Talk:Wikimedia Foundation/Legal/Update to banner and logo policies

Diff post

I have written a post about this initiative on Diff: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/01/24/help-us-collect-examples-of-community-discussions-to-run-banners-or-make-temporary-logo-changes/ --Charles M. Roslof (WMF) (talk) 01:15, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

Promotion of for-profit services

Will this also cover banners which are not project-wide protests but promote other kinds of activities or resources? What about sidebar or main page links? For example Facebook pages and Microblogging handles list some projects where links to Twitter or Facebook are heavily promoted. Such links may or may not directly advertise an individual political stance but they do support corporations with a political stance and a purpose different from (if not antithetical to) Wikimedia Foundation's. Nemo 11:30, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

@Nemo bis: No, setting policies about what websites can be linked to from the body of wiki pages is not within the scope of this initiative. --Charles M. Roslof (WMF) (talk) 15:33, 28 January 2025 (UTC)

Office hour

We have scheduled a time for conversation about this initiative on 4 February, 2025 at 16:00 UTC. You can sign up to attend at Event:Office hour for the banner and logo policy update initiative launch. This office hour is intended for questions and discussion about the initiative generally, as well as the research phase specifically. There will be time for additional conversation later about particular policy changes. --Charles M. Roslof (WMF) (talk) 00:07, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Thank you to everyone who attended the office hour conversation on February 4! Below is a summary of the questions that were asked during that time, as well as some comments from attendees.

Question: It is unclear what the rules are for some types of banner promotions. Some examples from the past: asking for submissions of research proposals; advertising open job positions (at affiliates or for Wikipedians-in-residence); promoting newsletters run by affiliates or other community groups; promoting affiliate membership; promoting social media accounts; promoting blog posts; recruiting new editors; thanking major donors. Would these be addressed by policy changes?

Answer: Many of those examples likely would not be within the scope of this initiative, but it is good to know about them. This initiative is focused on banners and logo changes that use Wikipedia’s reputation to take a position on external topics. This initiative is not intending to address every type of potential use of banners, and decide whether they are appropriate or inappropriate.

Question: How will any new policies be enforced?

Answer: The first step is to have policies that are as clear as we can make them. That will enable project communities to ensure themselves that they are following the policies, which is how most policy “enforcement” happens on the projects generally. If there are situations that are escalating into disputes or major issues, we can expect them to come to the Foundation’s attention. If there are more issues arising than can reasonably be handled on an ad hoc basis, we can consider adopting more formal mechanisms for review or enforcement.

Question: Will these new policies affect what logos can be uploaded to Commons?

Answer: The initiative is concerned with changes to the logos that are used to represent the projects and displayed to projects’ readers and users. At this time, there is no reason to expect that we will need to change the general permissive policy of allowing modified logos to be uploaded to Commons (per section 3.1 of the trademark policy).

Comments:

• CentralNotice admins do not always know how to process or respond to requests to run different kinds of campaigns, so this initiative may help.
• One way to provide clarity around what banners are allowed and what the procedure is to approve them would be to definitively say that CentralNotice policies also apply to Sitenotice banners. Some wikis already apply CentralNotice policies to their decisions about Sitenotice banners, but not all wikis do.
• There are additional types of actions that the policies might consider, besides banners and logo changes. One example is changes to the way pages are displayed (by modifying CSS or JavaScript), which could be used to take a political position. Another example is the removal of usernames from article histories.
• Currently, there is no guidance in the instructions for requesting changes to a wiki’s logo on how the modified logo should look.

Charles M. Roslof (WMF) (talk) 21:26, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

Russian Wikipedia

For Russian Wikipedia, the things not mentioned are 1) emergency banner due to the impending 2015 en:Block of Wikipedia in Russia, 2) CentralNotice campaign about the same topic in 2022 that was coordinated with the WMF, 3) New Year logo changes that users can opt-out of (see ru:Википедия:Новогодние логотипы русской Википедии). There were attempts to commemorate the victims of Russo-Ukrainian War via a logo change as well, but they were sadly unsuccessful. stjn^[ru] 22:52, 20 February 2025 (UTC)