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With paid advocacy in its sights, the Wikimedia Foundation amends their terms of use

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

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

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

This image, already used in six Wikipedias, was uploaded to Commons by professional photographer Stefan Krause. His homepage is two clicks from all of his upload description pages, which we linked to from our coverage of his win in this year's Commons Picture of the Year competition.
The language of this paragraph is already being put to use by Wikimedia Commons, whose users are currently voting in large numbers to void the effect of the default rule on the site. According to the proposer, the "very special nature" of the Commons means that they need to "adopt a policy that allows paid contributions without any disclosure whatsoever. / ... content submitted by users who receive compensation for it ... is often of excellent quality and educational value."

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

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

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

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

The logo of the former Wiki-PR.

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

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

In brief

The Wikipedia Library's owl logo.

















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