Proposal: "Paid volunteers" should take care to identify themselves on Wikimedia Projects and discussions related to Wikimedia Projects.
Sue Gardner's initial report by the WMF into the Belfer case makes a key decision that there must be effective processes for escalation of employee activities that may not comply with Wikimedia local project best practice.[1][2] The WMF can direct their own processes for their staff, but a consequence for the wider community is that on our projects we should have policies that ensure there is simple and straight-forward transparency for who is a paid volunteer and may have interests related to their edits or their contributions to discussion. The current situation is that paid volunteers have no requirement to identify themselves and may contribute anonymously or pseudonymously in ways that obscure their interest, in fact this is current common practice. I am thinking of raising this proposal on meta, so initial thoughts and comments on this list would be welcome to decide whether this is worth taking forward as beneficial to our volunteer community. *Definition of "paid volunteer":* Paid volunteers are employees, contractors or part time contractors of Wikimedia organizations or other organizations having agreements or partnerships with Wikimedia. The paid volunteer contributes to Wikimedia projects and discussions that influence the content of Wikimedia projects. This includes employees and contractors that may not be paid for their on-project activities, however their employer benefits from the content of the same projects. Links: [1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-April/070827.html [2] https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedian_in_Residence/Harvard_University_assessment Fae -- fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
