Wikipedia new Terms of Use (effective May 25, 2012) | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia new Terms of Use (effective May 25, 2012)

wikimediafoundation.org

14 pointsmadmaze4 comments

This really caught my eye when I visited Wikipedia as a logged-in editor yesterday:

"Under the following conditions:

"Responsibility — You take responsibility for your edits (since we only host your content).

A huge number of I.P. edits, and not a few edits by logged-in editors, currently show no sense of personal responsibility.

"Civility — You support a civil environment and do not harass other users.

This is why I edit very little on Wikipedia anymore. If I try to edit on any subject that I actually have a lot of sources for,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...

I get into time-wasting edit wars, without even much by way of administrator enforcement of the existing civility rules.

"Lawful Behavior — You do not violate copyright or other laws.

Some of highest-volume "contributors" on Wikipedia, including at least one person who made it onto the Arbitration Committee, appear to have been serial plagiarists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spotting_possible_cop...

"No Harm — You do not harm our technology infrastructure.

"Terms of Use and Policies — You adhere to the below Terms of Use and to the applicable community policies when you visit our sites or participate in our communities."

A reasonably noble set of aspirations, but with number of active administrators declining in "unsustainable fashion,"

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Wikimedia_Editor...

and many of those administrators being callow and inexperienced besides, it's not clear how any of these goals can be achieved.

I think one can argue with Wikipedia's statement that "we only host your content". If Wikipedia empowers editors with administrative privileges, including the ability to enforce rules like "no original research", lock and delete articles, block users, etc., they would seem to wield a lot of indirect power over what kind of content users can and can't post.

Contrast this with a web hosting provider like Rackspace or Amazon AWS who really "only hosts your content". They generally won't delete your content unless there are legal issues (e.g., alleged copyright infringement, court order, etc.).

A disclaimer like that is probably necessary for them to stay out of trouble in case somebody uploads copyrighted content, etc. Under DMCA and similar laws, a company that "only hosts" other people's content enjoy broad immunities, whereas anything more complicated than that might be just enough to make someone think they could sue the Wikimedia Foundation.

Unfortunately, the US of A is a country where being sued is almost as scary as being sued and losing.

Think what if YT automatically deleted videos with 90% dislikes. They would only "host your content" then, even though users would have some kind of "administrative privileges". On Wikipedia, it is not that automatic, yet administrators are expected to execute "community will" in the same way. Choosing administrators is also done by other editors, Wikimedia rarely influences this process.

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