Modification of WMF protection brought to Arbcom
Philippe Beaudette's July 2013 application of pending changes level two (PC2) on the article Conventional PCI—an action taken under his job as the Wikimedia Foundation's Director of Community Advocacy and its rarely used office actions policy—has escalated to the Arbitration Committee after an editor upgraded it to full protection.
In this case, pending changes were applied after a DMCA takedown notice was issued to the Foundation. The notice forced the WMF to remove links to PCI's Local Bus Specifications revisions 2.1, 2.2, and 3.0, according to its official policy governing takedown notices:
| “ | In some cases, the Foundation may be required to remove content from a Wikimedia Project due to a DMCA take-down notice. ... to retain safe harbor status, the Foundation is required to comply with validly formulated notices even if they are spurious. ... As a matter of policy, the Wikimedia Foundation will terminate, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of repeat infringers as provided under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. 512). … In the event that material is removed due to a DMCA notice, the only recourse for restoring such material is to file a counter-notice with the Foundation. ... Please note that filing a counter-notice may lead to legal proceedings between you and the complaining party to determine ownership of the material. | ” |
English Wikipedia administrator Kww objected to the nature of the protection, since an extensive discussion determined that PC2—which requires review before edits from autoconfirmed and anonymous editors—"should not be used" on the English Wikipedia. While Kww will typically downgrade PC2-protected articles to PC1 or semi-protection, in this case he increased the level of protection (to "fully protected"—only admins can edit) to avoid PC2 from being active on an English Wikipedia article. Doing so put him into conflict with the Foundation for the second time in recent memory; in September, Kww implemented what the Foundation called "badly flawed" code blocking the VisualEditor.
In response, Beaudette wrote Kww that he "just spoke to the legal team about your actions and asked them what to do. ... We select the level of action very specifically and with a great deal of care. If you have a problem with it, you're invited to contact us prior to taking action. That's the minimum standard expected of any admin when overriding an action, much less an office action." Beaudette advised that "On any other wiki, I'd be removing your tools right now. However, on this wiki, because there is a functional Arbitration Committee, I'm going to, instead, refer this to them for them to determine what sanction to take."
As of publishing time, the Committee is voting 6–1 to admonish Kww for "for knowingly modifying a clearly designated Wikimedia Foundation Office action." The motion continues that Kww did so without "any emergency and without any form of consultation", and declines his request for a full case, as it would involve a review of an inviolable office action.
In brief
- English Wikipedia:
- Two RfBs at once: Unusually, there are two current requests for bureaucratship (RFBs). Bureaucrats, known colloquially as "crats", can appoint admins and crats based on community decisions, remove admin rights in certain circumstances, change usernames for most users, and grant and remove bot status. The RFBs are for Worm That Turned, to close 27 January, and Acalamari, to close 31 January.
- Military historian of the year: The Bugle reports that the Military history WikiProject has awarded its prestigious "Military historian of the year" award to AustralianRupert. The award "recognizes the editors who have contributed most to the field of military history on Wikipedia over the course of a given year", as voted on by members of the project. The related "Military newcomer of the year" was given to Khanate General.
- Affcom appoints new members: The Wikimedia Foundation's Affiliations Committee, more commonly known as "Affcom", has resolved to add two new people to its membership, and to reappoint two others. Lodewijk Gelauff and Galileo Vidoni, along with new members, Cynthia Ashley-Nelson and Kirill Lokshin, will serve until 2016. Affcom is the Foundation's primary vehicle for selecting new Wikimedia affiliates.
- Chinese Wikivoyage: The Chinese Wikivoyage was created and opened for editing on 14–15 January.
- Education newsletter published: The Wikipedia Education Program has published its newest newsletter. While its page on Outreach appears to be out-of-date—for example, it makes no reference to the much criticized Wiki Education Foundation, a legally separate organization that now runs the US and Canada aspects of the initiative—the program appears to be partnering with professors in four countries (Brazil, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan) and boasts of much more extensive efforts in others.
- Foundation evaluates institutional content donations: The Wikimedia Foundation has published its latest program evaluation on the impact of content donations from GLAMs—galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. It concluded, in part, that the average implementation time is three months, and large portions of the uploaded content remain unused on Wikimedia projects. Comments on the talk page have criticized the practice of mass image uploads from these sources.
- Picture of the Year competition begins: The first of two rounds in the Wikimedia Commons 2013 Picture of the Year competition has opened for voting. Editors with more than 75 edits to Commons before 1 January this year are eligible to vote for as many images as they wish in this round.
- Visiting Scholar, Wikipedia Affiliate: The US' George Mason University is seeking a Wikipedia visiting scholar. The position, detailed on-wiki, will involve an individual with limited access to scholarly resources, at least a year's editing history, and experience writing Wikipedia articles on historical topics. They will be granted free access to George Mason's online libraries "to help improve Wikipedia’s reliability and accuracy by providing Wikipedia editors with access to the best scholarly information resources while providing a model for other universities to do likewise."
Discuss this story
KWW
I had to go back after skimming the section and re-read to make sure- we're really wasting (wasted) time complaining that Kww added extra protection to an article that Wikimedia wanted protected? Really? Removing the protection I could see causing a fuss over, but that's just whiny nitpicking. --PresN 01:04, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Pretty obvious to me that WMF is doing a bit of payback to Kww for getting in the way of their big money VisualEditor debacle and helping to mercifully wheel that hopeless sack o' zeros-and-ones to a cul de sac to die in peace. So now it it pettily making a molehill into a mountain, one of the few things they seem to be very good at. Carrite (talk) 03:39, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
This really looks like revenge. In fact, the VisualEditor is "badly flawed" itself and in my opinion it was nearly impossible to make it even worse. It brings to me the question: does the Foundation need so much power and are they using it correctly? The Banner talk 04:09, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I support the Arbitration Committee and its intended objectives, but the near-unilateral decision to opt for portentous admonishment of an administrator for attempting to uphold a consensus mandate hurts my perception of the acting body's ability to adequately represent the Community's interests. This is a scenario that can be reasonably expected to elicit mixed emotions in the minds of many if not most seasoned contributors, and the degree of dissent expressed here is simply not proportional to that observation. — C M B J 05:01, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I cannot help but wonder if there is more to this story than is made clear in this piece. I agree with the above posters that, if this is all that's going on, the Foundation (through Philippe) seems to have acted very poorly- an action going very much against community consensus (which was not necessary for any legal reason- why not use full protection to begin with?) followed by threats. If this literally is the whole story, then it's not Kww who needs "admonishment". J Milburn (talk) 10:24, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
It's sad to see such talented people who have done so much to protect the project now involved in a circular firing squad. Looking back at Philippe's talk page, I see this type of protection level has been questioned once before - it appears to have been added automatically by a bot back then - and that it was also changed a few months before that as well. I suspect that as long as the protection policy says this protection level is not supported by consensus, per RFC, the protection of this article will continue to be unstable. Who knows when the next user or bot will come along and notice the discrepancy, or what action they might chance to take. The en.WP needs a protection level that is specifically and unequivocally for WMF legal issues, and used only by the Office, whether the policy is created by consensus or by Foundation fiat. The solution to this problem should be looked for in the technical department, not in the ArbCom. —Neotarf (talk) 06:45, 28 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Terminology
"which requires review before edits from autoconfirmed and anonymous editors"
Autoconfirmed editors can edit pages that people who are not autoconfirmed cannot. I'm sure a different meaning was intended.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 22:46, 31 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]