps that. SSpalding (WMF) (talk) 23:13, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

Attribution variants explanation

Please add explanations about possible and wrong ways of how attribution of imported text can be made (dummy edits, face templates, talk templates, etc.). ToU says about sufficient attribution in edit summary, but many projects use talk page templates for attribution (edit summaries could be empty), even without links to concrete edits. Talk page templates can't be used as attribution according to the "(since each article has a history page that lists all authors and editors)" ToU claim with exception if edit summary directly refers to the talk page for attribution. D6194c-1cc (talk) 14:32, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

Prohibited use of quotations

In the Proposed update, I don't see addressed the problem of the apparent prohibition of the use of quotations from (non-free) content, not published under a licence compatible with Wikipedia, and the apparent systematic violation of this term on several wikis, including the en-wiki, through the right to quote. (see the item on top of this page and this 2011 article, in Dutch ). --Wickey (talk) 15:51, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

Child sexual abuse

Do pictures like commons:File:Martin Van Maele - La Grande Danse macabre des vifs - 13.jpg violate new variant of ToU? Does this image meet the child sexual abuse criteria? This picture had been proposed for deletion as child pornography, but was kept reasoning that is not a child pornography. I tried to remove this image from Russian wikipedia, but my edit was cancelled and administrators didn't see anything wrong with the picture (it was removed from the page afterwards). But this picture is still present in other language Wikipedia projects, and I think it must be removed. If ToU would allow deletion of this image, it would be great. D6194c-1cc (talk) 17:43, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

I'd guess you are referring to the ToU wording
"Posting child pornography or any other content that violates applicable law concerning child pornography or child sexual abuse material;"
The 1905 drawing isn't pornography in any modern sense of the word IMHO. So does this "violate applicable law concerning ... child sexual abuse material"? I don't know - you'd need to know that law very well. But since it is not a realistic drawing, and both people are fully clothed, and the abuse is more hinted at than displayed, I'd think not. Since this might vary by local laws and community sensitivities, it's likely that the matter would have to be decided by local projects by consensus rather than by the ToU. Smallbones (talk) 03:07, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
The men is not fully clothed. As I think this image is sexual perversion with child, and ToU must cover such cases, too. Some related information: en:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-02-20/Cobwebs, https://web.archive.org/web/20120426201501/https://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/05/10/porn-wikipedia-illegal-content-remains/. D6194c-1cc (talk) 08:11, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
The terms of use do cover this - images depicting the sexual abuse of children in a manner contrary to relevant laws are prohibited. Whether a specific image does or does not fall under the definition of "child sexual abuse material" is not a matter for the terms of use - it's also worth noting that different jurisdictions have a wide range of different definitions of what is and isn't child sexual abuse, especially when it comes to drawings rather than photographs. Thryduulf (talk: meta · en.wp · wikidata) 10:07, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

I'm comfortable with this text

I don't think WMF will ever be able to cover all conceivable conflicts we might get involved in. So neither the current version of the Terms of Use, nor the proposed version, nor any other future version will be found to be perfect. It's likely to be subject to revision from time to time. I'm comfortable with the proposed text. My suggestion would be to adopt this text. My thanks to the people who drafted this text and to the contributors who took time to read and comment on it. MartinD (talk) 08:59, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Reminder: Office hours about updating the Wikimedia Terms of Use soon!

Hello everyone,

The first office hours with community members about updating the Wikimedia Terms of Use are happening soon!

It will be held in a few hours from now, March 2, from 17:00 UTC to 18:30 UTC. See for more details and the link to the meeting here on Meta.

Another office hours will be held on April 4.

We hereby kindly invite you to participate in the discussion. Please note that this meeting will be held in English language and led by the members of the Wikimedia Foundation Legal Team, who will take and answer your questions. Facilitators from the Movement Strategy and Governance Team will provide the necessary assistance and other meeting-related services.

On behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Legal Team, DBarthel (WMF) (talk) 09:36, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

AltStyle によって変換されたページ (->オリジナル) /