Wikipedia talk:Global rights policy

ANNOYING!!!!! Ok, who loses their redirect? (I double posted this, guess where) Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 18:35, 8 August 2016 (UTC)Reply

There is a long discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Should Wikipedians be allowed to use community granted tools in exchange for money?

• 1st, I'm very sorry to say that I think a policy prohibiting selling the use of community granted tools (and similar) is needed. The main example given there involves OTRS. I think we already really have such a policy - it's just that we never thought we'd need to say it - "no selling the use of your tools"
• But this is not to say that anybody here has been abusing their position or tools, its just that we need to say the obvious now.
• Each policy that outlines special positions and tools can have a different variation on this proposed policy reflecting how the tools are used.

My proposal here follows. Please suggest alternative wording if you'd like. Note that WMF employees and employees of affiliates are exempt when fulfilling their duties for these employers. Wikipedians-in-Residence only need to declare what they are doing.

To be placed as a subsection immediately under "Use of rights"

No editor may use their global rights on Wikipedia or their status as a global rights holder to:

• solicit payment for services to be rendered on Wikipedia, or
• accept payment for the use of such rights or status
  • for the benefit a client
  • for advocating for a client, or
  • to evade our normal scrutiny system for new content and COI content.

Salaries, payments and grants made by the Wikimedia Foundation or its affiliates (e.g. chapters) are excepted. Wikipedians-in-Residence should declare their paid status and their paid use of global rights, but are otherwise exempt.

• Support as proposer. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 17:18, 8 November 2017 (UTC)Reply
• Support yes unfortunate we need to explicitly say this. Having people on OTRS using the system to find "clients" is simple not cool. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:16, 9 November 2017 (UTC)Reply
• Support. It is a sad indictment that we need to explicitly state this long unwritten policy. MER-C 06:26, 9 November 2017 (UTC)Reply
• Oppose - the one instance given as an example was a volunteer whose access was removed when it was discovered they were using the service to solicit money. Clearly the current system is working, and we don't need to explicitly say this. It also seems very odd to restrict paid editors from using global rights on enwiki, when global rights are mainly used from Meta, and OTRS access is only indirectly used on enwiki. -- Ajraddatz (talk) 07:04, 9 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Ajraddatz: Thanks for mentioning that most of the global rights users are operating off-enWiki. This proposal doesn't directly affect what they do off-enWiki.

Without this proposal, this policy simply says that there are global rights holders and that they are allowed to operate on enWiki within the bounds laid out in this policy. It then defines the groups and says what they do, and a very little about what they can't do here. If they abuse their rights then they are to be reported to the appropriate group (e.g. OTRS) with temporary measures that can be taken here, This proposal only changes the enWiki policy by adding paid-editing as an abuse of these rights here. As you said this mostly works ok already, but that doesn't mean that selling the use of global rights should not be explicitly prohibited. For example at WP:VPP there is one person who just says "I think Wikipedians should always be able to solicit 'payment for services to be rendered on Wikipedia'." We should just let it be known clearly that use of global rights for pay is not allowed, now that paid editing by global rights holders has shown up.

I don't think that the OTRS folks should disagree, since they are defined as an organization of *volunteers*. Just to be sure, I'll ping all the OTRS admins to see if this interferes in any way with OTRS activity @Daniel, Emufarmers, Keegan, Mailer Diablo, Rjd0060, and Sphilbrick:.

Other global rights holders migh also be pinged to see if there is anything here that interferes, but I really don't know who they are. Maybe people interested in global use of bots? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:04, 10 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

Just pinging a farily random group of global rights holders @Ryan Kaldari (WMF), EmausBot, BotMultichill, JeLuF, Alan, and Richwales:. Does anything in this proposed addition interfere with the legitimate use of global rights? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:16, 10 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

I have held global rights of some kind since early 2011, and I have never heard of paid use of global rights ever being allowed or accepted by the community. As such, while the proposed addition would not interfere with the legitimate use of global rights, adding more text to the policy is not necessary. There is no demonstrable need for this addition, since the one case referenced was dealt with appropriately without the proposed wording. To me, this proposal just looks like an extension of the moral panic surrounding paid editing here. To be clear, I don't support paid editing myself, but I also don't support the disproportionate addition of bureaucratic rules to address a problem that doesn't exist. -- Ajraddatz (talk) 19:59, 10 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

Global interface administrators can technically protect any page with any protection. This also applies to users who are not administrators on the English Wikipedia. Because protection of articles is not really "their job", neither globally nor locally, I guess they should not do so? ~ ToBeFree (talk) 23:22, 20 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

@ToBeFree: GEI's have the (protect) right primarily as it is required to edit a protected page they may have a special reason to edit. There could be some odd use cases where they may apply or modify a protection level, but it would be very very rare. There is an extremely small number of GEI's and they are carefully vetted (outside WMF employees there are only 10). They are still expected to follow all local policies and if they were to edit through protection or set/change/remove a protection level outside our policy we could block them (which would also likely lead to their GEI access being pulled). — xaosflux ^Talk 00:44, 21 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

And also that all GEIs (excluding WMF employee) are required to renew their membership every year, so any misconduct on a big wikis like enwiki will prevent their renewals. — regards, Revi 04:59, 6 June 2019 (UTC)Reply

I'll also add that GEIs are technically competent users who are usually making changes that are global in nature, or which are otherwise needed across multiple projects. These people are an asset to our sites. This sort of benefit should outweigh the ridiculous jurisdictional boundaries that we seem to spend so much time setting up and fighting over. -- Ajraddatz (talk) 05:13, 6 June 2019 (UTC)Reply

There's little point in debating this when there have been no protections by non-admins other than WMF staff since 2016. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 21:31, 6 June 2019 (UTC)Reply

The first protection by a global interface editor was implemented by Sophivorus earlier today. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 15:39, 30 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

@Pppery: I was not aware of all this history. I protected en:Module:Excerpt/staging and en:Module:Excerpt/i18n/staging to prevent any problems while deploying. I think you know the story behind it and I trust you'll agree that my action was reasonable. Else please let me know and I'll revert myself and we can discuss. Kind regards, Sophivorus (talk) 15:46, 30 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

I believe any usage of global interface editor rights except to edit the MediaWiki namespace or user scripts (or user-script-like pages such as Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/WikiBreak Enforcer) to be per se unreasonable. If you actually look at the history, the protect right was added to the global group by Snowolf in 2012 to enable editing of cascade protected pages, so it's clear that global interface editors were never actually intended to be allowed to protect pages in the first place. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 15:56, 30 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

• This GIE has been asked to stop using GIE access (c.f. User_talk:Sophivorus#Wikipedia:Global_rights_policy_issue) per the local policy. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:08, 30 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

I've created the global deleters section following a discussion at WP:BN. –xeno^talk 20:06, 3 December 2022 (UTC)Reply

I've added {{proposed}} to it, while discussion is ongoing. –xeno^talk 21:27, 3 December 2022 (UTC)Reply

Formal discussion happening at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Should global deleters be permitted to delete local pages when fulfilling m:Synchbot requests?. –xeno^talk 15:13, 5 December 2022 (UTC)Reply

The case reported at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-06-19/In the media and discussed on the talk page there seems relevant to this policy. (TL;DR: A steward from another wiki globally locked the account of active English Wikipedia editor for actions on the steward's home wiki, with a rationale that appears to match none of the usual "clear-cut situations" listed at m:Global locks#Reasons to request a global lock.) Regards, HaeB (talk) 21:48, 21 June 2023 (UTC)Reply

  The redirect Wikipedia:Otrs members has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 August 25 § Wikipedia:Otrs members until a consensus is reached. 1234qwer1234qwer4 17:50, 25 August 2024 (UTC)Reply

I have recently learned of someone with the the global abuse filter helper right who publicly shared details of a private enwiki filter. That person was reminded of expectations, but it feels like we should set some local expectations about this so that we would have the option to block, pending Steward discussion of removal, should a global user abuse this. I would propose expectations similar to what is in the EFH policy. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 16:09, 17 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Seems fine to document that here. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:37, 17 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Shouldn't this be written on AFHs removal section? Something like: The editor has shared details of local or global private filters with unauthorised parties. Nobody (talk) 05:22, 18 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

enwiki can't control what the global community does. We can, under global policy say that certain people aren't allowed to use their global rights here. While I don't think that is necessary in most situations, I think we should reserve ourselves the right to do so if there's been abuse - especially because enwiki makes far greater use of abuse filters than most projects (even many large ones). That said if there were a discussion on meta about removing for unauthorized disclosure I'd be in favor of that too - but that's a whole different (and I expect harder) discussion than what we can have here. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 17:08, 18 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Noting the conditions that could lead to revocation of GAH on meta is the right place for that, the notes that this project may issue siteblocks likely belong here (as it is a reference for the local admins that would do that task). — xaosflux ^Talk 18:24, 18 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

That sounds about right, but should likely apply for AFHs and AFMs. But does it actually work that way on the technical side? Will blocking them locally stop them from using their global right to view local private filters? Nobody (talk) 05:19, 19 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

I have been told by a steward the answer is yes. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 20:22, 19 September 2024 (UTC)Reply