[throw93949444]

Seems like a loophole not to employ people. "Editor" sounds like a job title! There is code of conduct, all sort of paperwork, you have to deal with comitees, editorial process... There is non disclosure agreement, you are not allowed to discus internal stuff with people outside from company... wery far from "i seen something was wrong, so i just made quick edit"!

Smells like proper job to me!

We closed the same loophole with uber and doordash employees. Wikimedia should employ its editors!!!

[bawolff]

> Smells like proper job to me!

In proper jobs you get paid, and there is someone telling you what to do. Neither of those things apply to Wikipedia.

There is no NDA. The only exception is if you volunteer to join the group that deals with private data (this is not the same as being an Admin, its the step above. Its a very small group)

Comittees exist but are largely optional. If you want to change things at a meta level or do wide coordination, there is no getting around that. But such stuff is optional. You don't need to join any comittees if you just want to write articles.

Now, if you want to say its exploitative (editors put in the labour and get almost none of the created value), then fair point. I would say its no more or less exploitative than your average open source project.

[weberer]

>There is non disclosure agreement

No there is not. You don't have to sign anything to make edits to Wikipedia. On the other hand, these people are full employees with work contracts.

[throw93949444]

There is like 50 page agreement, you even have to give up your copyright rights! The only way to do it legally in my country, is to hire editor as an employee!!! (Contractors can not legally give up copyright to their work)

https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Terms_of_Use

[francisdavey]

You license your contributions under an open licence. You don't give up your copyright. There would be no other sensible way to operate a collaborative encyclopedia without a license of this kind.

I (lawyer) have never encountered a jurisdiction where a contractor could not license their work under the contract with their employer (the person contracting them).

[sandworm101]

There are some non-divestable rights out there. Canada (and others) have a copyright concept of moral rights that cannot be given away by contract or, in other words, nobody can ever force someone to give them away. An artist/creator can decide to not exercise them but the artist/creator retains them regardless of contract language.

>> Unlike other IP rights, moral rights cannot be sold or given away. Even in the case of a sale, an author retains their moral rights in the work, unless they choose to waive these rights.

https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/canadian-intellectual-prope...

I was thinking about this as they were covering up murals and stadium names for the world cup. Canada doesnt really do that, but canadian stadiums are not generally named after tech companies (ie BC Place got to keep its name).

[some_random]

How is the right non-divestable if you can waive it? More importantly, how could wikipedia possibly work if contributors retained copyright in any form over their submitted articles and edits?

[bawolff]

> More importantly, how could wikipedia possibly work if contributors retained copyright in any form over their submitted articles and edits?

Note, the cc-by-sa 4.0 license that wikipedia uses requires you to waive any moral rights to the extent possible. In canada if you are the creator of the work, then you can waive all of them, so its really a moot point. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode.en

In general though, moral rights tend to be the sort of thing where they only come into play if you're being an asshole, so it mostly doesn't matter.

[ghaff]

It seems to be a somewhat murky area of law. In Europe (and, I guess Canada) you can't really have public domain because of moral rights that you can't waive. IANAL but I've talked with IP lawyers about this and they've been sortof "Yes this is often kinda true." So the broad public domain that is generally true of the US government and which individuals can release in the US isn't really true in Europe as I understand it.

[throw93949444]

The only legal way to waive copyright rights, is to hire an employee to produce the work. Individual contributors are not cogs in a machine, employees are!

And if someone produced work for 15 years, and edited 10000 articles... very hard to argue it is not permanent worker!

Wikipedia can easily work as "marketplace of ideas", linking original authors. That is not possible if you have editorial policy, political opinions and work like a corporation or a news paper.

[some_random]

Have you ever read the ToS/ToU of any social media site? Did you know that by using this site you've agreed to arbitration? https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#tou

Giving up copyright when you write an article for Wikipedia is literally the only way it could possibly work. The biggest issue Wikimedia has is its full time staff, followed by full time editors.

[cccbbbaaa]

There is no copyright assignment on wikipedia. You are required to license your work under CC-BY-SA 4.0, so the WMF can distribute it, and other editors can reuse and modify it.

More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

[throw93949444]

Social media is different from wikipedia. If i write my opinions here, it is not an opinion of ycombinator. If I write stuff on wikipedia, it is opinion of wikipedia and there is rigorous editorial process, to get my stuff published...

Also here my name is right next to the text, not in wikipedia!

Platform vs publisher...

[lkbm]

> If I write stuff on wikipedia, it is opinion of wikipedia

That's obviously false, if for no other reason than:

> and there is rigorous editorial process, to get my stuff published...

There are people who will see and review your work after the fact, but it's published immediately.

> Also here my name is right next to the text, not in wikipedia!

There's a link at the top of every page to see who wrote what text.