Talk:Terms of use

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If you were wondering what this page is about...

Below is a copy of the announcement from the mailing lists by the Wikimedia Foundation General Counsel:

---

Hi,

In the legal department at the Wikimedia Foundation, we have been examining for some time whether, as the 5th largest website in the world, we need a new terms of use agreement. Given our size and the need to ensure good communication with our users, I think we do, so we’ve put ourselves to drafting a new version with the hopes that we could get your review, comments, and ideas.

• You can find the current version of our terms of use here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_use .
• You can view the new draft here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_use

As I see it, right now our present terms of use is not much more than a licensing agreement. It does not address a number of other subjects that are normally found in terms of use of other community-driven websites and that are often relevant for both legal and community reasons. See, as examples, the Mozilla Terms of Use (http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Terms%20of%20Service) and Creative Commons Terms of Use (https://creativecommons.org/terms) .

What we would like to do is to invite you to read the draft, reflect on it, and leave your comments and feedback on the discussion page. We plan to leave this version up for at least 30 days; indeed, a 30-day comment period for changes is built into the new draft.

Our plan is to review the comments and feedback, make appropriate changes and edits, return with a revised version, and, if appropriate, propose that draft to the Board of Trustees for adoption and translation.

Generally, we sought to craft a document that is more even-handed, shorter, and easier-to-read than most user agreements. Although we encourage you to read the entire draft, here are some key provisions to give you some flavor:

• Security: The proposed agreement prohibits a number of actions - like malware - that could compromise our systems. We thought we should be clear as to what is unacceptable in this area, though most of these restrictions will not be surprising.
• Roles and responsibilities: We feel we need to be honest with the community on a number of issues, including user liability. We have heard a number of community members asking for guidance on this topic. The proposed agreement also seeks to provide guidelines to help users avoid trouble.
• Community feedback: With this version, and with each major revision afterwards, we want the community to be involved … obviously. So the proposed agreement gives users a 30-day comment period before a major revision goes into effect (with Board approval). There is a 3-day exception for urgent legal and administrative changes.
• Free Licensing: We felt our present agreement is somewhat confusing on the free licensing requirements. The proposed agreement attempts to explain more clearly those requirements for editors.
• Harassment, threats, stalking, vandalism, and other long-term issues: The proposed agreement would make clear that such acts are prohibited. Novel for us, the agreement also raises the possibility of a global ban for extreme cross-wiki violations, a need that we have heard expressed from a number of community members. We will share that policy with the community in draft form shortly. Dealing with such matters is a process that we hope volunteers will continue to lead on a day-to-day basis.
• Other Legal Provisions: We do have other legal provisions...we are lawyers after all. Most notably, the proposed agreement incorporates legal sections that are commonly used to help safeguard a site like ours, such as disclaimers and limitations on liability.

Thank you in advance for your review and comments. Your input will be invaluable.

Geoff

____________

Reasons for the New Terms of Use

In the below discussion, some folks have asked me to explain in more detail, beyond my email, why we need a user agreement, which, of course, I’m happy to do. To start, I want to underscore a couple of points. First, a user agreement should serve as a guide to new editors and readers (as well as the rest of the Community). It should help newbies understand the basic rules of the game and their responsibilities. It is only fair notice, and it reflects our commitment to transparency. When people understand the rules, when they understand their responsibilities, the experience is likely to be a better one for the reader and user as well as the Community. To be sure, not everyone reads the user agreement, but many do. And, when there are questions, it is always there as a reference to guide and advise.

Second, a lot of this falls into the category of “an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure.” There is a reason that every other website of our size has a (much more extensive and shockingly one-sided) terms of use: a little bit of legal language can go a long way in keeping an organization out of court. Indeed, we see more extensive terms of use than our present one on websites that share values of openness and community. See, as examples, the Mozilla Terms of Use (http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Terms%20of%20Service) and Creative Commons Terms of Use (https://creativecommons.org/terms) .

These terms of use are useful in preventing the frivolous lawsuits that could otherwise hit hard an organization’s budget; an issue that is especially relevant for a non-profit. Just because a lawsuit lacks basis doesn’t mean we don’t still have to hire a lawyer to go to court to defend us, and, if there’s one thing lawyers are known for, it’s that their costs add up fast.

Wikipedia and our other sites are really big now. This is something to rejoice and be proud of – you, as well as everyone who has contributed over the years, have done a great job building this amazing site while promoting an incredible mission! But being large means you have to protect yourself, your infrastructure, and your Community.

That said, let me take a stab at explaining some of the more specific reasons for the proposed terms of use:

1. A good description of our services (Sec. 1) reinforces to third parties, potential litigants, and courts what is a known and important fact about our operation: Wikimedia is a hosting site, entitled to legal immunity under U.S. and some foreign law. We constantly receive threats of lawsuits, but, after we explain our hosting site immunity, most of those threats go away. If we do go to litigation, and we sometimes do, courts are receptive to our hosting status position. The proposed language in the user agreement is not essential, but it can help persuade a foreign court that we are hosting content where the local law is unclear. In short, it reduces costs: We operate on a small budget, and every time we can persuade a lawyer not to sue us or a court to support us, that means more money to support the Community mission.

2. The user agreement helps new users see comprehensively the most important policies governing our site, like the Privacy Policy (Sec. 2), Board resolutions (Sec. 11), and Community policies (Sec. 11). It becomes more difficult for a user to claim ignorance about these essential guidelines when they are referenced in a user agreement.

3. A user agreement provides helpful notice to new users on issues that govern their very first edit. For example, a new user should know upfront that he or she is responsible for his or her edits (Sec. 1b). That is only fair. A new user should understand what basic behavior is not acceptable on the site (something that we are working to define right now through this discussion process)(Sec. 4). That helps both the user and the Community.

4. The prohibitions also are intended to assist the Community when it enforces its rules against unacceptable conduct (Sec. 4, 10). Indeed, for some of these prohibitions, such as long term abuse, senior members of the Community requested that we address this behavior as aggressively as possible; this user agreement is in partial response to that. Unacceptable conduct that is expressly called out in the user agreement provides backup for all the projects to enforce against violating users. And, if we were challenged in court, clearer rules in the user agreement would render these community actions even easier to defend.

5. The user agreement seeks to put in one place the essential parts of other legal or important documents on our site, many of which would be particularly hard to locate for newer or less familiar editors and readers. For example, the user agreement addresses potentially offensive material (Sec. 3a), non-professional advice (Sec. 3b), use of our trademarks (Sec. 6), and third party websites and resources (Sec. 9). See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_links#Restrictions_on_linking ; http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Trademark_policy .

6. With respect to technical situations like malware attacks on the site, we need to be ready to litigate if necessary. We facilitate that legal option by underscoring our boundaries in the user agreement for purposes of common law trespass and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (Sec. 4). We want to be in the best position to protect our infrastructure and pursue all legal avenues, and the user agreement advances those goals.

7. A user agreement should provide helpful information to ensure the experience is a positive one. We do that in the new proposed agreement. See Sec. 5 (telling users to keep their password secure); Sec. 8 (providing advice on how to handle DMCA takedown notices).

8. Like the present user agreement, we need to provide clear guidance on the licensing requirements (Sec. 7). With a new reiteration, we hope we employ even easier-to-understand language (though we could probably do better, and as with everything else, welcome your suggestions to improve it).

9. A user agreement allows us to gather in one place required legal notices and processes which help limit our legal liability, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)(Sec. 8).

10. The crown jewels for the Community and the Foundation are the Wikimedia trademarks. We need to be vigilant in this area, and the agreement puts all users on further notice that the trademarks may be used for only limited purposes that advance our mission (Sec. 6). Part of our ongoing legal responsibility as an organization is to safeguard our marks, and it is surprisingly easy for these trademarks to be lost due to obscure legal pitfalls. Our trademarks are there to protect users, the community, and the general populace by providing a clear method of identifying our services and goods so people are not misled by fraudulent impostors. The proposed user agreement furthers that aim.

11. There are good reasons to limit WMF liability in other ways (Sec. 13-16). WMF works off a limited budget consisting of valued donor money. $30 million sounds like a lot, but it really isn't for a website our size. As noted above, any wording that can persuade a lawyer not to file a lawsuit, saves donors' money - money that can be reinvested to assist the Community in forwarding the Wikimedia movement. I don't want to waste it on outside lawyers.

The above is only a partial list on the reasons for the proposed terms of use, but I hope you find it useful. As I have said below, in the end, this is intended to be a Community document, reflecting its values while reasonably protecting the Foundation. I encourage your feedback and suggestions and thank everyone who has participated so far.

Geoffbrigham 01:49, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

____________

As Geoff states above, your comments and questions are definitely desired here, and we'll do our best to answer in a timely fashion. Thanks, Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 21:24, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

I have been impressed by and grateful for the feedback and comments to date. Many comments - albeit challenging - have been quite constructive. I firmly believe that we must have a document that works for the Community, so I believe that, in putting together the next draft, we need to be flexible. Geoffbrigham 17:54, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

"In the legal department at the Wikimedia Foundation, we have been examining for some time whether, as the 5th largest website in the world, we need a new terms of use agreement." In keeping with the new WMF policy of making all the decisions, we decided we do, and are now going to consult the community about the detail only.

Has nothing been learned from the image filter fiasco? Rich Farmbrough 13:24 10 September 2011 (GMT).

"Be Bold" ? :-) -- Seth Finkelstein 10:43, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

I hear your points, but, to be honest, it is hard to have a discussion about a user agreement without proposing a draft. This version - as hard as it may be to believe - is actually not as legalistic as other user agreements, though I now see room for improvements based on the comments. I may be wrong but I also see the draft as serving as a tool to facilitate the discussion about a number of points. We may decide to delete certain provisions because they are too controversial or not right for now, but I still think that the discussion they engender is useful for thinking about the issues. Geoffbrigham 17:54, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

That leaving real legal work to a bunch of teenagers and wikilawyers is a bad idea? WhatamIdoing 01:05, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

Undoubtedly. I expect the Encyclopedia Judeica used professionals when they put the prohibition about "cancelbots" in their ToS.

But certainly there is no harm in having a qualified professional produce the actual document, and advise as to the content. However the community (or "teenagers and wikilawyers" as you so charmingly call us - I regret I am not the former and I hope I am not the latter) should be capable of producing the requirements spec. If anyone can tell me the practical use of :

• "Using the Services in a manner that is inconsistent with any and all applicable laws and regulations."

I would be most interested. It is basically like a card game that has a rule saying "no cheating". If that rule is needed then there is another one needed saying "No breaking the rule about no cheating". And so forth. Really we need to decide what the purpose or purposes of the ToS are and build them on that basis, not just put in as many clauses as we can that look good. Rich Farmbrough 01:27 14 September 2011 (GMT).

I think this is a fair point, but here is my view: A list of prohibitions in one spot can be helpful. Many users have not thought through all the possible legal ramifications of their actions, so users may see listed improper conduct - like copyright infringement - and think twice about what they are doing. A cut-and-paste of the list may also be helpful in educating users who ask questions about behavior on the site. Finally, the list of prohibitions in the agreement is helpful legally in making clear to others - including law enforcement, rights owners, regulators, etc. - that we do not support certain activity on our site. Geoffbrigham 17:54, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

It looks like a basic catch-all: We will ban you if you break the law, even if the specific example of lawbreaking isn't mentioned above. To give two examples, I see nothing here about prohibiting behaviors that break the insider trading laws or prohibiting you from looking at pictures on Commons while a court has banned you from using the Internet at all, but either of these behaviors might result in the WMF blocking your access to the site. WhatamIdoing 17:44, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Why should leaving real legal work to a bunch of teenagers and wikilawyers be a bad idea? After all, what the WMF should be about is letting a bunch of random people, including teenagers and wikilawyers, write an encyclopedia, a dictionary and a bunch of other things. As everybody knows (remember Nupedia or Citizendium?) it is better to leave this to the experts, and using an open wiki model can't possibly work. Kusma 19:54, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

I actually agree with this. I think the Community understands the site better than anyone. Hopefully this is an effort to get the expertise of the "teenagers and wikilawyers." One thing I have learned since joining Wikimedia: The Community is a pretty amazing law firm - really smart people. Geoffbrigham 17:54, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

Definitions, examples, and critiques

Thanks to those who addressed my concerns about community review above. We still need specific definitions of "especially problematic users" and "significant Project disturbance or dangerous behavior" with examples, if those terms are not to be applied subjectively. We also need need to exempt critiques of Foundation or community actions, staff, publications, and practices from the definition of "significant Project disturbance or dangerous behavior." Dualus 15:02, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Do we need these definitions and examples to be permanently carved in stone (that is, in the TOS itself), or do you just want to know what the answers are for your own purposes? WhatamIdoing 15:12, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

How do you think these terms are likely to be applied over time if they are not defined in advance? I think the Terms should include both definitions and examples for clarity. Are there any reasons that they should not? Dualus 15:43, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Examples, in particular, tend to produce needless disputes from sea-lawyers. For example, if the rule is "Do not kill people" and you give an example of "Do not shove people in front of moving trains so that they die", someone who is in trouble for killing someone will invariably say that he didn't know that tossing an unconscious person into a river was covered by the rule, because it doesn't involve either shoving people or moving trains.

Undefined words in agreements are interpreted according to their dictionary definitions and common sense. There are hundreds of undefined words in this agreement. I see no more need to define "disturbance" than I see to define "servers" or "traffic". WhatamIdoing 20:21, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Ah, but for a rule of "Do not kill people", what about - war? self-defense? death-penalty? abortion? risky medical operations? - there's obvious difficulties, which create a whole legal code distinguishing murder from justifiable homicide from accident. Regretfully, the practice for Wikimedia is more along the lines of being interpreted according to the politics of power. I would strongly agree that particularly broad and vague terms like "especially problematic" and "significant Project disturbance" need to be restricted. I can't find the link now, but if I recall correctly, Larry Sanger was blocked on Wikipedia after making his FBI report, with a block reason I think of "disruptive". In my view, that was an example of such spectacularly bad judgment on multiple levels that the blocking administrator should have been immediately desysopped. But since it was a popular action against an unpopular person, nothing was done. To put it simply the difference between "disturbance" versus "servers" and "traffic" is that the latter are technical while the former is social. -- Seth Finkelstein 21:36, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Here are some links:

• Block log
• AN/I discussion
• Block message and the subsequent discussion.
• Here are Rodhullandemu's reverts: [1], [2].

--Michaeldsuarez 00:34, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for those links. I see I was not far off, the reason given was "Disruptive editing". With the new terms-of-service taking this sort of issue to an even higher level (by making it into Foundation and legal material), I submit it's extremely important to guard against possible abuse. -- Seth Finkelstein 05:06, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Maybe a requirement for the admins to Assume Good Faith is the solution here. I think that is the main fault on the part of RodHullandEmu - he did not give LS the benefit of the doubt.--Filceolaire 10:48, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

My attention was called here...anyway, I'll bite: suppose RodHullandEmu had "given me the benefit of the doubt." What does that mean? Does that mean that he would assume that I was, say, not criticizing Wikipedia? After all, of course, I was criticizing Wikipedia. That is within the rules, I believe. "Assume good faith" is nonsense, I say. I was the originator of many of Wikipedia's rules--but not that one. --Larry Sanger 12:54, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Filceolaire, unfortunately, there's a logical problem in that the issue is exactly the casting of critical actions as punishment-worthy offenses - i.e. you're asking them to assume something they've already rejected basically by definition. This is one of the dark sides of Wikipedia culture, where in one block discussion above, the admin literally says "You're either with us or against us". While you can say that admins should not have this attitude, it's clear that some do. So again, I think it important that the phrasing of the terms of service do as much as possible to avoid feeding into that sort of power abuse. -- Seth Finkelstein 20:46, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Seth, if one wishes to permit killing people, then one should not have a rule that says nothing more than "Do not kill people". But if the rule is actually "do not kill people, no matter what", as it is in many pacifist traditions, then specific examples are not useful, because no illustration is necessary for correct understanding, and no example would limit the rule in the way that you wish to see the WMF voluntarily limit itself.

As for LS's block, that was authorized by the English Wikipedia's official guidelines, which several users have demanded be officially supported by this TOS. No possible change to the TOS would have made en:WP:DE not be an excuse for an en.wiki admin to block anyone the admin wants, whenever said admin deems it appropriate. WhatamIdoing 02:38, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Hmm? When you say "no example would limit the rule in the way that you wish to see ...", I'm merely agreeing with Dualus that "We also need need to exempt critiques of Foundation or community actions, staff, publications, and practices from the definition of "significant Project disturbance or dangerous behavior."" . And giving a notorious example. Now, "As for LS's block, that was authorized by the English Wikipedia's official guidelines" - was it? Now, at least one admin thought so. I contend it was an evident abuse. Who is correct? Perhaps that's exactly why it would help to be clear who is correct, and not rely on "common sense", which seems to give no undisputed answer here. Of course no admin can be stopped from calling something "disruptive", in a trivial sense. But it certainly can be made more evident if that admin is engaging in an abuse of power (tedious clarification: This doesn't say all cases can be solved, which would be an absurd claim. The point is that policies can be better verses worse in terms of limiting arbitrary and capricious interpretations) -- Seth Finkelstein 06:51, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Seth, the rules at en.wiki—for better or worse—are that any admin may block any user whom the individual admin believes is disruptive. Are we agreed thus far?

Some admin decided LS was "disruptive" and blocked his account. That action is exactly what's authorized in the official en.wiki guidelines and policies. Whether that admin's judgment was appallingly bad is actually irrelevant: the rules in place at en.wiki explicitly permit this action on that basis. The admin broke no rules in making that block.

Furthermore, you're looking at the wrong actor. Saying "The WMF (staff) will not do this" (what the TOS would say) has zero restrictive effect on the non-WMF admin who actually did this, and the hundreds of en.wiki non-WMF admins who are still explicitly authorized by the en.wiki community to use their judgment to block any users that they personally believe are disruptive. Tying the WMF's hands isn't going to solve the problem you see.

And if after all these talks about how the WMF needs to officially bow and scrape before the almighty community in the TOS, you think we have even a snowball's chance of getting the TOS to gut the long-standing en.wiki policies and guidelines on blocking disruptive users, then I don't believe we have a rational basis for discussion any longer. Free speech is a lovely thing, but the en.wiki community is never going to accept the WMF shoving a "you may not block users whose disruption can't be classified as 'free speech', especially 'free speech that hates on you'" rule down their throats. WhatamIdoing 15:54, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

The language at issue is this: The community has primary responsibility to address violations of Project policy and other similar issues. At the Wikimedia Foundation, we rarely intervene in community decisions about policy and its enforcement. In an unusual case, the need may arise or the community may ask us to address an especially problematic user because of significant Project disturbance or dangerous behavior. The purpose of this language is to underscore that the community has the primary responsibilty in enforcement, not WMF. It is intended to be descriptive in nature, and often such language in an agreement is not subject to further definitions. Even if it were, I think inserting such definitions would render the document too complicated (since if we do it here, we would arguably need to do it in other places), and, to be honest, I'm not quite sure how we could define these terms, given how the circumstances vary in each case. On a positive note, this language does appear in the proposed TOS (unlike the present TOS), and it therefore would have weight in community/WMF arguments/discussions if the community believed that WMF overstepped its bounds (which is not the case with the present TOS). In short, I propose not including definitions; however, if people feel they have better descriptive language, I am open to discussion. Cheers. Geoffbrigham 22:16, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I understand your intent there. However, this connects to the upcoming global ban policy. I am concerned there's an ongoing factional effort by certain people to put in place broad, project-wide, blocking powers for themselves. They may have the best of intentions. However, the history of some past incidents shows that while these powers may be only invoked in "an unusual case" (in a statistical sense), there is substantial evidence to be very wary of the political implications of those cases. Now, philosophically, this is the enumerated-powers vs. Bill-of-Rights argument. While I've become very cynical, I'm still enough of a formalist to believe that there's some value in protective statements. I don't think a sentence of so to guard against abuse would be undue complexity. Something along the lines of "We will not construe extensive criticism or policy disputes as matters for Foundation intervention". This is theoretically what you would want, keeping the Foundation itself from being used in political arguments. -- Seth Finkelstein 01:26, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

The problem is distinguishing between Criticism (allowed) and Disruption (not allowed).--Filceolaire 06:29, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

Two points:

• Nobody is "put[ting] in place broad, project-wide, blocking powers for themselves"; the WMF already has these powers. The only difference is that the fact that these powers exist will be mentioned in the TOS rather than elsewhere. This creates fair warning to the user, not a new power for the WMF.
• The WMF might legitimately construe "extensive criticism or policy disputes as matters for Foundation intervention" if that criticism or dispute results in significant disruption. The Berkeley city council might decide that destroying public property is "free speech about our parking meter ordinance" rather than "criminal behavior that people go to jail over", but I don't think that we need to follow their example. I see this as having no positive effect in ordinary disputes and as being a gift to people who want to abuse the WMF projects advocate for their political causes. The WMF might very legitimately intervene in a "policy dispute" about whether pedophiles and pedophilia activists should be tolerated on WMF projects, as it has in the past (by adopting a policy that blocks all identified pedophiles). In fact, depending on your definition, many Board resolutions, such as the change to the licenses a couple of years ago, constitute "intervening" in a "policy dispute". The Board has a positive legal duty to oversee policy matters, which includes intervening in policies as often as necessary. WhatamIdoing 17:37, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Actually, I disagree with you empirically about who now has "broad, project-wide, blocking powers for themselves". One of the weak constraints that currently keeps certain people in check, is that in fact it's not at all clear if they're operating in a sanctioned way. And they're getting substantial push-back on the matter. I think terms-of-service level push-back is important in this process. Regarding construal, again, we're going around making the perfect the enemy of the good. It's like objecting to freedom of religion on the basis of, what if someone argues that taking illegal drugs is part of their religion? Or that not getting medical care for sick children is part of their religion? Then one would could conclude that since in some cases, the government has a positive duty to act against against freedom of religion, therefore a provision for freedom of religion is "a gift to people who want to abuse". I don't want to be hyperbolic, but the "abuse" argument is perilous close to claiming civil-liberties are only for bad characters. -- Seth Finkelstein 12:04, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

You believe that the WMF does not currently have the actual power to block anyone it wants? On what basis?

Do you believe that the staff members' block buttons are broken, so that only volunteers are capable of blocking someone? Do you believe that the people who control the entire website are incapable of giving themselves whatever privs are necessary to block someone, if that's what they wanted to do? Do you think the devs are incapable of writing whatever code is necessary to make it possible for them to block people, if that's what they wanted to do? Do you think that if the WMF's board passed a resolution declaring that someone was banned, that the staff would wring their hands and say, "Oh, if only there were a way for the staff to block that account"?

I'm not talking about whether the WMF "should" do this. I'm talking about whether they have the ability (=power) to do this. They've got physical access to the servers: they can do anything they want to the WMF websites. WhatamIdoing 15:35, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

This is a bit like arguing "You believe that the police do not have the actual power to shoot anyone "dangerous"? Do their guns not work, so only vigilantes can shoot people?". We have been going around and around formalism vs pragmatism. Every time I say I believe that moderate formalism empirically has some value (some - not dispositive, not conclusive, not philosophically unassailable - but some value), you respond by arguing extreme pragmatism. At this point, it's been asked and answered. If you look at the actual global ban discussion, the social process is much more complex than merely who has the guns (servers). -- Seth Finkelstein 03:05, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

There's a significant distinction: The WMF websites are the WMF's property, and it is their legal and moral right to do whatever they want with them. The law enforcement officer's weapons are not the officer's property, and "we the people" gave those weapons to our officer solely on the strict condition that he (or she) do nothing with our weapons except what we have authorized (through the law). The two situations are not at all comparable. WhatamIdoing 16:37, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

All analogies have points of similarity and points of dissimilarity. In this case, the detail analogy might be that it's sometimes not clear when a specific person is acting with and within the authority of the WMF, and attempts to perhaps arrogate that authority. You're also retreating from pragmatism into formalism in talk of "have authorized" - that's an appeal to procedure, and somewhat infamous in terms of reviews of use of deadly force (i.e. the charge that very little is needed pragmatically). If it required a formal WMF Board resolution to global ban someone, rather than one person possibly lashing out in irritation, I wouldn't be nearly as concerned with the potential for abuse -- Seth Finkelstein 01:24, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

If the staff member is not acting within the authority of the WMF, then the decision will be overturned. If a WMF staff member bans you, and that staff member's supervisor (or anyone else in that chain of command, going all the way up to the Board) decides it was a mistake, then the decision will be overturned and you would be un-banned. Unlike killing someone, banning is a reversible process. If the staff member bans you again, or if the WMF decided the staff member used bad judgment in the first place, then the WMF can (and would) fire the staff member.

So where's the problem? Wanting a resolution from the full board for every single decision is both wasteful and leaves the person with no possibility of appeal. Would you have every single legal case decided by the Supreme Court? Isn't one magistrate usually sufficient for run-of-the-mill cases? WhatamIdoing 04:24, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

So the TOS needs to put a duty on the WMF to have an appeals procedure? The TOS doesn't need to define this. The TOS should also state that the Board is the court of final appeal - we don't want people trying to get the law involved in resolving disputes. The appeals process could be something like:

• staff action
• staff action is reviewed by board member appointed for that sort of thing (everyone has this right?)
• final appeal to a Board sub-committee who can (like the U.S.A. supreme court) decide for themselves if they will or will not consider any appeal.

There is probably scope for community actions to be appealed to the board too - is the project / branch acting in accordance with their contract with the WMF? This procedure should probably be spelled out in those contracts, not here. Ultimate sanction for project - stop new contributions but allow a fork. Ultimate sanction for branch - withdraw permission to use the trademarks.Filceolaire 06:29, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

I agree that it's unnecessary for the TOS to outline any appeal process.

I think the fundamental problem is that Seth believes he has some sort of human right to use the WMF's private website. In actual practice, Seth's rights to the WMF's website are exactly the same as Seth's rights to my equally private living room: he can use it only when the owner says so, and only in the ways the owner says so, and only so long as the owner continues to say so. The owner has an absolute legal and moral right to revoke that permission, at any time, for any reason or no reason at all. WhatamIdoing 15:42, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

I think the fundamental problem is that "WhatamIdoing" is knocking down silly strawmen. I said nothing of the sort, and Libertarian-type knee-jerking like the above is showing there's no more point in this exchange :-(. -- Seth Finkelstein 18:54, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing: The Wikimedia Foundation is a registered charity working to achieve certain charitable ends. It has invited us to work with them to help achieve those ends. To encourage us to help with this WMF makes certain undertaking to us as to how we will be treated and as to how our contributions will be used. These undertakings are described in the Terms of Use. There are lots of things the system admins could do which the WMF promise (in the TOU) not to do. If they do those things then that is a breach of the TOU and then we have a situation which is not covered by the TOU. As it's not covered by the TOU therefore there is not much point discussing it here. This page only deals with things that are covered by the TOU. Filceolaire 21:49, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

Like the "right to fork," I think the appeal procedure is something for the community to figure out and present to the Board as a proposed resolution. If the Board agrees, this TOS would recognize its authority. Sec. 11. I agree with WhatamIdoing on the power of the community to keep the Foundation in check, and I frankly don't see a need to modify the proposed language. Indeed, in some important ways, Section 10 enables the community more than in the past: with the global ban policy, the community will be able to amend and define the reasons why the community can and cannot ban someone globally, which is a good, community-oriented process. Geoffbrigham 18:23, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

The problem in the chain of reasoning above is that the people most affected by the new policy cannot plead their case, so it ends up concentrating the flaws of the social process of groupthink. Remember, civil-libertarian ideas are anti-majoritarian. -- Seth Finkelstein 18:54, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

Geoff: I disagree. A discussion on rewriting the TOU (i.e. this page) is exactly the right context for discussing these issues with the Community and the Board. A discussion is better than a proposal from one side with the other side left to approve or disapprove.

Seth: I'm not sure I understand what you are getting at. To put it in concrete terms - what is your proposal for wording to be added to / changed in the TOU to address this?Filceolaire 21:49, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

Filceolaire, above I suggested "We will not construe extensive criticism or policy disputes as matters for Foundation intervention". Please note also I was agreeing with Dualus at the very top of the subsection about "... not to be applied subjectively. We also need need to exempt critiques of Foundation or community actions, staff, publications, and practices from the definition of "significant Project disturbance or dangerous behavior.". This extremely mild and moderate view (IMHO) seems to have dragged me into a requirement to develop a complete moral theory of governance and to prove it against talk-radio style objections. It just doesn't strike me as so difficult (or at least, it shouldn't be). I hope I don't have to go around again that I don't believe this would solve everything, and I don't propose to nationalize Wikimedia and have it run as a subdepartment of the People's Ministry of Culture. What I'm getting at, is that there's *factions* of the "community" that apply broad and vague views of what constitutes "disturbance", and it would be a good idea to make sure from the start that they don't read the new terms-of-use as a tool for their efforts (even though, sigh, I presume the drafter does not intend to enable them, but I think it would be helpful to make that as clear as possible). -- Seth Finkelstein 12:09, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

┌─────────────────────────────────┘
Seth, I'm still not getting a useful response to the problem with your proposal. What if the WMF is faced with a user who is simultaneously, through a single action:

1. "extensively criticizing" the WMF and
2. disrupting the project to the extent that no one else is able to use it?

Should the WMF volunteer to "not construe" this extensive criticism as something it needs to deal with? Should the WMF sit idly by while everyone else is locked out of a project because the act of locking everyone was, itself, criticism of the WMF?

Has it ever occurred to you that the "extensive criticism" you (nobly) want to protect could be performed in an project-destroying disruptive manner? WhatamIdoing 20:24, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing: if the user is doing both of these things then the user can be banned for the disruption. The fact that they are also "extensively criticizing" does not give them a free pass to disrupt the project.

Seth: I agree with you that users should not be banned for criticising the project where this is done to try and make the project better. I also see someone could confuse "trying to change how the project operates" with "disrupting how the project operates". The Terms of Use need to establish the principles but I'm not sure how to phrase this.Filceolaire 22:45, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, that issue has been asked and answered already, above, where I noted that analogously, freedom of religion can involve conflicts over illegal acts. Again, we have reached a point where there's no point. Yes indeed, I want to protect e.g. Larry Sanger's right (sigh - tedious defense against strawman, this word is used in an internal, not government, sense) to make an issue over sexual material (without endorsing his views _per se_). And, repeating myself, being deemed blockable "disruptive editing" and outright told "You're either with us or against us" makes it easy to see the potential for abuse at the terms-of-use level.

Filceolaire, sadly, if the idea itself has been rejected, better phrasing is academic. -- Seth Finkelstein 09:38, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

And yet your proposed text actually says, in effect, that all criticism of the WMF, regardless of time, place, or manner, is never to be punished, even if that criticism is communicated in severely disruptive manners. That's what the words you wrote mean: "we will not construe criticism", with no qualifiers, means the WMF will not do this, full stop, no exceptions. If you mean "we will not normally construe criticism unless it significantly disrupts the projects", then you have to actually say all of that. WhatamIdoing 18:46, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, Seth, I'm not letting this die so quietly - neither sadly nor academically. You struck my free expression nerve. Just for discussion purposes, one idea - only an idea - is to insert the following sentence in Section 10: "We would never construe good faith criticism or policy disputes by themselves to constitute grounds for a global ban." I know it is qualified ("good faith") and limited ("by themselves" & "global ban"). But it does indicate that simple free speech against Wikipedia is not grounds for a global ban. Now the counter-argument is that we are restricting the community in how they would like to justify a global ban. So I would need to be convinced that we could get consensus with this language. Geoffbrigham 00:11, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

I don't think that you want the word never to appear in that sentence. Not is probably sufficient. WhatamIdoing 18:46, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for having a free expression nerve :-). Regarding "restricting the community in how they would like to justify a global ban", I think there's a definition issue. As in, if some faction wants a new broad and vague offense in the terms-of-use that they can wield against critics, and you try to make it clear that isn't the intended meaning, sure, it's a restriction in some sense of the world. But that's true of everything which doesn't give those people arbitrary power. Note I'm not advocating the new terms-of-use impose new guarantees on existing projects. Rather, I'm attempting to guard against the new terms-of-use becoming another tool to go after criticism (which, to re-iterate a tedious point, I know cannot be solved completely, but I merely think that some helpful measure can be taken). In your phrasing, the words "good faith" probably don't have the effect you're thinking (I suspect you're drawing on legal phrasing there). However, it is an unfortunate article of faith (pun unintended) by too many that no criticism of Wiki[p|m]edia done by someone who isn't part of the tribe is ever in good faith. The attributions are typically of malice of some sort, which allows the faithful to dismiss the point immediately, and rationalizes a personally attack in retaliation. The blocking of Larry Sanger is full of this - "Vandalism is broadly construed, and in my view extends outside merely Article space. However, that is somewhat irrelevant given your continued anti-campaign against Wikipedia.". Again, without endorsing Sanger's accusations in themselves, I think it should be clear to anyone who examines his voluminous writings on the matter that he does sincerely believe what he says. So I'd say an inferred state of mind aspect is not a good idea. -- Seth Finkelstein 12:58, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

Seth, personally I think the terms of use is the wrong instrument to use if you want to protect critics. The point of the terms is not to try and shape the very large, diverse Wikimedia community into something that protects the kind of critics you care about. There's nothing the WMF can or should put into its legal documents that forces the community to put up with critical voices if it doesn't want to. That's not our job, and ultimately, we are incapable of making any Wikimedia community put up with people it doesn't think are productive contributors to the projects. You're barking up the wrong tree here. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 17:58, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

Ahem - what I did just write? Note I'm not advocating the new terms-of-use impose new guarantees on existing projects. For heaven's sake, I could understand missing or forgetting this if it were many pages above. BUT IT'S IN THE COMMENT YOU'RE REPLYING TO! You're knee-jerking an accusation which I already disavowed! Another stock strawman that seems utterly disconnected to what I wrote. Do I have to create a FAQ for this, and like the old joke, just call out the numbers? Instead of going around it all again, let me point out, this is why I think as much guarding against abuse as possible is a good thing. Because given the incredible distortions seen even in this minor discussion, there can be no confidence that phrases like "especially problematic user" isn't going to be attempted to be interpreted by some as "annoyed someone in a position of power, e.g. at WMF". -- Seth Finkelstein 23:41, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

Well, Steven's kind of got a point: Imagine a perfectly civil, totally non-disruptive person who says something critical. (Oh, maybe the Arabic Wikipedia bans images of the prophet, and someone says he disagrees with the ban, or some kid at en.wiki posts a brief note complaining about the annual fundraising campaign.) Imagine a (dysfunctional, IMO) community that has decided they don't want to hear even the tiniest bit of criticism on whatever point the speaker is making. If we give (non-disruptive) "criticism" or "policy disputes" a special exemption, then it's possible that we'd be unintentionally undermining the communities' self-governance (i.e., in meaning to restrict only the WMF, we might undermine a community's choice to refuse to hear any criticism).

I personally don't think this is a serious risk, especially in our mature projects, and I read the text strictly as applying only to WMF-controlled bans rather than community bans, but others might not hold the same views, and it is no stretch to believe that the banned person would feel like the community ought to hold itself to the same standards as the "office". WhatamIdoing 16:56, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

If such a situation need to be addressed, I think phrasing along the lines of "WMF bans will not ..." covers it, as that is distinct from local bans. Note I don't expect perfect formalism, and in return, don't regard lack of perfect formalism as a killer argument (number x, some phrasing helps, not solves everything). Bluntly, such a hypothetical strikes me as of little concern given the existing actual reverse case of WMF global ban proposed policy being driven by local projects refusing to ban users when a WMF person believes that they should. That is, the concern for imposition and self-governance rings a little hollow when there's such effort going into "shoving a ... rule down their throats" that all projects will ban the users that a WMF person wants banned. -- Seth Finkelstein 20:27, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

1. Who decides whether someone is an "especially problematic user"? Is the Foundation required to have the same opinion as the Community? Is the Community required to have the same opinion as the Foundation?
2. Can "significant Project disturbance or dangerous behavior" include critiques, as Steven Walling suggests above? I hope not.
3. Should we exempt critiques of Foundation or community actions, staff, publications, and practices from the definition of "significant Project disturbance or dangerous behavior"? I am certain that we should. James Salsman 07:35, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Great discussion with some strong points on both side. I hear the position that WMF should have some limit on its ability to ban, but I also see the reasoning that we cannot constrain the discretion of the community. Although this is a close call for me, I would be willing to insert (and have done so) the following language in Section 10:

"Without limiting the authority of the community, the Wikimedia Foundation itself will not ban a user or block an account solely because of good faith criticism."

This is definitely not perfect: it is a compromise. I don't mean to terminate the discussion, and folks can feel free to say so if the above does not work. But, honestly, I don't see WMF going much further. The alternative - and maybe my preferred approach - is to say nothing at all. That said, I do want to respond to concerns that WMF will not use its powers to suppress legitimate criticism, which is of course not our practice nor our mission. Geoffbrigham 14:38, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

I still believe that the TOU is the wrong place to be dealing with this level of detail. Saying nothing at all here and dealing with it all in the staff policies and procedures and/or the Global ban policy would be preferable. Dealing with it elsewhere gives us scope to define terms and explain issues in much greater detail. WhatamIdoing 15:58, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. I'll take it, as a compromise. As I've said, there's only so far one can go with formalism. Just as a note of commentary "which is of course not our practice nor our mission" - mission, no, practice, again, there's been some disturbing incidents in the past. I'm sure WMF would disavow any official approval. But once more without going into specifics, the arbcom-l leaks had some problematic material. -- Seth Finkelstein 01:02, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

It always worries me when WhatamIdoing is disagreeing with me, especially given WhatamIdoing's deep experience on the Projects. In those cases, I need to ask myself if I'm not seeing something that I should have seen from a community viewpoint. I asked two other community members at WMF, and there does seem to be a concern about this phraseology. Here is an example: Say a board resolution passes and User X disapproves. Suppose he begins replacing images on Commons with a template expressing his disapproval, starts adding his disapproval into articles about the Wikimedia Foundation, begins mailing letters expressing his disapproval to members of the board, their friends, their families.... At what point does he cross the line from "solely expressing good faith criticism" to disruption/harassment? All of this may be done in good faith, depending on one's definition--in fact, it could be strictly a matter of conscience and firmly believed best for the movement from his viewpoint to systematically replace every article we have with his criticism. Would our language allow WMF to block him? Would it make it better to extend it a bit to add "solely because of good faith criticism that does not result in actions that would otherwise violate this Agreement or community policies"? Geoffbrigham 19:38, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

Let's put it this way - there's a strong element on this topic of "Where you stand depends on where you sit". Some people are concerned that bona-fide vandals are going to cry free-speech. And they will. Just like actual Mafia members claim to be victims of anti-Italian prejudice. But on the other side, there's plenty of Wiki[pm]edia examples of power-holders accusing someone who may be merely irritating them for one reason or another, of "disruption/harassment". It goes back to my point that I don't expect formalism to solve everything. However, I have a hard time thinking anyone is going to *seriously* be able to "systematically replace every article we have with his criticism" and maintain they can't be blocked for it. That would be like the joke about robbing a bank for money to fund a political cause and when imprisoned for it then claiming to be a political prisoner. What I'm trying to do is give the hypothetical WMF power-abuser as little legalistic grounds as possible (knowing full well one often can't eforce anything against them anyway). Something like "violate ... community policies" is to me *in context here* a loophole one can drive a truck through, because some sort of violation of e.g. "civility" can always be found. I think "solely" is already the loophole, but "solely" + "community policies" effectively communicates "This is meaningless because what you want to do is find some violation and that'll be enough of a pretext". I expect that's going to happen in practice anyway, but I see in the loophole a sort of seal of approval. -- Seth Finkelstein 12:47, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

OK, in light of WhatamIdoing's feedback and Seth's point that a qualified statement has little practical meaning, I'm going to leave out my own formulation and defer instead to the community to set the standards through the Global Ban Policy or otherwise. My apologies for waffling here, but I found the discussion quite helpful for thinking this through. Geoffbrigham 16:34, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Criticism

Section moved for clarity and to avoid forking the discussion

Geoff, didn't you agree that there would be an explicit exemption of good faith criticism from e.g. "engaging in harassment"? 67.6.163.68 22:22, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Harassment is when it actually goes beyond simple policy notices to simply being obnoxious. A definition should be included.Jasper Deng 23:34, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

There is a real distinction between good faith criticism and harassment but it is hard to put down in a definition without opening us up to endless wikilawyering so I am against including a definition here. Without a definition we are left to depend on the discretion of whoever is administering the enforcement of the ban on harassment. I think this is the way to go so long as all such decisions are made in the open and available for anyone to review. --Filceolaire 00:06, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

I just realized that this discussion is not in the archives as I thought it was, but is still above on this page (#Definitions, examples, and critiques.) I think the proposed statement, "Without limiting the authority of the community, the Wikimedia Foundation itself will not ban a user or block an account solely because of good faith criticism" is a very good idea because it would not, for example, permit project admins to globally block or ban Larry Sanger for off-wiki criticism as happened in the past, and because of the motivation that clearer rules are easier to defend. I'm sorry I duplicated this section and I guess I should move it back up there. Filceolaire, is there any reason that statement would lead to wikilawyering? 67.6.163.68 02:15, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Right to Fork

Extended content
The TOU talks a lot about what the WMF can, will or may do. The main response open to the editors, if they disagree with the WMF, is the right to fork, i.e. the right to take the content and set up a rival version of a project. WMF devotes some resources to creating database dumps of projects to facilitate and if there ever were a change in policy to stop doing this I believe it should get serious consultation first. I think I firmal mention here is justified. The software publishing efforts of the WMF are not mentioned either. They should at least get a sentence and a link to a page with more info. --Filceolaire 13:05, 15 October 2011 (UTC) I would like a commitment from the WMF that they will continue to provide and improve the data necessary to fork. Maybe it already exists? Is there a resolution from the Board of Trustees about this? The WMF have definitely done a good job of providing dumps, however currently the media files are not easily copied. John Vandenberg 23:05, 16 October 2011 (UTC) I agree this is an important aspect of fulfilling the Wikimedia mission; but is the Terms of Use document an appropriate place to make the commitment? Is there precedent for mission-driven non-profit org making such a commitment via its Terms of Use? -Pete F 23:30, 16 October 2011 (UTC) The "terms of use" typically cover "no warranties" for readers and "we reserve the right to terminate your account" for contributors. In our case, Wikimedia provides one right to readers and contributors: a complete dump of the content and the right to fork, which is IMO an underlying principle in many of our policies. I think this document is less interested in information for "readers"/"reusers", but it would not hurt to mention the right to fork, if that right has been provided by a board of trustees resolution. John Vandenberg 23:47, 16 October 2011 (UTC) Perhaps the WMF and its projects should have charters filled with user rights similar to the one Citizendium has. --Michaeldsuarez 02:48, 17 October 2011 (UTC) Citizendium does have an interesting agreement, and thank you Michaeldsuarez for bringing it to my attention. I saw the user rights in Article 3 (non-discrimination) and Article 7 (equality), but did not see other significant "user rights" that would make sense for our TOS. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) I could see borrowing some language from Article 3; not sure if the language in Article 7 is how we express the same idea on the Wikimedia projects. I'm open to some positive rights expressed, but those rights need to be universal and well recognized by the community before I would suggest including them into the TOS. Otherwise, I think it should be left to the individual Projects to develop these ideas over time. Geoffbrigham 18:19, 19 October 2011 (UTC) @John Vandenberg: Images are probably not included in data dumps in order to avoid having non-free, fair use images included in those dumps. I'm not sure if a dump of free images exists. Since there's a chance that copyrighted, non-free image may be labeled incorrectly as free, creating such a dump may be problematic. Fortunately, you could configure any MediaWiki installation to use the shared image repository at Commons – see mw:Manual:$wgUseInstantCommons. --Michaeldsuarez 23:36, 16 October 2011 (UTC) A dump of Commons media is what is missing. All free media on the Wikipedia projects should be migrated to Commons in due course. InstantCommons does not help the right to fork (enwp). John Vandenberg 23:50, 16 October 2011 (UTC) To any WMF employee considering creating those dumps: Be sure to includes upload logs, file histories, page histories, licensing information, and anything else needed for attribution and reuse. --Michaeldsuarez 00:52, 17 October 2011 (UTC) I have been working on such a dump independently myself, but it is a daunting task due to the sheer size of the dump, measuring in terabytes. Media is large and is already compressed. Even just the thumbnails of the images on enwiki I estimated at being roughly 50 GB. To make such dumps useful, useful subsets will have to be defined and made available, such as thumbnail sets, all works used by a single project, and all works in certain category trees. In all likelihood, the assistance of the developers will be needed to set up suitable dump servers, and dumps will have to be constructed and downloaded using a custom client/server model in order to share space between them (one good way to do this is with symlinks and rsync). As for the argument that Commons may contain mislabelled images - the same is true of the many textual copyright violations that have not yet been discovered. We should be clear that we don't provide any guarantees, but nevertheless be diligent. As a side note, I do believe it is legal for us to make fair use media available if it is distributed alongside the articles it is intended to illustrate, and this is relatively easy because they are all low-resolution and so small in filesize. Dcoetzee 02:46, 29 October 2011 (UTC) FYI, it's an open question as to whether forking of Wikipedia is really possible in a practical sense. If Google kills any fork immediately in search rankings for being "duplicate content", then it's a hollow right. I used to think that Google-death would be a certainty for any fork, but these days I'm not so sure. The real threat is not so much forking, but abandonment. -- Seth Finkelstein 01:40, 17 October 2011 (UTC) John, I'm concerned about the unintended consequences. You are, for example, asking the WMF to commit to always existing (because non-existent entities cannot provide anything to anyone) and to always having the resources to provide copies of everything (even if they're going bankrupt or dramatically change their approach). I do not believe that the right to fork was ever approved by any Board resolution. It is (as I understand it) only the natural consequence of the licensing agreement. WhatamIdoing 02:43, 17 October 2011 (UTC) You have a serious logic problem. If the WMF resolves to always provide dumps that allow the projects to survive it, its last acts should be to ensure those dumps are available, up to date and handed over to an organisation which survives it. It is common for organisations to have very specific rules about winding up. John Vandenberg 08:35, 17 October 2011 (UTC) I don't think you have thought through the request you made: "a commitment from the WMF that they will continue to provide and improve the data necessary to fork." Imagine that the WMF goes away. How can the WMF "continue to provide and improve the data necessary to fork" if they do not exist? You have not requested that "the WMF do their best to ensure that the data necessary to fork is available somehow"; you have requested that the WMF do it themselves. WhatamIdoing 15:37, 17 October 2011 (UTC) The data necessary to fork should be maintained while the WMF exists. The WMF is already undertaking this, which is good management, however it would be nice to point to a winding down clause which makes it mandatory. If the data to fork is not complete when the WMF is heading towards "going away" status, their Board of Trustees would be required to undertake whatever measures are necessary to ensure it is brought up to date and handed to an organisation which will survive them. If, heaven forbid, the WMF does turn off the lights, their role in maintaining it would stop once they had handed the data to someone else. Winding down clauses are thought about and written into charters in advance, to prevent an organisation running itself into the ground or selling off its assets in order to 'survive'. Boards overseeing a dying organisation usually make shithouse decisions if they are not constrained. Anything can be 'justified' in order to save the organisation. John Vandenberg 12:32, 18 October 2011 (UTC) I think this is a very interesting and useful suggestion. It doesn't have to be expressed in terms of things the WMF must do, however. The point is, the WMF should agree not to refuse to make CC-licensed data in its databases available, provided it is technically possible to do so, and any actual costs are paid -- in other words, a FOIA for WMF. Wnt 23:49, 17 October 2011 (UTC) Except that gives people the right to demand stuff. I'd rather leave it up to the WMF to decide how to fulfill this requirement.Filceolaire 12:53, 18 October 2011 (UTC) Interesting and informative discussion. Of course, the TOS (sec. 7) requires free licensing, which would help ensure that the content may be used for a fork or new project. As pointed out above, WMF does a pretty good job in practice with consistent data dumps. I think people have the natural right to fork today, and nobody contests it. I hesistate however putting it into the TOS for a few reasons, not the least of which is that it is hard to predict legally how hypothetical future events could play out. I realize this is only my opinion. My suggestion is that, if there is a strong consensus in the community and a belief that this needs to be considered at the highest level, the community petition the Board to address this individually by resolution. Put another way, I believe this issue requires a larger community and WMF discussion before acknowledging a formal "right" to data dumps in the context of unknown future events, if any. Under the TOS (sec. 11), a properly worded Board resolution would be mandatory and so recognized by the TOS. A separate Board resolution also would be more effective to ensure that proper resources and planning take this community concern into account. I know it sounds like I'm punting a bit, but I think this issue should stand on its own in a resolution proposal if indeed that is the community consensus. Geoffbrigham 18:19, 19 October 2011 (UTC) I agree that this needs a BoT level decision for allocation of resources. However I have just re-read the GFDL and it requires that publishers provide a machine-readable Transparent copy if they distribute more than 100 Opaque copies. The HTML pages of Wikimedia projects are machine generated, so a machine readable dump is required. Further to this, where it gets interesting is that the license requires that someone can download a complete Transparent copy for one year after the last Opaque copy is distributed. As a result, I believe the BoT needs to ensure that the dumps are available and that they can be available for one year after WMF turns of the lights on the core servers (it allows 'agents' to provide this service). As Wikipedia contains images, the images are required to be included. This is similar to the GPL language for “Corresponding Source”, which requires that everything required to rebuild identical object code must be made available (which meant UNIX vendors needed to republish their optimisations to w:Makefiles, any prettier bitmaps they wanted end-users to see, etc.) In order to comply with this, I think there needs to be a way to reconstruct the GFDL component of the projects from dumps. I think the currently provided dumps fail this because there isnt an easy way to obtain the images needed. John Vandenberg 02:46, 20 October 2011 (UTC) The GFDL was originally make for free software documentation, and Wikipedia was created before the Creative Commons licenses existed. This was a part of the reason for the license change. When Wikipedia was using the UseMod software, it used a simple filesystem instead of MySQL. Wikipedia basically outgrew the GFDL. Perhaps the WMF should've switched to using solely the CC-BY-SA license instead of encumbering itself with complex duel-licensing. Since the window the GNU allotted for switching licenses has passed a long time ago, it's too late to fix any of that now. I hope that copyrighted images may be excluded from such a dump. Otherwise, I recommend that the English Wikipedia follows the example of other Wikipedia's and use only free images. --Michaeldsuarez 15:39, 20 October 2011 (UTC) John, if it's already "required", then there's no need to mention it here. The TOS isn't meant to be a summary of every single thing associated with the WMF projects. WhatamIdoing 17:41, 20 October 2011 (UTC) In light of the above discussion, I do not plan to include explicitly the right to fork in the TOS with the understanding that the community can seek an independent resolution from the Board on the subject. I will forward exerpts of the above discussion to the folks at WMF charged with the data dumps. Thanks. Geoffbrigham 22:22, 24 October 2011 (UTC) I don't see how you can justify to not include the right to fork in the TOS. You have stated yourself "I think people have the natural right to fork today, and nobody contests it." The only reason you give for not including this are "unknown future events". This is not a valid reason, all of the TOS is written for unknown future events! This amounts to a disfranchisement of the users. This view is shared in the german Wikipedia community: de:Wikipedia_Diskussion:Wikipedia-Fork#Angesichts.... I request that you explain what you mean with "unknown future events". In what context is the right to fork no longer upheld? --Atlasowa 21:52, 29 October 2011 (UTC) I'll give you an "unknown future event" as an example: The WMF has accumulated staff and contractors at a considerable pace of growth (2005 - 2 employees; October 2006 - 5 paid employees; August 2007 - 12 staff&contractors; August 2008 - 20 staff; August 2009 - 30 staff; August 2010 - 49 staff; April 2011 - 63 staff; Oktober 2011 - 96 staff&contractors). They may grow more staff than can be supported by donations in the future. Jimbo Wales has said this year that in case of need he would consider both cost-cutting measures and advertisement on Wikipedia. He also alluded to advertisement in the 2010 donation campaign, "To do this without resorting to advertising, we need you." The community does not have a right to decide against advertisement, the WMF decides. Many wikipedians would want to fork in this hypothetical case (advertisement on Wikipedia). The WMF would probably not prioritize to provide data dumps for a fork in this situation, so we clearly need this TOS provision now, before unknown future events. This is a question of checks and balances. --Atlasowa 22:25, 29 October 2011 (UTC) +1 --Angel54 5 23:25, 29 October 2011 (UTC) +1 It's not so much up to the letter of a license, GFDL or other, as up to the spirit of the free content idea. If Wikipedia cannot be forked, it is not (anymore) free content, and almost all of its editors are cheated. Guess the result. Also, the right to fork is moot without a readily available way to have all the latest content. The typical months-old dumps you can get now don't qualify; schemes like "send us a kind request, and we will service it when we like" - too. Such a technical opportunity is a must, its lack is a call for trouble. (I've seen charitable organizations being "privatized" from inside or outside, often in strikingly inventive ways. A readily available way for a quick complete-content fork is a good defense against such attempts.) Providing it is going to be hard: info volumes are huge (and I'd love to help thinking of a way). But this must be written as a commitment in the TOS, I think: TOS is the "contract" between WMF and the editors / readers, and if the obligations of the editors / readers should be there, then the obligations of WMF should also be there. -- Григор Гачев 00:51, 30 October 2011 (UTC) +1. Seen in the light of the recent controversy about the image filter and the discussions in de:wp, resulting in plans of a German fork, the decision to exclude a right to fork shows again no sign of empathy on the side of the Foundation. The right to fork is one of the most needed basic principles on which people here are participating. It's the only security they have, that their work after "unknown future events" still can be used in the spirit of this project. In denying this, you have (again) gone far far away from your editors. Greetings --Magiers 08:13, 30 October 2011 (UTC) +1. Remember that the right to Fork is something like an insurance, it protects WMF from people who want to influence Wikipedia and the Foundation. -- Andreas Werle 09:04, 30 October 2011 (UTC) +1. By the way, the rigt to fork is not a "every single thing associated with the WMF projects", but a profound problem. -jkb- 09:47, 30 October 2011 (UTC) Here's another "+1"... Certainly "unknown future events" can and do take place, and I think anyone would show sympathy for a failure to provide data dumps in the event of a nuclear apocalypse over Florida or the summary execution of all WMF employees by some despot... or whathaveyou. Other than that, "unknown future events" cannot be an excuse. Seb az86556 11:27, 30 October 2011 (UTC) Thanks for these comments. I think you have convincingly pointed out that a TOS is written for future events (and my language there could have been cleaner). So, if I have it right, what we are talking about is not the right to fork (which the community has always had as defined by the free licenses), but the obligations on WMF in the future to allow for a fork. That said, I'm honestly not so sure there is consensus about such obligations. We could agree that WMF should "seek" to maintain accessible copies "within technological, financial, and resource constraints," but the above discussion suggests that something more is wanted. Of course, some obligations might be already covered in the agreement: there probably would be a requirement that WMF seek to host freely licensed content, and that is included in the TOS. But there could be other requrements imposed, such as implementing a system of daily, up-to-date, easily accessible, and complete data dumps for years to come, which, as I understand, is presently not the case. There would be a need to invest in personnel and technology resources to make this happen (which would require a reallocation of donor funds). For these reasons, from my viewpoint, if the community sees this as a priority, it should seek a board resolution. A board resolution - which has binding force with WMF and the community - would validate the employment of the resources, taking into account competing values and demands on resources. A resolution could also set out in more detail the requirements, obligations, and limitations. And, before such a resolution, there could be a healthy community discussion focused on whether this is an appropriate use of resources. As noted above, a mandatory Board resolution becomes binding under the TOS. Sec. 11. Geoffbrigham 14:26, 30 October 2011 (UTC) I notice that you did not elaborate on what would be the "unknown future events" that keep you from including the right to fork in the TOS. Nor did you comment on my example, what would be the impact of the TOS on this situation. So, please explain what you mean with "unknown future events". In what context is the right to fork no longer upheld? I believe reasonable minds can disagree on this, and I'm definitely listening on this issue, but I see the right to fork as defined by the free licenses. The above discussion however suggests that, for a fork to be effective, the WMF needs to take on other obligations (for which, in my mind, the details need stronger community consensus). I don't see the above hypothetical as realistic, but a real future event may be that WMF donations take a dip and we don't have the resources to meet those obligations. There may be ways to ensure against that, but we need a bigger discussion on that through the board resolution process. Geoffbrigham As far as I know, a resolution of the WMF Board of Trustees binds the WMF until the Board decides otherwise (another resolution) (WMF Bylaws Section 11. Reserved Powers: "The Board of Trustees shall be empowered to make any and all regulations, rules, policies, user agreements, terms of use, and other such decisions as may be necessary for the continued functioning of the Foundation not inconsistent with these bylaws."). And the Board resolution becomes binding to the users under the TOS. Sec. 11, without the user's further consent. The only time that a user really has to consent, is to the TOS, so this is an appropriate place for both obligations and rights of users and WMF. Fair (and well thought out) point. But the Board resolution could involve an amendment to the TOS (with a reference to the details in the resolution). This ensures that priorities and resources are set and spent per the resolution after time for an appropriate community discussion. Geoffbrigham 01:35, 31 October 2011 (UTC) You said you were not so sure there is consensus about such obligations on WMF in the future to allow for a fork. Erik Moeller recently wrote on foundation-l: "I think it's good that people are seriously discussing what it would mean to fork and how it would be done. Forking the project if WMF policies or decisions are considered unacceptable is one of the fundamental ways in which Wikimedia projects are different from most of the web; it's a key freedom, one which should be exercised judiciously but which should be preserved and protected nonetheless." I agree. --Atlasowa I hear you, but, frankly, I don't see the contradition. We are not talking about the ability to fork. We are talking about whether WMF has specific contractual obligations in that respect. I don't feel there is consensus on this issue, and, for that reason, a board resolution with community input makes sense to me (which could result in an amendment to the TOS). Geoffbrigham 01:35, 31 October 2011 (UTC) Not having consensus in WMF and/or the Board about the right to fork, including the up-to-date, easily accessible and complete content access, is a HUGE red light for me - and probably for other editors, too. I couldn't think of a better argument on how desperately and urgently this access is needed. Very much hope I've misunderstood you. Some ways to provide really useful data dumps will indeed require a lot of WMF resources. Others, however, may even save resources/expenses to WMF. To date, often WMF has saved resources at the price of limiting content backup availability, instead of trying (incl. calling for a community discussion) to save resources while/by preserving and improving the backup availability. This approach, however, essentially limits the freedom of the Wikipedia content, which is the centerpiece of the editors motivation. Unless the approach is changed quickly and radically, and organizational measures are taken to never repeat this mistake, we will see a gradual but irreversible decline of the editors motivation, and an increase of the forking calls. Guess where this leads eventually. -- Григор Гачев 01:47, 31 October 2011 (UTC) ┌─────────────────────────────────┘ Let me see if I can simplify what Geoff is telling you all. Where the right to fork is concerned, we can have two possible results: A really strong right to fork, with teeth in it and resources behind it, that actually results in these data dumps being created. A sentence in the TOS saying that there's a right to fork, which will give you the pleasant illusion of a promise, but zero action to make it happen in practice. If you want the first result, we need a much bigger, much stronger, separate process: we need a full discussion with the Board that produces a solid, specialized, and detailed Board resolution, plus directions to employees to do this and a budget for achieving it. A sentence in the TOS cannot achieve this. If you want the second result, then that is very easy to achieve. The only required action is for Geoff to type one sentence into the TOS. Nothing else will happen after that sentence is typed, except that a few very inexperienced people will say "See! I have the right to fork, right there in black and white!" (The WMF can claim that your "right" is automatically fulfilled by the current system, because you are capable of individually loading and copying every single page that you want to fork.) Now: Which of these two results do you want? And if you actually want the first result—a practicable, workable, robust system for forking—are you going to listen to what Geoff is telling you about how you can actually get that result, or are you going to persist in the belief that taking Action #2 will magically produce Results #1? WhatamIdoing 02:34, 31 October 2011 (UTC) So let me get what you are saying - The second point is a hollow statement in TOS to appease now and the first, is actually abiding by it. You are saying to get #1 we need the board but #2 can be added as just a hollow line, and I was under the assumption that licensing terms and the ideals of the mission meant that a hollow statement in TOS would be backed without a resolution. This is veering into an interesting legal territory where it might go down to the moral and ethical obligation to respect certain founding principles of open-source and free software. And here I thought we could just AGF, which incidentally, was a legal term (Implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing) before it was used in the community. Theo10011 03:05, 31 October 2011 (UTC) WhatAmIDoing is constructing a false dichotomy. It's not either #1 or #2. There should be both a strong commitment to provide data dumps for forking in the TOS (#2) and Board resolutions that provide specific directions to employees to do this and a budget for achieving "a practicable, workable, robust system for forking" (#1). Regarding hollow sentences in the TOS: There are detailed provisions under section 15 for limiting liability of WMF ("In no event shall our liability exceed one thousand U.S. dollars (USD 1000.00) in aggregate.") Interesting. --Atlasowa 11:06, 31 October 2011 (UTC) @Goeff and Whatamidoing: Thanks for your answers and excuse my bad english. I hope that I am not living with an illusion. But I always thought that wikipedia is something similar to linux: free software, free content. I think, it should be so, and therefore I want to have two things: information and access. I want to have information about procedures and access to sources in order to build a fork. Let me assure you that I do not want to fork. I want to have the realisitic possibility to easily clone wikipedia, because this means that I have control about content and software of wikipedia. And if this is true to me, it is true to everybody. For me this is the difference between Linux and wikipedia on the one hand and Microsoft and Elsevier/Springer etc on the other hand. Now Geoff, please tell me: do we as community have this control? Greetings -- Andreas Werle 19:50, 31 October 2011 (UTC) Andreas, I believe you do. I added some comments below, but Wikimedia projects are freely licensed, and you are free to copy anything within the terms of those licenses. That can be done today without WMF assistance. The question is how much more material assistance is WMF required to give to make the process easier. I don't think we have resolved that question, though I proposed some language and asked some questions below. Cheers. Geoffbrigham 15:09, 11 November 2011 (UTC) Sue-ability or whatever I'll make this a subsection. While I am all for the "right to fork" to be in the TOU, I'd like to ask those who absolutely insist on it what exactly they think they'll be able to do with it when "push comes to y'know" — sue WMF? And who's gonna sue? You, personally? And for what? Money? And who's gonna get the money? You? Some other foundation you just founded? I guess what I want to get smarter on is some scenario — Geoff says "unforeseen future events". Give me your "foreseen future events". Seb az86556 05:12, 31 October 2011 (UTC) Let me be clear on that: I don't want to fork, I certainly don't want to sue the WMF and I don't want to be rude/uncivil/unpolite to Geoff Brigham (and since I am not a native english speaker, I do worry about this last point). I gave a scenario about advertisement on Wikipedia, I think other "red lines" for the community would be disregard of WP:notcensored and WP:NPOV (see image filter discussion). The WMF Board can decide resolutions on anything it wants, with or without community "consultation" and anytime it wants (hiring or cutting back on staff, advertisement, moving its headquarter, developing and implementing new tools on Wikipedia, ban tools, ban users, ...). If the Board wants to modify the TOS, it has to abide to sec 15 TOS "we will provide this Agreement, as well as any substantial future revisions of this Agreement, to the community for comment at least thirty (30) days before it goes into effect. If future revisions are substantial, we will provide an additional 30 days to allow for translations. For changes for legal or administrative reasons, to correct an inaccurate statement, or changes in response to community comments, we will provide at least three (3) days' notice." --Atlasowa 11:06, 31 October 2011 (UTC) That's all good and nice, but not quite what I meant. Let's take your first scenario: advertisement. Somebody doesn't like that and decides to fork. The person asks WMF for the data dumps. WMF says "no." Then what? Seb az86556 11:36, 31 October 2011 (UTC) Then it is clear that the freedom of the WMF content does not exist, and all editors have been lied to. After this, some editors will probably sue WMF for all the data (and, since WMF has many times stated that this content is free as in freedom, will probably win). Most editors, even those that would accept ads, will probably refuse to work anymore for the WMF projects, and will either stop contributing to the free content, or will go supporting a fork. Eventually, we will have most projects up and running again, under a different organization, but at the cost of nasty disturbances and a huge public image damage. The point, however, is not what to do if WMF says "this is not really free". The point is how to never come to such a situation. Geoff wrote above that there is no consensus in WMF whether they have an obligation to support the right to fork (if I have understood him correctly - if not, please accept my apologies). However, the right to fork is the fundament of the freedom of any information project. If it is not present, the freedom of this content is a lie. It could still be free as in free beer, but not as in freedom. And if the Board indeed has no consensus, essentially, whether the WMF projects content is free as in freedom, then this must be clarified ASAP. The new TOS should best be approved by the Board anyway, to avoid doubts about their validity. So, it is the perfect moment to have a confirmation (again, if I have understood Geoff correctly - if not, please Geoff and all others, accept my apologies) that the Board has a consensus that the WMF content is free as in freedom. And this cannot be without an easily available fork ability. If the Board declines to declare this, then I'd suggest to expect soon forks and maybe even lawsuits. I'd go to great lengths to avoid this development; actually, this is what I'm trying to do right now. As for the resources needed: some ways to provide fork ability might indeed be resource-consuming, but some might be resource-saving. And all we know how much WMF needs resources. This is a wonderful win-win opportunity, it is unwise to miss it. Also, WMF denying the content freedom is probably the only thing ever that can make a fork call succeed - there is no reason to be afraid of disruptive fork calls once the technical ability is in place. -- Григор Гачев 21:53, 31 October 2011 (UTC) I think I see what the problem/crux is: Question 1 is "Do users have the right to fork, to use content freely, and redistribute it?". Answer is "yes". Question 2 is "Does WMF have the obligation to help users fork, to use content freely, and redistribute it?" Answer is...? (Geoff?) Seb az86556 22:05, 31 October 2011 (UTC) I think the WMF have a moral obligation to help users fork and I think that they should acknowledge this moral obligation in the TOU. I think, however, that making this a legal obligation would be a mistake and the TOU should be worded so as to make it clear that the courts are not the appropriate route to enforcing this. Григор Гачев above explains how the editors can enforce this policy - by withdrawing their free labour without which there would be no projects. Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons are among the largest free culture projects; let us set a high standard for how free culture projects should operate. Other organisations will be influenced for years to come by what we do here today.Filceolaire 00:59, 1 November 2011 (UTC) Not exactly. Editors may enforce some freedom by an abrupt withdrawing because of a drastic Board decision, but such a decision is not likely. (Unless the Board indeed has no consensus over the right of fork, ie. the content freedom.) More likely is, however, that the Board will have to take measures for keeping expenses under control, gradually sacrificing (unwillingly) the content freedom. The editors will feel the freedom limitation and will start withdrawing and giving more support to fork proposals. However, the process will be very gradual, and will probably not get enough attention until it's too late, and a lot of damage is done. This scenario seems to me plausible. Otherwise, I agree that the fork help should be moral, but not legal obligation of WMF, and that they should acknowledge it in the TOU, or in a document linked there. -- Григор Гачев 20:15, 1 November 2011 (UTC) I think some users are confusing a "terms of use" argument with a contract / charter / constitution. WMF obligations to its users would belong in a contract / charter / constitution, not the terms of use. A terms of use concerns user obligations, not WMF ones. @Geoff: I think that want users in this thread actually want is a charter / constitution; they need more assurance than what a unwritten social contract and licensing agreements can provide. --Michaeldsuarez 14:57, 1 November 2011 (UTC) The idea of TOU is similar to the typical proprietary "all rights reserved by us, you have only obligations" license. That is why TOU is expected by most users to be "a kind of license". And since TOU is most often the only usage-related stuff the users see, a lot may assume that Wikipedia is as closed and proprietary as most sites. This can be partially solved by providing in TOU a link to the license, and possibly to a social contract. (It would be a good idea to have one written.) -- Григор Гачев 20:15, 1 November 2011 (UTC) Seb's got the questions right, and the answer to #2 is "no". The WMF does not have a legal obligation to help you fork the content. Their only legal obligation is to not actively take steps to prevent you from forking all by yourself. If we want the WMF to undertake such a commitment, then we can advocate for that—but the TOU isn't going to achieve that. A sentence claiming something like that in the TOU is unenforceable in practice. If we want this, then we need staff time and a budget for making it happen. A sentence in the TOU does not produce action from the devs. An order from the Board, and a budget allocation by the Board, does produce action. It's my guess that the Board would be willing to issue such an order—assuming that someone here decided that he wanted concrete action instead of empty words, and therefore went to the trouble to ask them to make those actions happen. WhatamIdoing 17:47, 2 November 2011 (UTC) +1 to WhatamIdoing -- very well said. -Pete F 18:04, 2 November 2011 (UTC) Eg, if WMF decides to block overuse, by API or browser (of course, just to keep the traffic within budget), this is not an active step to prevent a fork, but makes it impossible in practice. So, if Seb's #2 is 'no', then WMF content is NOT free, editors have been and are being lied to, and the rock is already rolling downhill towards suing and forks. And, as I already said above, providing fork help might be done in ways that save more staff time and budget than they require. Want examples (in a more appropriate place)? A written fork help obligation in TOU, or a document linked in it, will show the new users what "content freedom" really means, and will help prevent inadvertent sliding towards denying the content freedom in practice. (If bound to provide it, WMF will quickly find ways that decrease its expenses instead of increasing them.) And the lack of such an obligation may ease this sliding. Bad things rarely happen by the order of bad people - far more often they happen when good people underestimate the side effects from doing other good things. That's why I consider such a mention in TOU or a linked document important. -- Григор Гачев 20:56, 2 November 2011 (UTC) I think they should have some freedom as to how they make the project forkable. Having a massive data dump file and a copy of the server software available to download is the way they seem to have been going till now. If that is available then I have no problem with them blocking people from trying to download the whole site page by page.Filceolaire 23:19, 2 November 2011 (UTC) Definitely yes; that is why I believe this should be defined as moral rather than as a legal obligation. However, the dump must be recent enough to allow for a real fork: months old dumps are non-starter. Other technologies, eg. rsync, should be available to supplement what one can get on some media (exports will be old anyway, and transferring the entire Commons over the Net will indeed burden the WMF resources). To decrease the burden further, WMF can limit the rsync right to eg. ten mirrorers who take the obligation to allow everyone to mirror them (or each to allow 10 more and to pass the obligation down). Some mirrorers will be willing to webserve files for WMF pages, thus relieving WMF from between 50 and 80% of the browsing traffic. And the amount of backups made by WMF may decrease (eg. if they have now 2 full backups, after getting 10 full mirrors they can cut down to 1 full backup, and still be better backed up than now). Giving mirroring help is essentially giving fork help, and may save a lot of expenses instead of making new ones. I can't find plausible argument for refusing this... Hence, taking moral obligation to support forking actually saves a lot of expenses to WMF instead of creating expenses. -- Григор Гачев 11:37, 3 November 2011 (UTC) Perhaps we have different definitions of "free". I've got a cassette tape somewhere that is a GFDL "free" recording of a local musician (CC didn't exist then). Is it your belief that if you want a copy of the music, that the artist must pay to make the copy and deliver it to you? Or is it your job to buy the blank media, to obtain the equipment necessary to copy it, to find a mutually convenient time to borrow a master, and to punch the 'copy' button on the equipment? WhatamIdoing 17:11, 3 November 2011 (UTC) Is this cassette tape GFDL free, and is actually created by you under the promise that it will be free for everybody, but the musician keeps it in his house, plays it from there in a non-recordable way and does not feel obliged to allow you copy it? If yes, and you still insist it is free, then we perhaps indeed have different definitions of "free". All the discussion shows very clearly that the topic is not who will provide the cost - it was said twice that providing mirror / fork help will actually save expenses to WMF. It is about whether WMF should be morally obliged to provide fork help. I am at loss why you are trying to beat this strawman. -- Григор Гачев 00:22, 5 November 2011 (UTC) It isn't hidden; you are insisting that you must have the right to go into the musician's house and get the original tape. Seb az86556 00:33, 5 November 2011 (UTC) WhatamIdoing: the WMF isn't the musician. It doesn't create the content. We create the content and we allow the WMF to put this content on it's web site subject to certain conditions that limit what the WMF can do with the our content. A musician who announces that his works are GFDL or CC free but then never gets around to doing anything is within his rights because he created the stuff, he owns it and he can do what he wants with it. A recording studio that takes his works and puts out a CD doesn't own the works so their use of the content must be in accordance with the license - If they don't comply with the license then they don't have the right to do anything with the work. Wiki editors are like the musician. We promise to make all this cool stuff and sometimes it take us a while to get round to it. The WMF is like the record company. They can cajole and encourage us but they aren't paying so they can't come round our house and take it. Once we do send them the music they can put it on the web but only so long as they do it the way they promised when we gave them our words. Filceolaire 09:07, 5 November 2011 (UTC) So? I'm not the musician on the tape, either. My role with respect to this tape is exactly the same as the WMF's: I have a copy of GFDL-licensed material that I did not create myself. In fact, at the time I was given a copy, the musician was dead. Does me possession of one copy of GFDL-licensed music recording, made by someone else, mean that Григор Гачев can barge into my home whenever he wants and demand that I buy a blank cassette and a machine that can copy it, so he can have his own copy? And if GFDL doesn't compel me to supply Григор Гачев with a copy of this content entirely at my expense, then why should it compel the WMF to supply Григор Гачев with a copy of the other content entirely at the WMF's expense? WhatamIdoing 15:48, 7 November 2011 (UTC) It can be understood (hopefully incorrectly) that some of the statements here come to say that WMF is not really committed to its freedom promise under which the editors contribute their work. For example, by not having consensus over whether it will allow a real fork of this work, or by not having a moral (if not legal) commitment to provide fork help (once again: not the fork expenses). To avoid more people misunderstanding that this is possible, a strong statement to the opposite is needed. I believe that TOU is an appropriate place for a short form of this statement, or for a link to this statement, because it provides an appropriate visibility for it. (The already present misunderstanding is to a large part due to the lack of visibility for such a statement.) -- Григор Гачев 01:05, 7 November 2011 (UTC) There is no material difference between "fork help" and "fork expense". The WMF cannot reliably do anything except through ordering its paid staff to do it, and the paid staff cannot do anything—not even walk from one office to the other—without the WMF paying for their time. "Fork help" is never going to be gratuit ("free as in beer"), and it is very likely that "fork help" is not even going to be cheap. It is likely to be expensive, as in, producing the very nice system proposed by John earlier is likely to cost the WMF somewhere between tens and hundreds of thousands of US dollars in staff time, hardware, and communications resources. WhatamIdoing 15:55, 7 November 2011 (UTC) There is a huge material difference between "fork help" and "fork expense", because whoever goes with a fork will be prepared to pay the expenses. Let's be specific. What WMF staff has to do to provide fork help is to allow the contents to be copied. For example, to have an employee tell the forkers how they can connect a storage to the WMF servers, and what to copy. From my experience with copying large data, the WMF cost for this help is going to be between several dozens and several hundreds of US dollars. Any reasonable fork will be glad to pay it. Since when zero cost to WMF became expensive? Moreover, I explicitly stated twice that a way to give fork help is to allow mirrors, which is going to save WMF millions, maybe tens of millions of US dollars in staff time, hardware and communications resources, as through the system proposed by me (see above). Please do hear already. And please do feel invited to reply. I'm curious - are there reasons for which the cash-strapped and expense-conscious WMF will refuse to save millions? And more. I also explicitly stated 4 times that this fork help is not expected to cover fork expenses; other editors explained it, too. Despite that, you continue to insist that the expenses are an unsurmountable obstacle, because of which WMF should not be bound to provide fork help. Pardon me, but I start to ask myself questions that until recently would consider unbelievable. And I start seeing the need to write a WMF obligation to help forks in the TOU (or a linked document) as an absolute must. -- Григор Гачев 21:23, 7 November 2011 (UTC) You're not getting it: The content to be copied does not currently exist in any form that can be copied. It's not a matter of saying "connect your storage to the WMF servers and copy 'this'", because there is no 'this' to copy. The current forms of the projects cannot be copied completely. Did you not pay any attention at all to John V's description of the large gap between what we have today and what would be needed for someone to be able to conveniently download all 10 million images at Commons in practice? WhatamIdoing 16:56, 8 November 2011 (UTC) I want to thank everyone for this informative and helpful conversation. I have read it through a couple of times, and I'm still thinking about it. I just don't want people to think I'm ignoring the issue. (Also, in response to an above comment, let me say that nobody should worry about offending me, especially folks who are communicating in English as a second language. To the contrary, I'm grateful that you are expressing yourself.) Geoffbrigham 02:05, 10 November 2011 (UTC) This all reminds me of the copyright law debate as to whether "fair use" is a mere rather technical legal defense, or whether it has a deep First Amendment status with overall implications. Anyway, maybe there could be a compromise here by including a sentence that blocks/bans/terminations etc will not affect any "right to fork". Before anyone jumps and rushes to say the obvious, the point is that it's a compromise which is not onerous for the Wikimedia Foundation but does mention the topic in a reasonable way in the terms-of-use. -- Seth Finkelstein 03:20, 10 November 2011 (UTC) We blocked Amazon in the very act of them attempting to fork the English Wikipedia, because their method of forking was slamming the servers. We do take actions that very directly "affect any 'right to fork'", because occasionally we must choose between blocking someone and having a non-functional system for the rest of the world. WhatamIdoing 16:01, 10 November 2011 (UTC) commons:Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/01#Backing_up – I think that Григор Гачев is asking for more freedom for bots and scrapers. --Michaeldsuarez 17:31, 10 November 2011 (UTC) @WhatamIdoing: Any information can be copied, and if what you have is good for you, it should be good for the forkers, too. Some methods will surely overload WMF, but others will not. For this reason, denying the right to fork in principle is NOT a defense of the WMF budget: it is a violation of the freedom promise, and the spirit of the GFDL and CC-BY-SA licenses. For the record: I did paid attention to John V's description (and have a lot of info he omitted for brevity's sake). My proposal of methods for mirroring takes into account these details, and allows seamless evolution to different structures without breaking the mirroring process. Did you paid any attention to it, instead of accusing me in not paying attention? I agree to blocking entities that try forking in a way that overloads WMF (and telling them how they should do it instead). Amazon should be allowed to make their fork if they do not overload the WMF infrastructure; also, if they burden WMF with a noticeable cost, they must pay this cost. This is not a violation of the right to fork, much like stopping you from taking a plane without a ticket is not a violation of your right to travel. If you revoke people's right to travel just because some of them might try it without tickets, and there were ones that even tried to, you will be rightly accused of groundlessly violating basic freedoms. Same here. If you try to deny people's right to fork just because some will try it the wrong way, you will be rightly accused of violating the WMF promise and the spirit of the licenses used. And such an accusation is the very last thing WMF needs. If anything can destroy the WMF projects and its stated goal, that's it. @Michaeldsuares: The two topics are completely different. Scrapers already have more freedom than they really need, in my opinion: see what Amazon tried to do, in the paragraph above by WhatamIdoing. Bots could get good use from a little more freedom. Mirroring and forking, however, are completely different thing, and should be considered separately. From the discussion you pointed to: for a small project, eg. :bg, a bot will still be the most selective and thus the most economical way for WMF to mirror the files used (they are < 0.01% of the Commons). Transferring the entire Commons on a storage instead will burden WMF far more. However, mirroring all the Commons is completely different thing. From my experiments (I have several MediaWikis on my servers), the best way to mirror the Commons files would probably be initial transferring the file collection through a specialized storage, and then making daily (or hourly, etc) "snapshots" of the new files (at me, most effective proved directories with symlinks to the appropriate files), which can be rsynced. Removed / renamed files info can be derived from the MediaWiki logs / recentchanges, which can be obtained most selectively through a bot. Pages and revisions are also obtained best through a bot, because of the selectivity. The traffic generated by maintaining eg. ten mirrors through this mechanism should be a tiny part of the Commons traffic. In the beginning, WMF could allow several mirrors (eg. ten), on the condition that each of them will allow 10 more, passing this obligation down. Many companies and organizations will benefit (and profit) from having a local mirror of the Commons, so there should be enough of candidates. The passed obligation will ensure that everyone who wants their mirror will find a mirror source. And WMF will save on this, too. Some mirrors will agree to webserve files to WMF pages, thus potentially relieving WMF from over a half of its traffic (which, I am told, gobbles most of the WMF expenses). A provision that mirrors should provide contents back to WMF on request will decrease also the hardware and maintenance expenses: eg. it will allow to decrease the Commons backups from 2 to 1, and it will still be backed up better than now. Last but not least, this mirroring mechanism will also grant the right of fork. A win-win. I understand that some people at WMF are scared by the opportunity of many forks who dissolve the efforts of the volunteers. However, forks will nave a chance to attract significant number of editors only if WMF fails it mission - for example, if it fails its content freedom promise. And denying the right of fork is the principal way to deny the content freedom. I have the feeling (hopefully wrong) that there are people at WMF who don't understand this. So, putting a promise for fork help (again, not funding) in a very prominent place becomes a needed safeguard against this mission-critical mistake. That is why I demanded it to be included or linked in the TOU. -- Григор Гачев 23:44, 10 November 2011 (UTC) WhatamIdoing, I'm trying to figure out a way to "split the difference" between two problems at different extremes. Obviously, nobody wants to permit a server overload under the justification of right-to-fork. But on the other hand, I can conceive of a situation I call "Go Fork Yourselves!", where a group gets into a dispute with the WMF, wants to fork, and WMF says that since these people are blocked/banned/terminated, their actions to download material to fork are in violation of the terms of use, as "unauthorized access". That is, server issues which could be handled amicably if the WMF wanted to do so, would be intentionally used as a way of hindering the dissent group's efforts. There's been accusations of foot-dragging with "Wikia", a commercial wiki-farm company, when digital sharecropper communities have done escapes from its electronic plantation. So it's not as if there no reason to think this couldn't happen with Wikipedia. Thus, appropriate language is the goal, even if it may be difficult to come up with concise phrasing. -- Seth Finkelstein 01:19, 11 November 2011 (UTC) Many thanks to all for this discussion, which I find fascinating and quite humbling. It is a needed reminder that our community of editors has created Wikipedia and its sister projects, that free content means just that, and that no entity has a monopoly over general knowledge. Here are some thoughts or questions: 1. The Foundation believes in free content obviously, as articulated in Sec. 7 of the proposed TOS. The Foundation also believes that, pursuant to the terms of the free licenses, people have the right to copy the free content from its projects and use that content to support another (contrary) site (assuming all proper attributions and other license requirements are fulfilled). 2. For most of the reasons articulated above, however, I remain unconvinced that the TOS is the best place to address a so-called "right to help" without a more thorough Board review and study of the question. But, if we were to include language today, what should it say? For discussion purposes, taking into the present constraints, one proposal might read like this: The Foundation recognizes that others may copy the free content on its Projects for use on other sites pursuant to the applicable licenses and that, as a desirable but nonbinding goal, the Foundation should seek to facilitate such copying within the constraints of its budget, resources, and other priorities. 3. Can anybody find TOS language from another free content site that guarantees a right for assistance during a fork? My guess is that this is somewhat novel to Wikimedia projects. 4. During the Spanish Fork in Wikipedia's early history, was there any assistance from the Foundation vis-a-vis the fork? Thanks. Geoffbrigham 14:56, 11 November 2011 (UTC) Geoff, when the spanish fork happened in 2002, the WMF did not yet exist. Actually, without the fork, the WMF probably wouldn't have been founded (in 2003) but a private business company based on advertisement similar to wikia (founded by Wales in 2004 in Florida and re-incorporated in Delaware as Wikia, Inc. in January 2006). Further background: For reasons that I don't understand, the WMF wanted to move its headquarters from Florida in 2007 - and moved to expensive San Francisco, which helped Wales consolidate his business interests since Wikia was then based in San Mateo. --Atlasowa 15:32, 11 November 2011 (UTC) @Geoff: Thank you for the nice words. As for the points you brought: 1) The right to copy the content is moot without the opportunity to do this. If WMF acknowledges your right to copy its content, but denies you the technical opportunity to do it, you are effectively denied the right to copy content. (Or if the info you are provided is not good for a fork, eg, if it is months old.) I agree this copying should be done in a way that does not unreasonably burden WMF, but believe that we need a commitment on its side to not deny the opportunity (see the next paragraph). 2) The proposal addresses the problem in a way different from what some people here, incl. me, would mean. It does not bind WMF to provide fork assistance (which I think should be provided), and appears to me to bind WMF to provide what assistance it gives on its own expenses (I think these should be covered by the entity that does the fork). An example: if someone comes to WMF and wants to fork eg. the German-language Wikipedia, WMF should be bound to give him the technical opportunity to copy the relevant content, incl. to tell him what he needs to copy, etc. However, WMF should not be bound to cover his expenses on buying a storage on which to copy the content etc, and if the copying process puts noticeable expenses on WMF (Internet traffic, admin time or whatever), WMF should be able to ask the forker to cover these expenses too. Unhappily, my English is way below the level needed to propose a legal text to this sense. 3) Typically, no TOS / TOU I am aware of includes such a grant. However, most free projects do not accept people who would doubt whether they should permit a fork, while WMF appears to have such people onboard. Also, most free projects have no record of blocking fork attempts, while WMF has it (and probably cannot avoid having it). For this reason, I believe WMF TOU should include or link to such a grant. There is one more aspect that is important: what one needs for a fork. Let me give an example with the free software. If you take the compiled binaries, this is not forking, but redistributing: you can't for a project by them. For a fork, you need the source. In our context, this will mean that the right to fork covers the wikitext and the original images, but not the generated HTML and thumbs (their freedom might be covered by another content freedom aspects, but I don't discuss these here). Let's make the difference. -- Григор Гачев 19:01, 11 November 2011 (UTC) Seth, I've got a lot of sympathy for what you're trying to do, but the fact remains that saying "the WMF will never" when the WMF not only does, but must, is dishonest. Although I don't actually object to Geoff's latest proposal, I think it's ultimately too complicated an issue to be addressed here. WhatamIdoing 19:13, 11 November 2011 (UTC) Григор Гачев says: the best way to mirror the Commons files would probably be initial transferring the file collection through a specialized storage, and then making daily (or hourly, etc) "snapshots" of the new files (at me, most effective proved directories with symlinks to the appropriate files), which can be rsynced. And here's what I want to know: How exactly are you going to create that "specialized storage" with zero money, zero new hardware, and zero staff time? Wave a magic wand? Wish on a falling star? Or do you think we can finally agree that creating "specialized storage" to enable this mirror will actually cost the WMF some real money? WhatamIdoing 17:30, 11 November 2011 (UTC) "Specialized storage" in the context of copying large amount of information usually means a specialized storage hardware, eg. a big NAS. Of course it should be provided by the side that makes the fork. (If this is not a fork, but a mirroring according to the scheme I described above, it may be provided by WMF to facilitate the mirrors it will benefit from. However, this is NOT a case related to the right of fork we discuss here.) This is probably the fifth time I am explaining that fork expenses are not expected to be covered by WMF. Please tell me how many more times I should repeat it to get it understood, in order to finally be able to proceed with the topic on hand. -- Григор Гачев 19:01, 11 November 2011 (UTC) And the big NAS will be installed by magic fairies, so that it will require none of the networking staff's time? It will use no electricity? It will not increase their bandwidth expenses? You're not getting it: there is no way to do anything in the WMF's server farm that does not ultimately cost the WMF cold, hard cash. You are here proposing essentially a "right" to pay the WMF to make a copy of the Projects for you, at whatever they declare the going price to be. In my opinion, this is not the sort of thing that needs to be done in the TOU. If that's what you want, you can have it right now: you just need to send them a proposal, a standard fee-for-service contract, and a fairly large check. WhatamIdoing 19:11, 11 November 2011 (UTC) A NAS will not increase the bandwidth expenses, as it is connected locally. Connecting it to a server farm will require a power plug, a LAN socket and 10 mins staff time to show these to the forker. At the standard consumption of a NAS (about 300W/h), the week needed to make a full Commons (the largest WMF project) copy will consume about 50 KWh power, costing about 10 USD. (Assuming a price of USD 0.2 / kWh; please adjust if the price is different.) Another 10 USD will cover the increased power consumption of the WMF servers during the copying. And the 10 mins of staff time will cost about 20 USD, at a rate of 120 USD / hour. In total, your fairly large check is going to be about 40 USD. (Unless WMF tries to make a huge profit by effectively selling the data we created under a freedom promise by it, in which case most people will bring it to the court and the media immediately. This is the development I am trying to avoid, by requiring measures that will decrease its probability. What are you trying to do?) This is the sixth time I explain that fork expenses should be paid. You didn't answered me how many more times I should do it to finally get us on a constructive track. And, pardon me, you appear to be arguing in circles in order to avoid WMF having to take a prominent obligation to allow mirroring and forking. The reason I find so important to have such an obligation in the TOU is exactly this stance. You are demonstrating it, and the need for such an obligation, better than I could. -- Григор Гачев 12:12, 12 November 2011 (UTC) Would you let anyone at all have full physical access to your machine room, with only ten minutes of supervision? I certainly wouldn't. Not only that, I'd very probably fire anyone who thought it would be acceptable. Even if every WMF manager was an idiot, and every WMF tech thought that letting unknown people do whatever they wanted in the server farm was a fine thing (and if you're not directly supervising the work, that is exactly what you are actually permitting), the fact is that it would take more than ten minutes just to make the initial appointment. WhatamIdoing 17:45, 12 November 2011 (UTC) Please tell me, and everybody else, that you really expect the forker to be let into the machine room, and to stay there during the copying, eg. one week, day and night. We desperately need additional basis to evaluate how good your judgment is. What you gave through this talk by now is not enough. In the reality, 5 minutes will be needed by a staff member to take the storage from the forker outside the machine room, move it in, connect it and get out. The other 5 mins will be used to move the storage out after the copying and give it back to the forker. Additional 1 second will be needed to run a simple copying script. At the company I work in, making an appointment takes about 1 minute. Does WMF spend on such a task hours, paid by the donations? And if the fork help was taking even 10 hours instead of 10 minutes, would the expenses be large enough to assume that the forkers will not pay them, and to deny fork requests on this basis? I already don't doubt that you will fire anyone who will think it is acceptable to make a fork of the WMF content, and will keep inventing even less plausible reasons to deny it. However, I don't have infinite time to waste. With your help, the case is demonstrated convincingly enough. There are people who will deny the right to fork with baseless arguments, will get WMF sued by a hell lot of people (and convicted), will destroy the public image of its projects, and will teach everyone around that who helps a noble cause gets cheated. For this reason, the WMF TOU desperately need to include or link to a clear statement from WMF that they will support morally the right of fork. The knowledge that everyone knows WMF can be forked on need is the only deterrent for such people I am aware of. -- Григор Гачев 15:55, 13 November 2011 (UTC) WhatamIdoing wrote "We blocked Amazon in the very act of them attempting to fork the English Wikipedia, because their method of forking was slamming the servers." Actually WMF did not "block the very act of attempting to fork" and Amazon's Shopping-enabled Wikipedia pages are still up: http://www.amazon.com/wiki/James_Joyce#Finnegans_Wake . See also w:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-12-06/In the news#Amazon adds "shopping-enabled" Wikipedia pages. This is a (commercial) mirror, not a fork, and it apparently did Remote loading, which was blocked. --Atlasowa 10:14, 12 November 2011 (UTC) Apparently, one of their efforts to create this mirror slammed the servers, and they got blocked. I've heard that everything got worked out in the end, but that doesn't change the fact that they did actually get blocked (once) during the very act of trying to copy the files. WhatamIdoing 17:45, 12 November 2011 (UTC) Right to fork - New Section I agree with WhatamIdoing that facilitating a fork will cost money. Configuring the software to produce a usable data file will cost money. Storing this file will cost money. Every time someone downloads this file it will use bandwidth which costs money. I also agree with Григор Гачев. This is worth doing for it's own sake just like it is worth providing the information for free download page by page and all the other things WMF does to support it's mission. I also believe doing this will have certain other benefits which will mitigate the cost - notably that it will let others help us keep security backups - and that we can probably find others who are prepared to donate storage space and bandwidth to host copies of the data dump because they support our mission, especially if someone comes up with a way to do this in a distributed way so they can store a part of the file.Filceolaire 08:53, 12 November 2011 (UTC) I agree that it should be done. But the way to make that happen is to develop a detailed plan, a budget, and a list of staff members responsible for doing it. Saying "You have the right to fork this content from the WMF servers" will be interpreted by certain site scrapers as "you have an unlimited right to fork no matter how you choose to go about it", which is not true. Putting such an irresponsibly unqualified statement into the TOU could result in one of them suing the WMF for "breach of contract" when they get blocked for slamming the servers. Even having such a lawsuit threatened costs the WMF real money, even if we all believe that they're going to lose. Again: good idea, but bad method. WhatamIdoing 17:51, 12 November 2011 (UTC) If an unqualified "right to fork" is a bad idea then I guess we should qualify this right - for example by requiring the WMF to make appropriate arrangements and requiring those wishing to create a fork to cooperate with those arrangements. Without this kind of agreed procedure, as you noted above, there can be problems, but, as you noted above, these problems can be (and have been in the past) resolved with a little cooperation. It may even be that if you want a copy of the data you have to buy a hard drive, loaded with the data, from WMF - price as listed on the download page, similar to the retail price of the drive plus shipping. That would meet my expectations. Filceolaire 19:12, 12 November 2011 (UTC) I believe this has been an extremely useful conversation for the reasons I stated above, and I have been impressed with the strength of the arguments. Although I do not intend to cut off further discussion, as previously noted, I honestly don't see the WMF moving much on this without a larger community discussion and review by the Board. Now, to be clear, WMF is maintaining a strong commitment to keeping all information in our projects freely available and re-usable, free of charge, in perpetuity, as per our mission statement. (And I suppose we can say that in the user agreement if we want.) As noted, WMF recognizes the right to copy our content and re-use it on other sites. It is easy to copy the text of all revisions from dumps.wikimedia.org; images and other media files can be manually slurped over time. But, without a more formal directive, we are not in a postion today to make a commitment to provide additional technical assistance or support, especially give our constrained budgets and priorities. Thanks to all for your views on this, which have been quite helpful. Geoffbrigham 01:09, 13 November 2011 (UTC) @WhatamIdoing: Filceolaire expressed it nicely. The best way to avoid being sued by scrappers etc. is to have a developed procedure for forking that ensures content quality and completeness, is not overpriced, does not make one wait beyond what is technically necessary, is easy to follow, and its description is readily available. If so, I am unable to find an argument that a scrapper will be able to defend in a court. And there is one more benefit: the procedure will be effectively the same as for mirroring, and WMF has a lot to gain from mirroring. (In fact, mirrors and forks are interchangeable to a degree: I don't see a strong reason to differentiate between them, as long as the procedure is concerned.) The procedure might be different for different-sized projects. Mirroring the smallest Wikipedias by a bot will probably constitute under a megabyte of traffic per year - this is negligible. For larger projects a bot will still be the cheapest approach, once there is agreement who will pay the traffic. For the largest projects bot-only might not be an option: even if the mirrorers agrees to pay the traffic, slurping too much per time may slam the WMF servers. But this talk already belongs to the procedure development. As for the scrappers depending on the statement to sue WMF: a scrapper would have a hard time to convince a court that WMF simply owes him the money that pay for their work. However, a scrapper will have absolutely no problem to sue WMF for not keeping to their explicit written promise and the spirit of the licenses they receive the content under. Given the current situation with the content, a lot of judges will easily decide on the scrapper side, and the scrapper might not only get all at WMF expense, but to even litigate a compensation from WMF - that is, the scrapper has the incentive to go for it. Including or linking this statement in the TOU will nudge some people at WMF to finally take measures to prevent this far bigger and present now danger. @Geoff: The dumps are typically months old - a scrapper can convincingly argue in court that they do not really fulfill the right to copy. And the talk is not about providing technical assistance beyond the copying, neither it is expected to be done on WMF expenses. For this reason, the budget has nothing to do here. And keeping to the spirit of the licenses and the promises should be expected to be very high in the WMF priorities. In fact, to have been very high since a lot of time - and this raises some unpleasant questions. Given all this, I believe that it would be irresponsible to not have such a commitment included or linked in the TOU. -- Григор Гачев 16:46, 13 November 2011 (UTC) @Григор Гачев. I hear you and understand your position. As I've said, I believe this requires more discussion and review before turning it into a contractual obligation. I have been quite impressed by your advocacy, which shows an admirable dedication to open source philosophy. What I can promise you is that I will hightlight to the Board that this was a strongly debated issue (if we decide to submit the TOS to the Board for approval). And the Board will have access to this discussion for its own consideration. There are times when I have strong respect for a position, but cannot incorporate it immediately because of practical considerations. This is one of those times. Geoffbrigham 23:57, 13 November 2011 (UTC) Geoff, you're being slightly sloppy: It's not the WMF's content. The WMF doesn't hold the copyright on my contributions. I do. So it's not "the right to copy our content and re-use it"; it's "the right to copy content that we're hosting and re-use it"—a right that the contributor, not the WMF, granted to both the WMF and the rest of the world. Yep. You are right to put me in check on this. Thanks. Geoffbrigham 13:40, 14 November 2011 (UTC) Григор Гачев, the WMF cannot be sued successfully for refusing to allow someone to copy my content from their servers. The WMF has zero legal obligation to provide you, or any site scraper, with the content that is owned by someone else (the contributors). The WMF has made zero "explicit written promise" to guarantee site scrapers the ability to conveniently copy everything at the WMF's expense, or even at the scraper's own expense. It's equally true that the folks who print up articles on paper have no duty to provide you with convenient methods of copying the work from their books. Perhaps your "knowledge" of this promise is based on rumors and hearsay, rather than reading and understanding the formal documents? WhatamIdoing 00:01, 14 November 2011 (UTC) @Geoffbrigham - again, I believe this issue can at least be mentioned in terms-of-use by focusing on terms of use issues, and it can be incorporated as a matter of a promise not to have to any disputes resulting in blocks/bans/terminations override any right-to-fork. That is a reasonable terms of use matter. Right now, that scenario is not a hot topic, as there isn't a dissident faction. However, just for an example, given the tensions of e.g. the image filter, and some of the politics around possibility imposing it on unwilling projects, it's not hard to see a potential dispute. This of course leaves open the specifics of any such obligations. But that shouldn't be a show-stopper. After all, the "Global Ban" so-called policy isn't fully written yet, and the terms of use had no problem making a legally binding reference to a policy that didn't exist, and wasn't clear what it would be if/when it did exist! Note to WhatamIdoing, in terms of calling-out-numbers argument, I understand your objections, so you need not repeat them. -- Seth Finkelstein 00:18, 14 November 2011 (UTC) A draft version of the Global Ban policy is now ready for review; you should be able to link to it from the agreement. Understand it is not final, so I hear your point. I'm open to proposed language for consideration, but, for the reasons already stated, I don't see us resolving this issue substantively on this round. Geoffbrigham 13:40, 14 November 2011 (UTC) //@ Geoffbrigham, with some ec's// OK. First, you should know that I fully accept and support the need of something like a central organisation (German: Dachorganisation), in our case the WMF/Board (I just simplify and make no difference in this posting of mine). I fully understand that you cannot do certain steps immediatelly but you must consult some other participants. OK. But I would like go back to the roots (as you can see I am registered here since 2004) and I give you some question: 1. whan was the Wikipedia created, 2 whan was the WMF/Board (and chapters) created, 3. who created whom and why, 4. what are then the principial goals of this two parts of one whole, 5. who is earnig the money for the technical suppost (the WMF/Board or the authors here?), 6. should both parts of this whole participate and cooperate on the WP in the future, and last but not least 7. what is the best sort of a cooperation in this case. I know these problems from other situations and I really know it is sometimes quite difficult. But sometimes possible. so here we are. Regards -jkb- 00:22, 14 November 2011 (UTC) If you are looking for answers then the Wikipedia articles on the WMF in various languages have most of them. Or did you mean that the Terms of Use page should include the answers to these questions?93.96.237.210 07:59, 14 November 2011 (UTC) @jkb. Your experience on projects (since 2004!) is quite impressive, and, if I understand your point correctly, you are reminding us never to forget that the editors and contributors have made Wikimedia. I can't agree more. I do believe there is a role for collaboration or cooperation with WMF, but maybe you can explain a little more your thoughts expressed above. Thanks. Geoffbrigham 13:40, 14 November 2011 (UTC) Your last statement is laudable, but not complete: We - the contributors - did not just made Wikimedia, we own all the content. WMF just owns the servers and the trademark. The copyrights are ours and while anyone including the WMF may use our content under the free license provided, we can take our content anywhere else under the same license, including a full or partial fork. --h-stt !? 14:40, 14 November 2011 (UTC) Yes, and fundamentally the question is this: I have personally granted Григор Гачев the right to copy my contributions (with certain small restrictions, as outlined in the licenses) through unspecified means. Does the fact that I, an individual human, have granted Григор Гачев this right mean that Григор Гачев has the legal right to copy my contributions specifically from the WMF servers, even if there is some reason why the WMF does not want their server used that way (say, because Григор Гачев is slamming the server, or only wants to copy during peak traffic times, or wants to have physical access to the server to make the copy)? Or does it just mean that he has the right to make a copy somehow, possibly in ways completely unrelated to the WMF? There's another question: Does Григор Гачев have the right to do the same thing for any copy of my contributions, or is he singling out the WMF as having some (mythical) special rights to my contributions? There's a mirror at Facebook, and my contributions are present there under exactly the same license terms as they are present on the WMF servers. Does the fact that my contributions are present at Facebook mean that Григор Гачев can demand that Facebook let him physically install a NAS in their server farm (his preferred method) and download all of our contributions from Facebook? And once he's done so, can we all go to his home and demand physical access to his copy? Or is it only the WMF that he believes should be forced to make special allowances for his desire to copy the files? It seems to me that my choice to grant a right to copy my contributions does not impose any special burden on the WMF to make it easy or convenient for someone else to make those copies. In fact, it seems to me that my choice legally cannot impose any special burden on the WMF, because I don't own or control the WMF. WhatamIdoing 20:08, 14 November 2011 (UTC) I think per the calling-out-numbers joke, it's time to assign this argument a number, which should be "1201" (in-joke, from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act). That is, "Can a licensing right be de facto nullified by an access restriction?". Having gone through this in the real world, I can say it's intensely disputed, and I believe unsettled. The answer to your question in specific, is yes, by the WMF *soliciting contributions*, and possibly making some sort of implicit or explicit promises on their reuse (colloquially called the right-to-fork), it's arguable that the WMF has to live up to those promises and not turn around and break them because by definition keeping such promises would be more effort than not. At least, that's what one side would argue in a legal dispute. Now, to save going around again, please recognize that while you may not consider it the correct answer, it is indeed a well-grounded answer to the question you raised. -- Seth Finkelstein 09:49, 19 November 2011 (UTC) Right to Fork - Legal benefits? I was wondering if making the "Right to Fork" the ultimate sanction in the TOU could be used to weaken the right to sue to enforce the TOU. Editors and contributors can certainly sue to enforce their rights under copyright if the use of their contributions doesn't comply with the licenses. The rights and duties under the TOU are a bit different and we would really rather disputes over how the terms of the TOU are implemented should be handled under our own internal procedures, rather than in court. If the TOU make the Board the court of final appeal and the right to fork the ultimate sanction for anyone dissatisfied by the response of the Board would that make it more difficult for others to go to court if they disagreed with our implementation/ interpretation/ enforcement of the TOU? i.e. would it make courts more likely to refuse to hear such cases or make it easier for WMF to win such cases? -Filceolaire 12:10, 18 November 2011 (UTC) Filceolaire ... this is an interesting idea. I think the answer is that, if we expressly make the Board the court of last resort, it may create some arguments militating against outside law suits. It is not unlike compulsory arbitration clauses in contracts where the parties agree to take their dispute to a certified arbitrator as opposed to a court. There is always the risk that some who disagree with a Board's decision will nevertheless try to sue, claiming some lack of due process or other grounds, but we would urge against that position. From a practical standpoint, however, the Board probably should not be asked to be the final decision-maker because, simply put, the Board is too busy to take on that kind of day-to-day arbitration role; the Board's role is to look at the big picture in terms of strategy for the WMF. I would submit that they have little time for more day-to-day administrative functions. Also the right to fork as a remedy may not always work for every violation of the agreement; for example, if someone downloads malware on the site and receives an adverse Board decision, should the WMF have to support that person in a fork effort? I would suggest not. Geoffbrigham 17:01, 5 December 2011 (UTC) Right to Fork - WMF benefits? Much of the debate about the right to fork has been conducted in a somewhat confrontational way as if the Foundation could keep groups of volunteers and prevent forks simply by making them difficult, or people suspect that the WMF seeks to do that. I'd like to suggest that the Foundation approach this from the opposite angle. The Right to Fork is a great reassurance to editors in times of controversy, but measures to enable it are also a potential reassurance to our partners and potential partners in the GLAM community. Proper full backups and a practical way to make efficient copies are needed for the right to fork to be meaningful for large projects, and also some have argued are needed for the Foundation to honour its license commitments to the volunteers who contribute content and the compatibly licensed content that we import from elsewhere. It would also be a much more user friendly response to people who want to legitimately copy the data if we said how they could conveniently copy as much data as they wanted when we tell them not to do it in a way that looks like denial of service attack. A digital archive that could survive even if the Foundation closes would be a great reassurance to some editors and potential GLAM partners. We are competing with commercial organisations to be the place that museums and other institutions choose to upload files to. We are currently losing that competition because our software is difficult to use and loading images to Commons is much harder than doing so to Flickr, and it is easier to then display a Flikr page on the museum's own website. What uploads we do get are partly because we are a fellow not for profit, but one of the questions we face is digital archiving - what guarantee can we make that the information released via us will continue to be available? We should also remember that the most popular proposal in the Strategy wiki was Strategy:Proposal:Keep the servers running and this is reflected in one of the five themes of the current WMF strategy. So a plan from the WMF showing how the data entrusted to it will remain fully available would be a very positive move, and I would suggest in keeping with its published strategy and license commitments. This could be achieved in the short term by making a clear simple commitment such as "A complete copy can be taken in the following manner give us x days notice then visit our servers with the following equipment and the knowledge of how to use it". More realistically and for the medium term it should be quite straightforward for the Foundation to pay an IT provider to maintain a full backup of the Public data (if this was done outside the US it could result in dramatically improved access speeds in whatever part of the Globe the mirror was located). Maintaining longterm digital archives is a fairly new area and it would be interesting to see what responses and publicity the WMF would receive if it invited bids for "A digital repository that would be available for the longterm" including at a minimum a 100 year archive. Among the risks of making it inconvenient for large projects to fork are: Those projects which are small enough to do so anyway may be more tempted to go. Editors who feel trapped could be demotivated. Projects to fork may take longer to bring to fruition, but in the process they could acquire their own inertia and be difficult to reevaluate - even if Foundation relations with the community have improved during their gestation period. I appreciate that enshrining the right to fork in the TOU and making it more practical would require a substantial rethink at the WMF. But I would suggest it is in the true interest of both the WMF and the community. WereSpielChequers 11:44, 27 November 2011 (UTC) Referral of Discussion to the Board Thank you for this discussion, which I have found quite educational and important. For reasons already set out above, WMF obviously agrees that people have the right to copy content under the applicable free licenses (see Sec. 7) and reuse on a new site (the "right to fork"). Although not always perfect, the state of today's world allows anyone to copy text from dumps.wikimedia.org and manually slurp images and other media files. If the community feels that WMF should do more (such as actively allocating resources to support a fork, maintaining better archives, or ensuring access), I personally believe that a conversation independent from the TOS is necessary since any final decision would impact WMF priorities, budget, resources, etc. For these reasons, I do not intend to add additional language to the TOS, but, in transferring the final TOS for review, discussion, and decision, I will highlight this issue and conversation to the Board for its consideration. Geoffbrigham 18:45, 5 December 2011 (UTC) Hah, saw this before he even had a chance to refer it. I've read the discussions. I think that the ability to fork is important, and something WMF has already had an am implicit principle--many other decisions have been made that take it into account, even if the principle has never set down anywhere. It's difficult to write proper language that captures the idea of what we want to do--to not hold a monopoly over the ability to reproduce the content and host a community around it--without making guarantees that are impractical or inappropriate. But I'll start drafting something that I think would be appropriate to set down as a board-level resolution and then send it to the lists for discussion. Kat Walsh (spill your mind?) 20:30, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

This section has been reviewed. If there are new issues or outstanding concerns related to this, please start a new conversation. Mdennis (WMF) 15:16, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Licensing

In section "7. Licensing of Content", now the sentence:

"(Re-users may comply with either license.)"

has been added. As far as I remember, "either" can have the meaning of "all of them" or the meaning of "one of them", depending on the context. So at least for me, this sentence in brackets is not a real clarification.

--Rosenkohl 13:26, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

"Either" in this context means that you have three choices:

• comply with the GFDL,
• comply with CC-BY-SA, or
• comply with both. WhatamIdoing 15:36, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Rosenkohl. I have reworded as follows: (Re-users may comply with either license or both.) Does that help? Geoffbrigham 17:09, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Ok, now the content page has been changed into:

>>Re-users may comply with either license or both<<,

thank you Geoffbrigham. This is quite similar to the clause on the current http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_use:

>>Re-users can choose the license(s) they wish to comply with.<<

However I now notice that in my opinion this is more than a language problem, since i don't understand how can be correct. At the moment, can't see from http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Terms_of_use&action=history where this old policy has been discussed before, and am not aware if is clause has been discussed on this page Talk:Terms of use or in the talk archives so far (I just did a quick full text search with "re-use" which gave me no sufficient result).

Suppose someone wants to re-use content which has been published on Wikimedia under GFDL or under CC BY-SA, or both. Both licences require that the re-user is complying with the particular license, that means that he publishes the re-used content under the particular license. That means, content which is under GFDL must be republished under GFDL, and content which is under CC BY-SA must be published under CC BY-SA.

But this clause "re-users can choose the license(s) they wish to comply with seems" (or: "re-users may comply with either license or both") seems to allow to choose one of these licences, and simply leave away the other, or even to re-use content which was first published on Wikimedia under one of these licences under the other license. This means that a re-user could take content published under GFDL on Wikimedia and re-publish it outside Wikimedia under CC BY-SA, or he could take content published under CC BY-SA on Wikimedia and re-publish it outside Wikimedia under GFDL. But this would violate the particular licences it seems.

--Rosenkohl 10:25, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

Rosenkohl, I greatly appreciate your close reading and feedback here. Under the present user agreement under the subtitle of "Information for text contributors to Wikimedia projects," we state:

Therefore, for any text you hold the copyright to, by submitting it, you agree to license it under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For compatibility reasons, you are also required to license it under the GNU Free Documentation License (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). Re-users can choose the license(s) they wish to comply with.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_use

So I don't think we are doing anything new here. The text at issue in the proposed TOS says (Sec. 7(a)):

When you submit text to which you hold the copyright, you agree to license it under:

* Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (“CC BY-SA”), and

* GNU Free Documentation License (“GFDL”) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts).

(Re-users may comply with either license or both.)'''

I believe it is clear from this language that, if someone licenses text under CC BY SA and GFDL, the subsequent re-use of that text may be under either CC BY SA or GFDL (or both). This provision on re-use only applies to text that is previously licensed under both licenses. Does this clarify things for you or am I missing something? Cheers. Geoffbrigham 22:49, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

Hello Geoffbrigham, thanks for your patient answers. In fact, I'm not very familiar with licensing issues of Wikipedia, so am trying to read up now on old policy, talk or frequently asked question pages, some of which I can only find by using google or other full text searches.

a) I do understand that the new draft ("(Re-users may comply with either license or both") is taking a version of the the old statement ("Re-users can choose the license(s) they wish to comply with") from the hitherto Terms of Use, without changing the meaning of this statement. However, I'm not convinced that even the old Terms of User are not without any problem.

To my understanding, for the re-user, GFDL generally is (to some extenxt) more restricitive than CC BY-SA, e.g. since under GFDL the re-user has to fullfill more, or more difficult requirements, including attribution requirements.

Now the proposal says under "7. h. Re-Use":

"In addition, please be aware that text that originated from external sources and was imported into a Project may be under a license that attaches additional attribution requirements."

Suppose someone is reading this statement, who wants to take content which is on Wikimedia under both CC BY-SA and GFDL, and intends to republish it outside Wikimedia under CC BY-SA. Then they must believe, that GFDL is a kind of "license that attaches additional attribution requirements" (because GFDL is the more restrictive license). And consequently, they must think that the Terms of Use require them to publish the content under both licenses, CC BY-SA and GFDL. But I think this would be a misunderstanding, and seems to run against the original intention, why double licensing had been introduced into Wikimedia in 2008?!

I'm definitely welcome expert advice on this, because I believe you raise an interesting point Rosenkohl. Let me tell you what I think. I believe when a document is licensed under both CC BY SA and GFDL, there is not a requirement that you must relicense under both. See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3-faq.html . With respect to your reuse, you can choose between which license you want to apply to the reuse. Section 7(h) does not refer to the situation where a work was previously licensed under both licenses; I believe it refers to other free licenses (Sec. 7(c)) that attached to the imported text, which are compatible with CC BY SA but which require attributions beyond those enumerated in Section 7(h). Again, if there is anybody who wants to help us figure this out, please chime in. Geoffbrigham 23:55, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

b) The old Terms of Use, and new proposal both contain the expression:

"* GNU Free Documentation License (“GFDL”) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts)."

The four attributes in brackets "unversioned", "with no invariant sections", "front-cover texts", "back-cover texts" are not explained anywhere in the Wikimedia-Terms of Use. It is not clear to what these attributes are meant to apply, to the text of the contributed content, or to the text of the GFDL. The terms "invariant section", "front-cover text" and "back cover-texts" are explained to some extent on http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html, but there it is no mentioning and explanation of what "unversioned" means.

So it is not clear at all for the reader what is meant with this bracket "(unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts)" in the context of Wikimedia Terms of Use. Perhaps it could be helpfull to explain it in full sentences?

I'm open to hearing from better experts than I on this. I believe that "unversioned" embraces the present and future versions of the license, like "GFDL 1.3 and beyond." If someone has a link that explains this better, that would be great. Geoffbrigham 00:53, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

Wikimedia projects never included any front-cover text, back-cover text or invariant sections as the GFDL defined them, so we never addressed what they were--all of the text is considered the main body of the work. (If you know that the GFDL was developed initially for the GNU manuals, this makes more sense--basically, the only GFDL-licensed works that really used these sections are the GNU manuals.) My interpretation of "unversioned" is the same as Geoff's. Kat Walsh (spill your mind?) 20:11, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

c) The old Terms of Use in their chapter "Information for re-users" are starting to advise their reader in the section "Re-use of text" to re-use Wikimedia content with CC BY-SA. Then, only in a kind of addendum, "Additional availability of text under the GNU Free Documentation License" is mentioned. But the explanation there of how to re-use under GFDL is not as extensive as the explanation of how to re-use under CC BY-SA.

However, in the new proposed Terms of Use, parts of the explanation of how to re-use under CC BY SA seem to have been transfered into the section "7. i. Modifications or additions to material that you re-use". Section 7. i. says:

"When modifying or making additions to text that you have obtained from Project website, you agree to license the modified or added content under CC BY-SA 3.0 or later (or, as explained above, another license when exceptionally required by the local Project or feature)."

But now this reads as if when you make modification or additions to material under the new Terms of Use, the section 7. i. would require you to apply CC BY-SA in any event, and doesn't allow to apply GFDL instead anylonger.

I don't understand this restriction, and it seems to violate the GFDL.

So when you reuse the original text, you may do so under CC BY SA or GFDL. But when you modify that text, you are limited to relicensing under CC BY SA. This is what the present terms of use says: "Each copy or modified version that you distribute must include a licensing notice stating that the work is released under CC-BY-SA . . . ." Geoffbrigham 00:53, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

Well, that quote starts with: "each copy or modified version", so it does not distinguish between plain copys of an original text and a modification of the text. I think it follows from the context on http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_use, that this quote means that if you want to re-use text under CC-BY-SA, then your distribution must include a licensing notice stating that the work is released under CC-BY-SA.

In fact, http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_use also says: "For compatibility reasons, any page which does not incorporate text that is exclusively available under CC-BY-SA or a CC-BY-SA-compatible license is also available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License." But GFDL (of course) allows modifications, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html, chapter 4.MODIFICATIONS. Obviously, the term "re-user" in "Re-users can choose the license(s) they wish to comply with" of the hitherto Terms of Use encompasses both ways of re-use, to make plain copys of a document or to make own modifications. I think any new proposed version of Wikimedia Terms of Use must avoid to prohibit re-users from publishing modified versions under GFDL of double-licensed texts from Wikimedia, which I think has been possible so far.

--Rosenkohl 20:41, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

--Rosenkohl 11:22, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

Rosenkohl - you raise a number of good points. I would welcome experienced experts in GFDL and CC BY SA to read Section 7 and ensure we have it right. Many thanks. Geoffbrigham 00:53, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

I'm not an expert but I remember the old discussions about this. I think that the point here is that re-users are not re-using content thanks to an agreement with the WMF: their "license agreement" is directly with the authors; the WMF requires a license but that's a license to the general public; the WMF gives only some information to re-users, i.e. that all text is (or should be) available under a certain license.

The key difference between GFDL and CC-BY-SA in Wikimedia projects is that GFDL is not mandatory any longer: if authors have provided text under GFDL, re-users can use it in compliance with the GFDL, but the WMF requires only the CC-BY-SA for text (in general), and that's the only license it can say to be always attached to the text. Still, this has to be properly worded, because the WMF is not promising or ensuring anything here, and if re-users include content that in the end is discovered to be under a different license or even a copyright violation (to be reverted or deleted on the wikis), that's their own risk. Nemo 15:03, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

GNU Free Documentation License (unversioned) vs GFDL 1.2 or any later

There is a mistake in the Terms of Use: untill the licence update all Wikpedian text content got GDFL 1.2+ (see old English Wikipedia:Copyright and German de:Wikipedia:Lizenzbestimmungen/alt_GFDL) but in this draft it is GFDL (unversioned). GFDL 1.0 isn't compatible with GDFL 1.2+. Syrcro 06:38, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Thank you Syrcro for looking at this. It is important to note that we did not intend to change anything from the original terms of use with respect to licensing. Today, for example, we are saying in the present terms of use: "For compatibility reasons, you are also required to license it under the GNU Free Documentation License (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts)." Maybe somebody can explain to us what we meant when we referred to the "unversioned" GFDL license in the original terms of use. Geoffbrigham 15:03, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

It basically means "whatever appears on http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html", AFAIK: otherwise we would link http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.2.html etc. This is explained by the GFDL itself: «If the Document does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation». Nemo 14:48, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

The Wikipedia did specify a version of the GNU Free Documentation License: GFDL 1.2. ~ 1.2 or any later version, not 1.0. The draft includes all versions. Syrcro 13:54, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

When was "1.2 or later version" specified? It isn't, in the current terms of use. Nemo 19:10, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Details from Section 10

Hey all, per the fact that Section 10 refers to a Global Ban Policy where the community gets to lay out how it wants things to work, I've kicked off a draft for comment and editing. There was previously a combined draft at "Global blocks and bans", but since there is technically no current ability to globally block an account, I have separated them out into two drafts for discussion. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 22:12, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Ensuring prior notice is provided

Extended content
The Terms of Use are only enforceable because the edit box includes above it "By clicking the "Save Page" button, you agree to the Terms of Use" or the local equivalent. However, this leaves us powerless against clever vandals who avoid the editing function and rely on a means of disruption that does not involving clicking that button, such as: editing via the Mediawiki API, page moving, compromising administrator accounts and using them to perform non-editing admin actions like delete, protect, and block, distributed denial of service attacks (e.g. rendering a preview page containing images of many different sizes), and so on. In some cases (such as page moves) this is relatively easy to fix, while in others it may not be. How can we ensure to the greatest extent possible that all users of the site are given notice of the terms of use before they have the opportunity to violate them? Dcoetzee 03:26, 29 October 2011 (UTC) We intend to include page footers throughout the projects that say the following: "By using this site, you agree to abide by the terms of use." In specific cases, we could employ language tailored to the specific tool that would condition the use of that tool on the acceptance of the terms of use. Geoffbrigham 09:03, 29 October 2011 (UTC) Is this really a realistic concern? Do you think any judge in the country will buy into the equivalent of "Yes, your Honor, I have the right to continue throwing bricks into any window that doesn't have the note 'it is illegal to destroy me' on it."? Seb az86556 21:42, 29 October 2011 (UTC) It really depends on the issue. The user agreement, of course, addresses questions beyond the "bricks into any window," so I think it is wise to add the additional language, even if not totally necessary for all issues. Geoffbrigham 08:07, 30 October 2011 (UTC) The point here is that the examples given above show that someone who puts in the necessary effort of deliberately circumventing the terms of use notice will darn well know s/he's doing something wrong, e.g. the only motivation for avoiding the save-button is maliciousness. No? Seb az86556 09:33, 30 October 2011 (UTC) @Geoff: I think the footers will be unhelpful, ref Specht v. Netscape Communications Corp.. I do think it would helpful if all actions which write the database (move, delete, etc.), which already have confirmation pages anyway, include a "By clicking the button below" notice. Similarly, we could change "By clicking the "Save Page" button" to "By clicking any button" to encompass most forms of DDoS. I'm not sure what to do about the Mediawiki API, however - this is currently accessible to anyone, very powerful, and they can easily produce their own tools to use it, so a EULA on API-based tools would be powerless. Dcoetzee 05:13, 31 October 2011 (UTC) Thanks much Dcoetzee for your thoughts here. As I see it, the footers may still be helpful despite Specht since their main purpose is to provide notice to our readers (which is factually different from the purpose in Specht). Furthermore, we could present the link to the TOS elsewhere on the page, such as in the left-hand toolbar. And, as courts have suggested, the rationale of Specht will depend on the specific facts of the case at hand. See, e.g., Cario v. Crossmedia Services, Inc., 2005 WL 756610 (N.D. Cal. Apr. 1, 2005)(agreement upheld where the language "By continuing past this page and/or using this site, you agree to abide by the Terms of Use for this site" was displayed on every page of the website and user repeatedly accessed the site); Pollstar v. Gigmania, Letd., 170 F. Supp. 2d 974 (E.D. Cal. 2000)(finding that dismissal of breach of contract claim is inappropriate, even though visitors to plantiff's website were presumably "not aware that the license agreement is linked to the homepage" and "the user is not immediately confronted with the notice of the license agreement"); Molnar v. 1-800-Flowers.com, Inc., 2008 WL 4772125 *7 (C.D. Cal. 2008)("a party's use of a website may be sufficient to give rise to an inference of asset to the Terms of Use contained therein."). In short, I see no harm in including the footers. Once we figure out the TOS, we can figure out how to present it on the Mediawiki API. With the help of the community, I'm pretty sure we can find a solution. Geoffbrigham 00:15, 1 November 2011 (UTC) Interesting point, Dcoetzee. There's one specific case that should be considered -- shouldn't users have to explicitly agree to the TOU (and maybe the Privacy Policy as well) upon creating an account? Because there's no mention of them on that page currently. -Pete F 19:34, 3 November 2011 (UTC) I had thought of that Pete, but, of course, we have many unregistered users. That is why, for contributions, our present placement of langauge above the edit summary makes sense in my mind. Geoffbrigham 16:20, 4 November 2011 (UTC) Yes, I am not suggesting that it should be removed from the edit summary -- merely that it be added to the account creation page as yet another way to make them visible. From an end-user perspective, it seems if someone were ever inclined to look for the Terms of Use, it would be at the time when he/she takes a strong step toward joining the community. It seems important to have a link on the account-creation page, in addition to the edit submission window. -Pete F 19:25, 4 November 2011 (UTC) OK. There is really no legal reason against it. But, as a user experience issue, it may not be ideal. Someone who registers as a user (and then agrees to the TOS) will likely make edits immediately afterwards, at which time that user will be asked to agree to the TOS ... again. If asked, I would vote against including on the registration page, but my reasons are more cosmetic than legal. Geoffbrigham 15:58, 8 November 2011 (UTC) That doesn't strike me as a huge problem -- in my opinion, a little duplication is a small price to pay for having the TOU linked in the place where, in my opinion, it is most likely to be noticed and read. However, maybe there's a happy compromise available? I suspect it would be simple, on a technical level, to have the TOU linked from the edit screen when a user is not logged in, but absent when editing from a registered account. If you think that would be a good idea, I'd be happy to ask some developers if that's an easy change to make. -Pete F 17:27, 11 November 2011 (UTC) That would work except for the fact that, when we have a revision, we need to redeliver the TOS for agreement. We would need to think that out. Geoffbrigham 20:38, 14 November 2011 (UTC) Ah, I see. That makes sense. Would either of the following approaches work? TOU on account creation is linked with text along the lines of, "I agree to the current Terms of Use, and understand that when I make any future edits, I will abide by the then-current TOU, which will be visible in the edit screen" or: A new technical feature which, when there are new TOU, interrupts the normal user login process with a text box and an "Accept" button The second one seems to me to be pretty standard practice elsewhere on the web and in the software world. -Pete F 02:08, 17 November 2011 (UTC) Two problems with the second option: Most edits are made by people who don't login (ever), so there's no login process to interrupt, and most people who login do so only infrequently (as little as once every 30 days), so it would take a month to deliver all of these notices even to people who edit every single day. WhatamIdoing 15:07, 17 November 2011 (UTC) Whatamidoing: the first isn't an issue here (I'm not proposing any changes to how the TOU are delivered by non-logged-in users). The second one: good point, but that seems like a small technical hurdle that could likely be easily overcome. The interruption could come to a user while logged in -- as soon as they click the "edit" button, they are presented with the new TOU. Maybe it comes up as an optional/dismissable box several days before going into effect, and then turns into a mandatory box on the date it goes into effect. Regardless -- if the general approach is approved, I think this sort of issue could easily be handled offline as part of a software design process. -Pete F 01:34, 24 November 2011 (UTC) Maybe the wording on the edit screen could be changed to tell you when the Terms of Use were last changed? That way if it was 2 years since you last edited and you see the Terms Of Use were last changed 18 months ago you know. Filceolaire 07:34, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

This section has been reviewed. If there are new issues or outstanding concerns related to this, please start a new conversation. Mdennis (WMF) 14:57, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Broken HTML structures in "Refraining from Certain Activities"

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In Terms of use#4. Refraining from Certain Activities, there are broken HTML structures on the list of disallowed activities. This caused by unnecessary and extra spaces between each items. Now the text is :Harassing and Abusing Others ::* Engaging in harassment, threats, stalking, spamming, or vandalism; and ::* Transmitting chain mail, junk mail, or spam to other users. :Violating the Privacy of Others ::* Infringing the privacy rights of others under the laws of the United States or other applicable laws (which may include the laws where you live or where you view or edit content); [snip] but should be :Harassing and Abusing Others ::* Engaging in harassment, threats, stalking, spamming, or vandalism; and ::* Transmitting chain mail, junk mail, or spam to other users. :Violating the Privacy of Others ::* Infringing the privacy rights of others under the laws of the United States or other applicable laws (which may include the laws where you live or where you view or edit content); [snip] to correct the HTML output. Or I suggest you to use HTML tags instead of Wiki Markup like below. <dl> <dt>Harassing and Abusing Others</dt> <dt><ul> <li>Engaging in harassment, threats, stalking, spamming, or vandalism; and</li> <li>Transmitting chain mail, junk mail, or spam to other users.</li> </ul></dt> <dt>Violating the Privacy of Others</dt> <dt><ul> <li>Infringing the privacy rights of others under the laws of the United States or other applicable laws (which may include the laws where you live or where you view or edit content);</li> <li>Transmitting chain mail, junk mail, or spam to other users.</li> [snip] </dl> Anyhow, the current text is clearly wrong and should be fixed.--aokomoriuta 22:45, 13 November 2011 (UTC) Hi. :) I'm looking into your concerns here. The current markup and your recommended change seem to render the same in both Chrome and Firefox. Can you tell me what browser you're using? It would be helpful to see how this is rendering for you. --Mdennis (WMF) 16:15, 14 November 2011 (UTC) Just wanted to add that I tried implementing your version 3, but I'm afraid that it appears to be incompatible with some hidden markup being used by the translation team, as it gave me an error "Multiple section markers for one section" and refused to save. Only if I wiped out the translation team's markup would it save, and we obviously don't want to do anything to hamper their work. If we can figure out the display issues with the existing, we may be able to implement your first proposed alternative provided that there are no compatibility issues. --Mdennis (WMF) 18:31, 14 November 2011 (UTC) I checked your try but it seems wrong format for a tranalation page. How about below? </translate> <dl> <dt><translate><!--T:22--> Harassing and Abusing Others</translate></dt> <dt><ul> <li><translate><!--T:23a--> Engaging in harassment, threats, stalking, spamming, or vandalism; and</translate></li> <li><translate><!--T:23b--> Transmitting chain mail, junk mail, or spam to other users.</translate></li> </ul></dt> <dt><translate><!--T:24--> Violating the Privacy of Others</translate></dt> <dt><ul> <li><translate><!--T:24a--> Infringing the privacy rights of others under the laws of the United States or other applicable laws (which may include the laws where you live or where you view or edit content);</translate></li> <li><translate><!--T:24b--> Transmitting chain mail, junk mail, or spam to other users.</translate></li> [snip] </dl> <translate> I referred to the source of Terms of use#3. Content We Host, and the documentation. But since I'm just a translator, so that I have never managed tanslation pages, I don't make sure above is correct. User:Siebrand knows well so we might need his help. --aokomoriuta 18:25, 15 November 2011 (UTC) That wasn't my actual try; my try didn't save. :) That was me checking to see if it would work if the tags were removed (it would). I'll ask Siebrand to take a look. --Mdennis (WMF) 21:18, 15 November 2011 (UTC) It is true that the definition list is broken after each bold header (dd) and each itemized sublist (ul, which should be part of a dt). Given that bold has been added with apostrophes markup for each item, it should have just been marked using the ";" to make it a true defined term. So the layout should be: A paragraph... <blockquote> ; Harassing and Abusing Others :* Engaging in harassment, threats, stalking, spamming, or vandalism; and :* Transmitting chain mail, junk mail, or spam to other users. ; Violating the Privacy of Others :* Infringing the privacy rights of others under the laws of the United States or other applicable laws (which may include the laws where you live or where you view or edit content); ; [snip] : ... </blockquote> Another paragraph... which gives the correct result: A paragraph... Harassing and Abusing Others Engaging in harassment, threats, stalking, spamming, or vandalism; and Transmitting chain mail, junk mail, or spam to other users. Violating the Privacy of Others Infringing the privacy rights of others under the laws of the United States or other applicable laws (which may include the laws where you live or where you view or edit content); [snip] ... Another paragraph... However, even if it's better and logically correct (at the Mediawiki markup level), each defined term (dt) and its definition data (dd, containing here the unordered bulleted list ul) appears in a separate list (dl), and these successive dl are not merged. For an unknown reason, MediaWiki, closes the current definition list (dl) for immediately reopening it in the generated HTML, if a defined term or definition contains any block element (here an unordered bulleted list ul). That's something to be fixed in HTML Tidy, because it can cause extra margins or borders (caused by CSS stylesheets) between each definition list. Mediawiki should only close a definition list (dl) and reopening a new one if there's at least an empty line between them to explicitly mark their separation. verdy_p 14:43, 20 November 2011 (UTC) The alternative is to use a div element, but it does not exhibit the semantic of a block quote. And if we use ";" and ":" to create blockquotes (standard in MediaWiki, too late to chage it), MEdiaWiki should really convert blocks of lines starting by ";" or ":" into either: a blockquote element, if the first line only starts by ":" — because it is logically incorrect to use a definition list (dl) containing definitions (dd) without prior defined term (dt)— up to but excluding the first line that starts by a ";" a definition list element (dl), for generating all the other lines starting by a ";"-line; in this definition list, all ";"-lines will become a defined term (dt), and all ":"-lines will become a definition data (dd) instead if generating definition lists always (notably for threaded discussions like here). If this was used, we could even avoid using the "blockquote" element explicitly in the markup, to use the all-wiki markup like: A paragraph... :; Harassing and Abusing Others ::* Engaging in harassment, threats, stalking, spamming, or vandalism; and ::* Transmitting chain mail, junk mail, or spam to other users. :; Violating the Privacy of Others ::* Infringing the privacy rights of others under the laws of the United States or other applicable laws (which may include the laws where you live or where you view or edit content); :; [snip] :: ... Another paragraph... which gives the similar visible result (but still without the blockquote semantic, and still with multiple unmerged successive 'dl' elements like above): A paragraph... Harassing and Abusing Others Engaging in harassment, threats, stalking, spamming, or vandalism; and Transmitting chain mail, junk mail, or spam to other users. Violating the Privacy of Others Infringing the privacy rights of others under the laws of the United States or other applicable laws (which may include the laws where you live or where you view or edit content); [snip] ... Another paragraph... verdy_p 15:03, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

This section has been reviewed. If there are new issues or outstanding concerns related to this, please start a new conversation. Mdennis (WMF) 14:56, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Is there a reason why "insulting" is not listed?

Extended content
I consider the atmosphere of regular offenses as anti-productive. A group of people considering themselves as the upper circle is using insults to keep the base of cooperative authors decreasing. Some years ago there was few money but a lot of work to do. Now the work is quit done and there is too much money. There are too many people in a waiting loop for jobs at Wikimedia and its chapters. Those who do not have a paid job but would like to have one are acting most aggressive sometimes. Wikipedia is facing social closing. It would be a benefit for the project to ban insulting, offenses and scatology as we have it in Germany Wikipedia. -- Simplicius 22:28, 18 November 2011 (UTC) PS Please see Note by user Widescreen, now blocked user Define "insult". Seb az86556 03:13, 19 November 2011 (UTC) But how is that enforced? It's a longstanding point of mine that in the Wiki[mp]edia community, high-status members can quite freely be insulting to low-status members, with quite intense personal attacks permitted, even possibly encouraged for group approval, on those at the bottom of the status hierarchy. This happens basically because of the politics being that nobody wants to go against a high-status person on behalf of a low-status person (the full dynamic has a few exceptions, so don't jump on this, that's the one-line version for the overall case). If Germany Wikipedia has a good way to address this problem, it'd be interesting to hear about it. Note simply making a rule is very limited, as violations must be interpreted and sanctions administered. -- Seth Finkelstein 09:22, 19 November 2011 (UTC) @Simplicius. I think you raise interesting points that require reflection. We did have a significant discussion on politeness and civility and came up with this language in Section 4: We expect you to be civil and polite in your interactions with others in the community, to act in good faith, and to make edits and contributions aimed at furthering the mission of the shared Project. One issue we encountered is the difficulty of defining exactly what is civil and politie, but, by at least stating an "expectation," we hoped we communicated how we wish our interactions would play out. Hopefully that addresses your concern in part. Geoffbrigham 09:35, 19 November 2011 (UTC) Well, Geoffbrigham, this expecting behaviour that is obviously contradictory to custom (esp. in German Wikipedia) shows that the people at WMF (or whom so ever) don't see the problem. I wouldn't assume that you don't want to see it but we should have made better efforts before to inform about the problematic social situation in German Wikipedia. What nourish expectations that anyone obey real life standards in behaviour while worst insults are common, sometimes even tolerated by German admins and at the same time substantial not insulting critics, reviewing of articels and so on, are banned as beeing insulting? Looks like we still have to talk about situation of community and to define the problem. The problem is not "what is said" but "who is saying." Defining a rule to be reckoned against incivil behaviour would mean that either half of the German admins (and of course some other users, too) will have to leave the project or alter their attitude towards their own power and aggression. That's why I don't expect a rule like that by the WM. --Brummfuss 10:35, 19 November 2011 (UTC) I think you've got a translation challenge here. "Expect" means two things in English. One is about the probability of something happening: "I expect that the Sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning", which is the equivalent of "I believe it very likely that the Sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning". Geoff is using it here in the second sense, which is more like hope or want. It is like a parent saying to his or her child, "I expect you to be kind and helpful and well-behaved at all times". The parent honestly does not believe that the child will be kind and helpful and well-behaved at all times. The parent honestly believes it very likely that sometimes the child will be mean and unhelpful and badly behaved. But the parent is setting a goal or an ideal for the child's behavior, not trying to describe the facts. WhatamIdoing 20:41, 19 November 2011 (UTC) I don't think there's a translation problem. It's the philosophical question whether or not the WMF can be compared to a parent. Seb az86556 00:38, 20 November 2011 (UTC) Would changing it to "We expect you, regardless of your role or status within the community, [...]" be satisfactory? As the guy who started the "politeness and civility" thread, I would of course prefer excluding any mention of civility from the TOU. --Michaeldsuarez 04:24, 20 November 2011 (UTC) Seb:I don't see any philosophical question at all. The Terms of Use are exactly to tell users how they should and should not behave. That is why they are here. Telling people how they should behave is acting like a parent. This is the WMF telling the projects "Don't make me come in there".Filceolaire 07:18, 20 November 2011 (UTC) Not really. This is a legal document. "Expect" means one thing. "Demand" is another. "You must" would be even clearer if that's what's meant. A stop-sign says "stop" not "it would be nice if you stopped". Seb az86556 10:07, 21 November 2011 (UTC) Seth, Bummfuss: If you believe these alleged actions by Wikipedia DE are wrong then I would have thought you would want the TOU to ban these actions. Your post above almost sounds as if you are saying rudeness by high status german editors is common so the TOU should allow it! Can we get back to the point. Do you have any suggestions for improvements to the wording of the TOU. Do you have any suggestions for enforcement of the TOU? Filceolaire 07:18, 20 November 2011 (UTC) @Filceolaire, from my perspective, a selectively-enforced civility standard is worse than none at all. Because in practice it means that high-status people can violate it since it's not enforced against them, but low-status people can't flame back since it will be enforced against them. This is one area where the abusiveness is so blatant, from the highest levels, that I don't even bother about formalism. Regarding the wording, I'll "!vote" for what Michaeldsuarez said above. For enforcement suggestions, I wish I knew, it's a very old problem (and a big topic in itself). -- Seth Finkelstein 08:45, 20 November 2011 (UTC) Enforcement is indeed a problem, and that's where the parent-metaphor fails. Parents are two persons, and they have to agree on enforcement which isn't always the case, but mostly. The WMF is at best 100 odd laizer-faire part-time parents who want their children to be completely independent and won't speak with one voice, especially when they cannot even understand what's supposed to be enforced. German civility might be easier because they'll be a few who understand it, but how do you enforce sanctions against insults in Azeri or Mongolian? The bottom line is that if the culture at German wikipedia is really what it's claimed to be, then there's noting the WMF can do short of an invasion, e.g. stripping the project of its independence. Seb az86556 10:18, 21 November 2011 (UTC) I'm not very enthusiastic about mentioning this (for all of the reasons given), but I'll add another: figuring out whether something is insulting is very difficult. What you think is friendly, informal language might be my idea of a deliberate insult. Honest mistakes might be taken as insults: you might refer to a female editor as "he" rather than "she" in a discussion, or offer a virtual beer to people whose religion forbids alcohol. People sometimes act insulted when they discover that the standard rules apply to them, e.g., that even famous professors have to produce sources to back up their statements. By the way, I don't think that the German Wikipedia has any legitimate claim to fame for insulting editors. The English Wikipedia spent too much of last month talking about why some "special" editors get to use profanity freely, while newbies are blocked for much smaller transgressions. WhatamIdoing 16:55, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

This section has been reviewed. If there are new issues or outstanding concerns related to this, please start a new conversation. Mdennis (WMF) 14:56, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Terms of use/summary

The informal summary recommended by User:Dcoetzee has been drafted by the legal team and is now placed in the article. Please don't change the text of this summary directly, but discuss alterations here first. While it is not a legal document itself and alterations to it do not change the Terms of Use, it is meant to be an accurate summary of the document to avoid misleading contributors. --Mdennis (WMF) 13:45, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

My rewrite

This summary is not a part of the Terms of use and is not a legal document. It is simply a handy reference for understanding the full terms. Think of it as the user-friendly interface to the legal language of our Terms of use – You must still adhere to the Terms of use and policies for each project.
Part of mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to:

• Empower and Engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content and either publish it under a free license or donate it to the public domain.
• Disseminate this content effectively and globally, free of charge.
• You are free to Read our articles and other media free of charge.
• No Professional Advice – the content of articles and other projects is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice.
• You are free to Save or print our articles to read later
• You are free to Share our articles with others, as many copies as you like, provided you give credit to the authors and let your readers share too.
• No Harm – You do not harm our technology infrastructure

Contributors:

• You are free to contribute content, photos, recordings you have created to be added to our projects.
• You are free to edit the content contributed by others on our various sites or Projects.
• Free Licenses - You agree to your contributions and edits being shared and reused and edited by others under the various Free and open source licenses used on our projects. This also applies to editted versions of our content which are not not posted on our sites.
• Civility – You support a civil environment and do not harass other users
• Responsibility – You take responsibility for your the accuracy and legality of your edits and contributions (since we only host your content).
• Lawful and Proper Behavior – You do not violate copyright laws or engage in other inappropriate behavior.
  

Filceolaire 00:15, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

Filceolaire - thanks for taking time to reflect on this and to propose concrete suggestions. I like many of your ideas, which I have incorporated below. I might suggest that the additional bullet points and their grouping in your version make it a tad harder to read, so I tried to incorporate some of your concepts a little more concisely. In my personal opinion, I like the original format since it roughly copies the Creative Commons format and breaks up the bullet points into three easier-to-read groups (but, of course, if I hear more community opposition I'm willing to modify the text and order with the understanding that I'm just wrong there). That said, as I said, there were a number of concepts in your proposal that I liked. Below is a rewrite based on your input (with my italics indicating the significant changes). Does this work for you?

This is a human-readable summary of the Terms of use.

Disclaimer

This summary is not a part of the Terms of use and is not a legal document. It is simply a handy reference for understanding the full terms. Think of it as the user-friendly interface to the legal language of our Terms of use.

Part of our mission is to:

• Empower and Engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content and either publish it under a free license or donate it to the public domain.
• Disseminate this content effectively and globally, free of charge.

  [Note from Geoff: I noticed that you deleted this summary of our mission, but I think it is useful, especially for new readers.]

You are free to:

• Read and Print our articles and other media free of charge.
• Share and Reuse our articles and other media under free and open licenses.
• Contribute and Edit content and contribute photographs and images to our various sites or Projects

Under the following conditions:

• Responsibility – You take responsibility for your edits (since we only host your content)
• Civility – You support a civil environment and do not harass other users
• Lawful and Proper Behavior – You do not violate copyright laws or engage in other inappropriate behavior.
• No Harm – You do not harm our technology infrastructure
• Terms of use – You adhere to the Terms of Use and policies for each project.

  [Note from Geoff: I noticed that you included this last point in the introductory text, but, in my humble opinion, I think it makes that text a little too heavy.]

With the understanding that:

• You License Freely Your Contributions – you generally must license your contributions and edits to our sites or Projects under a free and open license (unless your contribution is in the public domain).
• No Professional Advice – the content of articles and other projects is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice.

Geoffbrigham 20:05, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

"entire Agreement"

Resolved.

Extended content
When you say "please read the entire Agreement" in Overview, do you expect that readers will learn that this (new) terms of use is an authoritative contract which supersedes previous negotiations? Or, would it be nothing more than that you want readers to continue reading until the end? Clarification would be much appreciated, as it would enable us to make better translations. --whym 00:12, 25 November 2011 (UTC) Thanks Whym (and thanks to all the translators for the excellent work they are doing). I simply want readers to read until the end. I will try to clarify the language. Tx. Geoffbrigham 09:38, 25 November 2011 (UTC) I see, thank you! --whym 11:52, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

This section has been reviewed. If there are new issues or outstanding concerns related to this, please start a new conversation. Mdennis (WMF) 14:43, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Falsification of content

Extended content
There's a discussion going on at Talk:Global bans#Clarification please about administrators who deliberately insert false information into pages (and then lock them). There is a clause in the proposed Terms of Use which says (no. 4) that such behaviour is forbidden if done "with the intent to deceive." What is the point of that qualification? It seems to be saying that blatant falsehoods are OK because nobody would be deceived by them. Other websites just say that you can't put in false information full stop. I would suggest Wikipedia does likewise (if you haven't checked whether your edit is factually correct don't make it). Alternatively, there could be a get - out for people who who are misled by reliable sources which later turn out to be wrong (it does happen). The prohibition could then be on intentionally or knowingly posting content that is false or inaccurate. 62.140.210.130 18:34, 28 November 2011 (UTC) Good question -- please take a look at this discussion: Talk:Terms_of_use/Archives/2011-11-08#Prohibited_activities In my view, a situation like the one you describe is the community's responsibility to resolve, not something that should be expressly prohibited in the TOU. It's very common for somebody to post false information in the course of good faith editing -- either out of his/her own ignorance, etc., or (as on Wikisource) by transcribing something was inaccurate, or (as on Wikibooks) something that is fictional, etc. I believe community processes are sufficient to deal with those cases that need to be addressed. -Pete F 19:16, 28 November 2011 (UTC) Perhaps the prohibition could be (4) ... These activities include: ... Representing as true something which you know or believe to be false ... This would protect someone writing "Creationists say that evolution is a myth" but not someone writing "The sun goes round the earth". That way, you avoid having to make a value judgment on whether someone intended to deceive, which is notoriously difficult to do. 62.140.210.130 15:57, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

This section has been reviewed. If there are new issues or outstanding concerns related to this, please start a new conversation. Mdennis (WMF) 14:41, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Interesting point, and I appreciate the comment. In the end, after thinking about it, I propose leaving the language as is. It is a close call, but I believe Pete F makes a good point that community processes are sufficient to deal with these cases. The TOS could definitely be more comprehensive to include the above, but I need to weigh other feedback that we don't want the TOS to be too long, complicated, overbearing, etc. Many thanks for the discussion (which raised a legitimate point). Geoffbrigham 22:54, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Dispute Resolution Bodies

I have been asked to consider adding the below language to the proposed TOS. I am supportive of this language since it describes our reality, and, accordingly, I wish to put it forward for discussion.

You agree to comply with the final decisions of dispute resolution bodies that are established by the community on specific projects (such as arbitration committees). These decisions may include sanctions, such as your ban as a user, the closing of your account, or other prohibitions or restrictions on your contribution activity.

Geoffbrigham 01:40, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

I think this correctly matches existing practice, and provides the necessary support to community process without imposing a specific method to projects. Disclaimer: I am currently an arbitrator on the English Wikipedia, and this proposal results from a discussion with Foundation staff in which I have participated. — Coren ^{(talk) / (en-wiki)} 03:06, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

I like it, but a few quibbles... Technically we can't "close" accounts as in deleting them. We can lock them so you're unable to log in, but that's really a hack due to the fact that we don't have global blocking. Also, a ban can mean no editing under any alias, so that should be specified. I suggest the following edit: "... These decisions may include sanctions, such as blocking of your account, a ban on editing under any account, or other prohibitions or restrictions on your activity." Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 06:36, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

"Close" may be good enough; I'm not convinced that people will interpret "close" as meaning "permanently delete". "Suspend" is another possible word. Probably any of them are good enough. WhatamIdoing 16:03, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, I was a little iffy about "close" at first, but the common meaning of "close your account" is clearly "make it no longer available for use", which fits.

True, there is the occasional request to "delete my account" that clearly expect it going away from histories and user lists, but we clearly cannot do that. — Coren ^{(talk) / (en-wiki)} 19:57, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

When we ban people we ban them from editing the site. we don't allow them to edit as IPs. So I'd be uncomfortable with the "a ban on editing under any account" suggestion. But I'm also uncomfortable with "your ban as a user" - as we never ban people from reading, we block some forms of automated reading and hides some diffs, but we don't ban people from using Wikipedia or our other products. When we ban people we ban them from editing our sites, not from using them (and I appreciate that not every site uses the Wikipedia term "editor", but I can't think of a better one). This may seem a subtle point, but it actually goes to the heart of what we are doing here. We really are making this information available to everyone, and that includes all the millions we have blocked or banned from editing. WereSpielChequers 22:30, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Have we really blocked or banned millions of people? What a colossal waste of time. A few days ago, WereSpielChequers advocated breaking the rules by reverting the edits of banned users without reading them. See Talk:Global bans#Clarification please. Now he objects to the phrase "a ban on editing under any account." I think people should be discouraged from spending time examining the edits of IPs which remove inaccuracies with a view to reverting them should it be decided that the IP is a banned user. The time could be better spent examining the edits of banned users so that those which remove inaccuracies are not reverted.

The amendment of the global banning policy to give a right of reply to blocked editors put up for global banning is a step in the right direction. This right should be extended to blocked editors put up for community ban. On English Wikipedia administrators routinely institute community ban discussions without giving the requisite notice beforehand. The recipient of this unwanted attention, the "target" in adminspeak, has already been blocked and had talk page access cut off on a pretext and will probably only find out after the ban has been enacted. Should he happen upon the proceedings he will see a succession of involved administrators telling lies during the course of a unanimous !vote in favour. This not only looks illegal, it is - the policy says

"the community may engage in a discussion to site ban, topic ban, or place an interaction ban or editing restriction via a consensus of editors who are not involved in the underlying dispute."

The proposed phrase

"You agree to comply with the final decisions of dispute resolution bodies that are established by the community on specific projects (such as arbitration committees)"

could be construed as limiting the right of appeal to the community. The relevant policy states

"Administrators are prohibited from reversing or overturning (explicitly or in substance) any action taken by another administrator pursuant to the terms of an active arbitration remedy, and explicitly noted as being taken to enforce said remedy, except:

(a) with the written authorization of the Committee; or

(b) following a clear, substantial, and active community consensus to do so."

62.140.210.130 12:29, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Closing of Discussion: December 31?

Given that community comments and suggestions are slowing, I would like to propose that we close our discussion on the proposed terms of use on December 31. This will have allowed us approximately 4 months to discuss and revise the proposed TOS. Given the number of translations, my hope is that we are giving our international community sufficient time to provide feedback as well. I frankly feel the proposed TOS is a stronger document because we took the time to review and revise based on your response, suggestions, and revisions. If people see strong reasons not to close on December 31, I would be most appreciative in your letting me know. Geoffbrigham 01:40, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

I've decided to spread the word about the possible conclusion of these discussions on enwiki: [3], [4], [5]. If anyone can do the same for non-English wikis, then please do so. Hopefully, everyone will have a chance to say something before these discussions end. --Michaeldsuarez 14:12, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Refraining from Certain Activities

Banned activities:

Infringing the privacy rights of others under the laws of the United States or other applicable laws (which may include the laws where you live or where you view or edit content)

Why must we try to enforce the laws of other countries or locations? Look at the recent fiasco with the Italian Wikipedia. Why should the Wikimedia Foundation try to enforce the (sometimes ridiculous) laws of other countries? Our own laws are often bad enough as they are.

Infringing copyrights, trademarks, patents, or other proprietary rights.

There are always more and more proprietary "rights" being conjured up, as well as extensions on already existing rights. There are already very specific procedures in place for dealing with copyrighted material (at least on enwiki and Commons); why do we need to make global policy encompassing all "proprietary rights"? The term "other proprietary rights" does not even have a definition, as everyone has a different idea of what their own proprietary rights are. Does this *only* include rights as defined under US law? There is no explanation, and this is a blanket statement.

Posting or trafficking in unlawful obscene material

There is no concrete definition (AFAIK) of what is and is not unlawfully obscene. This also varies with location. Take the cover of the Virgin Killer album. It is (to most people) quite obscene. But is it unlawfully obscene? I would think not, since it is still displayed prominently on the Wikipedia article about the album. I personally find that very offensive. And I am sure it is also illegal in some places. But Wikipedia already deals with these issues.

Using the services in a manner that is inconsistent with applicable law.

This is about the broadest and vaguest statement I've ever heard. Wikipedia (and maybe other Wikimedia projects too) specifically aids users behind government firewalls break the law in their editing, and is committed to the privacy of such users. Users in parts of China for example are likely "using the services in a manner that is inconsistent with applicable law", depending on how the phrase "applicable law" is interpreted. Most of us are not lawyers, and most of us who are not lawyers do not wish to be lawyers, and even lawyers argue about these types of things, so how are average users supposed to interpret this type of statement?

Posting or distributing content that contains any viruses, malware, worms, Trojan horses, malicious code, or other harmful content

Articles about viruses often contain sample virus code. The phrase "other harmful content" can be construed to mean almost anything.

Disrupting the services by placing an undue burden on a Project website or the networks or servers connected with a Project website

I'm sure this has happened before accidentally. My understanding is that this is dealt with at the developer/admin level, unless it is intentional (in which case it is already obviously not acceptable).

Probing, scanning, or testing the vulnerability of any of our technical systems or networks without authorization

People do this all the time, with every (major) website. Even something like this could be considered breaking this rule.

I know my comments might not represent a global view of the subject, but I am envisioning how these terms could affect the projects I contribute to (primarily the English Wikipedia and Commons). Each project has its own rules, regulations, and procedures, and the statements in these new global terms of use are much, much too broad and vague. Danhash 14:57, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

The issue concerning "Probing, scanning, or testing the vulnerability of any of our technical systems or networks without authorization" has been brought up previously, but the issue has never been addressed. I had to test a possible blacklist exploit on a non-Wikimedia website because asking for "authorization" from the WMF would've been a pain in the ass. I believe that the "Probing, scanning, or testing the vulnerability" statement will hinder bug testing. Wikimedia should allow for vulnerability testing without having to ask for permission while encouraging responsible disclosure. --Michaeldsuarez 15:38, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Why? Why should the WMF be the one major website in the world that says it's just fine for script kiddies and politically motivated hackers to see if they can take it down? Even if you're testing Mediawiki software for a directly WMF-related purpose, why should that be done on a production system? Risking a major production system for initial bug testing is what professionals call stupid. Giving you a safe place to test such things is why places like testwiki.org exist. WhatamIdoing 16:13, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

testwiki.org is for testing sysop bits and such, not uncovering vulnerabilities. --Michaeldsuarez 16:27, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Many tests do NOT risk "a major production system". I've tested a few things myself here and there to see if anything needs fixing; this is appropriate and in the spirit of Wikipedia: be bold in trying to fix things. There are plenty of sandboxes and other ways to test things on Wikipedia itself without malicious intent, and I would content that most or at least much of this is done by people who are *not* script kiddies. I guess in your world no good deed goes unpunished (unless you receive "authorization"). —danhash (talk) 17:08, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

About "Infringing copyrights, trademarks, patents, or other proprietary rights":

"Other proprietary rights" covers trade secrets, personality rights, and the moral right not to have your work plagiarized (i.e., you come up with an idea, and I unfairly pretend that it's mine). In practice, I don't think that anyone will actually have any trouble identifying serious violations of this item.

It's worth remembering that we're not writing major laws here. It's not like the precise definition means the difference between someone going to prison or not. WhatamIdoing 16:23, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

What about issues like the 09F9 fiasco? What specific implications does this overarching and indiscriminate blanket prohibition have for illegal numbers and the like? This *is* legalese after all: if we are going to prohibit something, we damn well better be exact and specific about what is and is not ok. If this will be global policy for all Wikimedia projects, it needs to be much more explicit. —danhash (talk) 17:15, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

Minor wording change in the summary

"you generally must license your edits and contributions to our sites or Projects under a free and open license (unless your contribution is in the public domain)."

I'd like to see this changed to "you generally must license your edits and contributions to our sites or Projects under a free and open license, or you may release your contribution into the public domain." It wouldn't change the meaning, but it would be more natural English. Nyttend 18:16, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure it doesn't change the meaning, for several reasons.

First, content may be in the public domain, for example if it lacks the requisite creativity for copyright protection to attach. If I add a "complete works cited" list to an author article, it is in the public domain. It is a list without creativity.

But that is not the same as releasing the contribution into public domain. I think Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Granting work into the public domain (page is out of date!) is also worth considering here, particularly in the email sent to User:Dcoetzee from the US copyright office indicating that "Please be advised that one may not grant their work into the public domain. However, a copyright owner may release all of their rights to their work by stating the work may be freely reproduced, distributed, etc." I believe this is why Creative Commons devised CC-0.

Beyond that, I'm not sure we would encourage people to release their content into public domain even if we (and they) could. :) The current release when we click save says, with respect to text, "you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license"; it doesn't offer the option of "public domain." I was certainly not here for the licensing discussions at the dawn of time, as it were, but as I understand one of the reasons for the license chosen was to help ensure that content remained free. If our works were released under CC-0 or were in public domain, while the originals would always remain freely reusable, derivatives could be sewed up tight. We have no right to require copyleft license for derivatives. The license (now licenses) we went for mandate that.

For those reasons, I think that the change could actually be substantial.

(Of course, I am also User:Mdennis (WMF), but I want to make clear that I'm speaking in my volunteer capacity here, not in any way on behalf of the Foundation. This is purely my opinion.) --Moonriddengirl 20:13, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

I agree with Moonriddengirl. I prefer the original wording. If you want to dedicate your edits to the public domain (i.e. license them under CC-0) then there is a template you can add to your user page which does this. Filceolaire 00:09, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Criticism section moved

• See #Criticism

Typo

"No harm" is missing the word "to". Beyond My Ken 03:08, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Also, both "Terms" and "Use" should be capitalized in the title and in the "Terms of use" line, i.e. "Terms of use – You adhere to the Terms of Use and policies for each project." Beyond My Ken 03:10, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Hi, Ken. :) The words "No harm" are only used that I can see in the summary.

No Harm – You do not harm our technology infrastructure

I'm not sure why they would take a to? We are a bit inconsistent with Terms of Use and the title case. I've converted the summary. I'd be scared myself to try to move this document, though, as there is some tricky translation markup going on that I don't even begin to understand. If Geoff things we should move it, I'll ask User:Siebrand for input. :) --Mdennis (WMF) 11:18, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

"Terms of use – You adhere to the Terms of use and policies for each project."

I don't get the reference to terms of use here in what is supposed to be a summary of the terms of use; I suppose the idea is to have project-specific Terms? In which case, is this mostly a reference to policies?

[Disclaimer: I query this only on the back of giving the terms a quick glance. But then, that's the whole point of the human readable summary...!] 14:52, 7 December 2011 (UTC)