Wikimedia Foundation/Legal/2023 ToU updates/Office hours/Transcript 2

WMF Legal Team: Myself, (another WMF Legal Team member), who's also on our team and has been helping write the terms of use amendments and (another WMF Legal Team member) who has also been helping write in terms of use amendments, and is particularly been focused on some of the issues around undisclosed paid editing and trying to improve those sections and then another (WMF Legal Team member) has been helping a lot with our advice on the European laws and has been helping us. Make sure that we are writing the sections, especially sections that tend to match with the European requirements that we're going to be subject to. So yeah, we've got a group of us here.
WMF Legal Team: I think based on what I've been seeing it seems like we are in a pretty good place overall. There's a few comments that sort that did come up that are still some outstanding things. I know there were some concerns for example around us having the one section around the security policy that isn't written yet. That might I think that was a reasonable suggestion that someone made so that might end up coming out of the final draft. But for the most part I think the language seems like it is in a pretty good spot and has not had too many objections. I know there was a little bit of sort of leftover
WMF Legal Team: Like a few folks left over that were still debating back and forth on like, Should it really be just US law? I think the answer that we've come down to legally is that it doesn't really work anymore. Just sort of as a factual practical matter of the rest of the world. We can't just say US law. We have to follow some of the other laws, but we did in this update, try to make clear that we are using broad standards. So the international human rights as well as jurisdictional rules determine how we respond to the different laws and what laws we think apply to the foundation. So we're not going to You know, like our terms of use will not be used to enforce like anti-lgbt laws, for example, against people. So I hope that was. I hope that was made clear in the previous round of updates. But interested to hear more about that one. And also just sort of if there are still any outstanding questions.
Community Member: Yeah. Yes. Hi, I have one question for you and your team regarding the terms of use and the European European Digital Services Act. I've seen that in February the Foundation published the numbers required by the DSA as to the Users which we still don't know who a user is, but that's another story. And we've mentioned that no new data from the users was collected to get those numbers. And I've read the draft of your terms of use. And while I'm not a lawyer, it looks like we don't plan to collect any more new data from the user's regarding this requirement. My question is not about the terms of use, but more of the approach of the foundation regarding such requirements in the future. DSA was one big step from the EU and it's a big market for Wikipedia. But We are also very vague in our terms of use as to what data we collect and how we use it. Is there an opening for us in the future and the second related What is distracted to be looking at foundation to address that? If any of that arises, either in the US or the EU And I know it's more of a public policy question. But we are collecting very little data about our users, and the regulatory requirements are becoming much and much stricter. I'm just worried that we cannot go for much longer collecting as much data as we do while still being compliant with your requirements.
WMF Legal Team: Yeah, that is a good question. I would actually call it a series of questions because I think I should talk about three different things in response to that, but that is an excellent very large question. Sorry about where the world is going right now.
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WMF Legal Team: So first in terms of our own policies, I think I still don't know the timeline. This came up briefly in the last call as well so I still don't know the timeline but we are planning to update our privacy policy, I think in the next couple of years so like sometime sometime in the next two years. Let's say probably next year, like all. So the foundation goes on fiscal years. So if you're looking at calendar dates, I think sometime between July first of 2023 and July 1st. So 2024 we will make the plan for updating the privacy policy and start. Maybe collecting some information from users and staff and developers about what data we might need. And what changes we might need to make, as well as how we can improve our security things like that. And then probably in the
WMF Legal Team: July 2024 to July 2025 time period is when we would actually start doing the updates to the privacy policy. Do not quote me on these dates that might change. Like this is not set in stone yet but I know we are looking at doing that. The privacy policy is much more like that, that is much more focused on the data we collect and how we organise it and protect it and use it so much more. So then the terms of use are the terms of use as a document, basically, just say, like, See the privacy policy for the most part. And so that is like those things are a little bit separated. So I would say definitely tune into that conversation like not soon, but in a couple of years I think we will see that conversation happening and they'll probably be a lot interested in that and in thinking about those issues.
WMF Legal Team: I think in terms of the global question of like sort of. So that's us what we're doing about it. In terms of the global question of what's happening in the rest of the world and what factors are going to be pressing on the foundation. I think there's a couple things to think about. One, we have been very active in the public policy discussions around telling regulators that we don't want to be forced to collect more data. I think there is often an assumption because of the way the Internet looks right now with things like Google and Facebook and Amazon and so forth. There's an assumption by a lot of lawmakers that everyone just collects more data than they think. And so they're like, Oh well, you know, we can put requirements to do all of this tracking for transparency reasons, because Facebook is already collecting all of that data anyway and every website works like Facebook and so they must all have it and it's not a big deal for us to demand that they be transparent with it. And so we've tried to be very active in public policy conversations in telling people.
WMF Legal Team: Like that's not actually true. It's like we don't collect that much data. Please don't write a law that forces us to collect a bunch of new data just to comply with the law. And it's been one of our more firm stances that we're not, you know, unless we are absolutely forced to do so, we are not going to start collecting data just to do legal compliance. If we don't have to, And so for example with the DSA one, as you noted, we didn't need to collect new data for that. We were able to use a method of just sort of like taking the unique device data, which we already had and had been publishing and then applying a sort of overall heuristic to it to say Well what is the average number of unique devices that people have based on existing studies and expertise and and try to convert that number of unique devices into a best, guess of a number of people.
WMF Legal Team: And I think that was acceptable. Like that was a good enough method. The DSA was not asking us to give up. It was just asking us to get close enough that they could make decisions about the size of the platform and how the law applies, as a result of that. So, I hope that that actually serves as a model for future laws in other countries as well, where if they're going to have those sorts of requirements, we can fulfil them without needing to collect new data or reveal non-public data.
WMF Legal Team: There is, I think, a risk that that is not the case in other countries and we will have to see what this looks like around the world. There's definitely some countries that are much more interested than the European Union in tracking the behaviour of their populations on the Internet. Sometimes, for authoritarian reasons, sometimes for sort of like protectionist reasons. those those countries present a challenge for the wikimedia movement, I think that we need to make efforts to allow people to safely contribute to our projects with safely being defined broadly to include like, That they are like people are able to contribute with some level of pseudonymity that people are people trust that they will not be identified by the foundation in response to legal orders, to the extent possible because we cannot make that promise perfectly even in the United States.
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WMF Legal Team: But that it is very rare and unlikely and that if it happens, they will have an opportunity to object to it. And that people can write about a variety of topics, some of which may be controversial without their own governments coming after them, which is also related to this question of privacy in a lot of countries. Like I think if you are If you are writing about minority movements in a lot of countries in the world, their governments might take an interest in you and that's just that's the reality that we live in right now, so that, that part really sucks. I think, like, In the worst case scenario, we will see this come down to governments blocking Wikipedia because we don't comply with the rules that they want.
WMF Legal Team: I think that is more likely that we are just complying with those rules. It's like I just don't see it being like on the table. Like we'd have to say what we're doing in our policies and I just don't see it being on the table. As we update our policies for us to, to, suddenly, like be giving out data about users, that can identify them to various governments around the world absent a like, very clear judicial process to do that inappropriate way. And even then we try to defend it like when we do give over data and respond to a judicial process, it's generally because they're actually a clear underlying case like a user actually did defame someone. Or you know, someone actually did make a threat. That was like a crime.
WMF Legal Team: So, yeah, I think defending good faith. Users are definitely one of the core things we're doing. And, you know, it may be that that runs into challenges with governments around the world, and if we see Wikipedia like being blocked as a result of that. Also blocked, I'm using really vaguely here, a lot of governments. I don't think I want to do a full site-wide block. There are various options as we saw with the Pakistan thing recently, sort of like degrading service, quality or asking ISPs to block certain things. So it becomes sort of partially accessible and partially not Um, and so there's various strategic approaches that governments are taking short of just blocking the entire websites to try to get their way. I don't Yeah I don't know what happened. If that sort of thing goes along in the long run, I think with a lot of the responses to that sort of thing is like
WMF Legal Team: Are based around communications and publicity, and international relations more, so than it is being able to directly challenge and get it undone. And so it would be, it would become like a broad movement wide discussion.
WMF Legal Team: So, that is a, That is a long answer to your question. I think it is a very thoughtful question and I wish the world were in a better place than it currently is
Community Member: Okay, thank you. That was actually a very good answer with a couple of follow-ups that you that you are that you answered. Sorry this wasn't fully in scope of today's consultations. But I have another one that this also mostly just satisfied my own curiosity, but also a bit about the policy in the proposed updates in the Chapter Four Refraining From Certain Activities. The WMF is proposing to add a provision. Saying, we ask that all users review and follow the UC. My questions here may come from, maybe me not speaking English natively, so please correct me if I misunderstand it.
Community Member: I wanted to ask Well ask here about how it works. Usually in policies, whether this is not being too shallow of a word in this. Because I had a question from a person in our community. If we are only asking people to follow Ucoc, are we really going to enforce it? I'm more of the Liberal side of translation when the foundation asked somebody they are obligated to follow. But I worked at UCC for two years while I was part of the Foundation contractor team. And I may be biased here and the community members may have a good reason. Some people may have a good reason to interpret this vague word in the other direction.
WMF Legal Team: That's interesting. I think we can. I want to look back at that and make sure that we're not implying to people that they don't need to follow the UCLC. My thinking and using that phrasing is that the way that the Ucoc is referenced is polite in the introduction but then in the introduction to section 4 but then with greater specificity in a couple of spots. And so like it says So like, for example, it says, we ask you follow the Ucoc but then also in the harassment section further down in Section 4, it says, Don't engage in harassment as defined in the Ucoc. And so, there it is not is not asking. It is just saying, do not do not engage in the behaviors that. The ucoc says that it is harassment.
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WMF Legal Team: and that's like from a legal drafting style, that's kind of like, it's, it's not the best, like it's not the best contract language but it's it's trying to like Introduce the thing in a polite way, but then also ensure that it is included in. The definition of prohibited behavior in the terms of use. And I see (community member) in the comments also noting that there's like both. Yeah, there's both required and desired behavior and so we, yeah, we want the terms of use to let people know the Ucoc exists. We want the terms of use to say that. If you violate the parts of the uco, see that define behaviors that are unacceptable then that's not okay.
WMF Legal Team: And I think a lot of them are already covered. Like I think adding it to harassment was something we wanted to be specific about but a lot of other things like fraud or threats or stalking are already covered in the Ucoc definition pretty much matches with the regular definition of the words.
WMF Legal Team: So I think I wanted to look at it again in light of your comment and make sure that we have not been too soft but I think the way we wrote it is probably correct.
WMF Facilitator: Thank you. And I just want to remind those who joined recently that feel free to raise your virtual hand and ask your question or comment. You can also ask your question on the chat.
Community Member: Sure, this is more perhaps for someone conceptual question, but ask anyway the Most of the links sort of tear you by reference as it were to documents within the TA you make perfect sense, licensing agreement, frequency policy and so on. There's also one to the general policy page and so upload the global policies and The.
Community Member: Does this sort of offer someone? What I call over-expensive scope in the sense that anything can be bought in and stated to have sort of tear you backing, by placing it there particularly since while some global policies whether What's the community qualities? Have to go for conversation to get that way. But some global WMF policies do go through decent amounts of consultation; others have just sort of sprung into being on very short notice. Indeed before and While I'm confident, obviously, that's for finding a legal sense. Do you see it being a problem that sort of tier you level changes can be made, so sort of rapidly or at least without consultation beyond the functionary level.
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Community Member: There. I mean that holds up in the sense that I, I suppose, I am fat, like I said I'm fairly confident that You know, not try illegal is more than capable of making sure that it is fine in terms of making sure it's consistent with that.
Community Member: I suppose I had sort of two questions with that. What was the original point as to? This allows. So basically, but obviously the board has the legal pads to do this, but do we think it is excessive security of the board can just will it into here. Here we've had excellent consultation on these two, you changes, which has been really good the but because things can just be instantiated in, they can come in from anywhere the other bit was whether
Community Member: There are changes made to global policies and made at a foundation staff level rather than a board level. That might be in the sense of either an entire policy being created at the staff level, all changes made to current ones. And within that, that could also be the board has said, Yes we can have a policy on this but that has been decided before that policy says has been created. Just the board has said they want one and then the staff are actually changing what that looks like and that was sort of what my questions were more focused on.
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WMF Legal Team: And there's a little bit of that like, you know, wikimedia be bold, like philosophy there or like we need to do something. We do it and then we will fix it.
WMF Legal Team: I think the human rights policy is one that was really referenced. I see that in the sidebar like that was one that was really referenced to like industry standards and the foundation being part of like industry bodies and NGO bodies and things like that. and there has been community feedback, but I also think like, You know, if there are ways that the human rights policy is being used like that are causing harm or that are not being used correctly. I think please continue to provide that feedback and they can work on updating it.
WMF Legal Team: Like yeah, I would say that was an interesting example and that maybe gets to the way that things can go badly, which is you are, you are right in the theoretical sense, that if you really want things to go wrong corrupt, a board of trustees like that. It is true as a theoretical matter that. Like the way corporate law is structured. A board of trustees can just sort of go off the deep end if they want to. And, there's not a lot of checks and balances on the board themselves like they can. The board can just be like here with a bunch of stuff we're doing and they have that ultimate decision making power and so that is how things are structured. And the check on that is the election process. The board is elected by the community. There are a bunch of different ways that are structured. The board does have certain duties to the organization, as well in its mission. So, you know, if you, if you actually bribed the board of trustees that would be a legal problem because they cannot take money to
WMF Legal Team: Against the interests of the organization and its mission. But generally speaking the board of trustees are given a really wide latitude and so they check on them going, totally off the wall and just doing a bunch of terrible things. The political nature of their role and the fact that they are therefore beholden to a voting community that wants them to do good things.
WMF Legal Team: But there's Yeah, there have been like I don't I mean from what I know the Foundation board, they're doing a great job and the people that have been elected to the board in the last few rounds of elections, have all been doing a great job. But, you know, if you want a horror story, go read about Hawaii. What's the name of it? The Bishop Family Trust. I think that there was a very very large American trust. That was the Hawaiian royal family before it was conquered by the United States and all of their land. And they had a terrible corruption scandal that was like not just the board of this large trust but like Hawaiian politicians judges, all these people that were implicated and getting all this money from this thing and that was doing a bunch of really bad behavior. There's like an entire book written about it.
WMF Legal Team: Um, so that is where things go wrong like nonprofits. But I think we are. I think we are currently in a situation where that is not at all happening on the board. It is actually like trying very hard to do a good job and If they don't get things, perfect like community feedback is taken very seriously right now.
WMF Legal Team: Yeah, and I think that's right. In the sidebar. That, like the issues, we have in our projects, are our people that all want to accomplish the same goal of free knowledge for the world. Not always agreeing about the best course of action to do it. Um, but we, we generally are not in the situation of, like, people in bad faith, trying to, you know, leech off donor money for their own personal luxury, or things like that.
Community Member: That's fine. I have a couple of mind things but they are just more the choice of words one. So I dropped them in there. Spelling unless we truly run out of questions here.
WMF Legal Team: Sounds good, appreciate that feedback as well. It is helpful to get that final product just like really polished.
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WMF Facilitator: Just a reminder, we have 40 minutes to go.
WMF Facilitator: We don't have so many people from the community, so if you still have questions, feel free to ask them.
Community Member: I suppose, like if we are, always just going to sit here, the The I like the idea that's on by the way, just notion inside would was going to plan on bribing the trustees and then it's like, well if I guess it's in the Teo you are probably shouldn't the But my question is that from the explaining aspects which again are really appreciated, they explain that certain bits are there to cover sort of incoming all likely to be incoming law. The. There seems to be what am I called, a growing trend and your no double place tonight. See whether it will either continue or at least be upheld of certain US states going off on their own when it comes to
Community Member: Slightly, all very bizarre data laws within their states, and usually aimed at big tech, but not particularly well, targeted in the process.
Community Member: I'm from say, the movement charter, so you should be able to be stable for at least the next couple of years.
WMF Legal Team: I think it will be stable. I think right before you joined I was talking about the privacy policy being updated. So on the data topic, particularly I think the time frame for the privacy policy getting its own update is going to be in the next couple of years. My guess and I said at the beginning, don't quote me on this. So this is just my guess at the timeline. But I think given the foundation works on fiscal years I think between July 1st 2023. So this year to July 1st 2024, we're probably going to be doing background work on these like data questions and like what requirements there are as well as like, what the communities are interested in, what developers are interested in. And then I think the 2024 to 2025 fiscal year, we are likely to actually look at updating the privacy policy, which will be with community consultation
WMF Legal Team: Um, so not that soon. But like in the near future time frame, I think we're gonna look at updating the privacy policy.
WMF Legal Team: I am a little worried more generally about what US states are doing. There's probably a lot of legal protections and if something really goes off the rails, it's probably going to be the kind of thing that will let us finally get something like a federal privacy law that has been debated a number of times and hasn't happened yet but they're it has been discussed in the current US Congress and there is even bipartisan support for some kind of federal privacy law. So it's really about overcoming the partisanship of the US Congress, where, like, people will vote against doing something, they think is good, just because they don't want the other political party to get the the victory credit, but I think if they can overcome that sort of political partisanship, then there is actually pretty good chance of federal privacy law, being passed in the United States soon.
WMF Legal Team: So I don't know what the odds are of them overcoming the partisanship. That's a big problem but we'll see what happens there.
Community Member: I have one question, but that would be Since we've tapped on the topic of either lobbying or terrible bills, or people doing things that are of danger to Wikipedia, but that made me want to ask about updates regarding Google, but that's very out of scope of this consultation. So maybe leave it in the end if there are no other questions.
WMF Legal Team: I guess I could say something about that since we're going relatively slowly. How would this interact with the terms of service In particular, I think right now, the terms of service, still accurately, reflect the structure of the underlying law about like hosting websites
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WMF Legal Team: I think it is very unlikely that Google ultimately upsets that structure. It seems like based on the way the judges' justice is rather reviewed the case, and the discussion at oral argument, it seems relatively likely that they will either rule for Google. Or if they rule for Gonzales, they will do so in a very narrow, and very careful way that will and most sort of like have indirect impacts on wikimedia. Like, it might affect the Internet ecosystem, maybe there would be a couple of features on Wikipedia that would need some review in, light of like potentially. Now, creating legal risk, but it's more like, a couple of developer tools or something or like, the recommended article's feature that might need a review, but it's unlikely that the whole site would be problematic. um, there is like,
WMF Legal Team: There is a way that it goes like horrifically wrong and they they'd like completely overturn the protections of the law or say something like linking counts as recommendation and then every Wikipedia article linking with two of other stuff in it becomes like a source of legal liability and then in the worst case scenario, we don't win a case and there's some like really bad happening. Like you know, for those of you that Um, they may have followed this for a while, the sort of the worst case scenario that a lot of people have in mind is the Hulk Hogan versus Gawker lawsuit from several years ago. That was a privacy violation but it was similar to the kind of defamation cases that people could bring against an inaccurately written Wikipedia article.
WMF Legal Team: And in that case, Hulk Hogan sort of single-handedly bankrupted gawker because he was able to establish that like his personal celebrity was worth like 70 million dollars and that was more money than Gawker had available and so they were bankrupted by the lawsuit and you know you can see the foundations budget like we are somewhere around the 170 to 180 million dollar number. But that means that like two very bad lawsuits from celebrities would completely wipe out our entire budget for like all staff and all global operations. And so that's sort of the, the ultimate like worst case, you know, disaster scenario that could come out of like a bad Supreme Court ruling. It is an extremely, extremely low percentage. There's like a number of different defenses that we could raise as well as
WMF Legal Team: A lot of like legal arguments, even if we lost a case that we could make, that we shouldn't owe that much money because they were nonprofit and like it's not structured that way. So I think it is very very unlikely that that ultimate worst case scenario happens. What could happen. I think what is much more likely to happen than that? Is that the Gonzalez case coming out? We see some some concern, it doesn't change enough and the US Congress passes reform to Section 230, and, and depending on what that reform looks like we might
WMF Legal Team: Need to make changes. If we're lucky that kind of reform is actually the same as what the Digital Services Act is already requiring of us. And so we will have to beat them to the punch. The terms of use will be updated, and everything will be working the way it's supposed to be. If we're not lucky, they might require something specific. That is like, you know, there was, there was like, a bill, a few years ago that was like, you must have a phone number in your terms of use for people to call for complaints. Because the US Congress was like people still use phones, right? And so you could see that sort of thing where like maybe we have to go back and tweak the terms of use because we need to have a complaints phone number and then we just set that up so that somebody calls that number and it goes to like it creates an email of their voicemail message and we forwarded it to like the volunteer response team or something. Um, yeah. I don't I don't know what that would look like, but that it could be that sort of tweaking.
WMF Legal Team: So I think the realistics and like the most high percentage scenarios are that what we are doing now will address most of what happens in the next year or two. But it's definitely possible that the lower percentage scenarios turn into reality and there's some bigger changes that are required. And so even though we've just done this, we might have to revisit it in the future. If it is, I will say if it is really small, if it's just tweaking like a phone number or something, we might do something like the sort of administrative update version of this or we don't do a full two month. Multilingual consultation to put a contact phone number in the thing. If there's more substantive updates, we'll have to look really carefully at it because, you know, I don't want to. I don't want to sneak at by the community. I also don't want to waste everybody's time, if it's basically like we're doing the same thing we're doing now and we just need to rephrase how we say it.
Community Member: Okay, thank you. It Is very informative. Thank you.
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WMF Legal Team: No one wants to be manning that phone number. It would be such a terrible idea.
Community Member: I have a piece of trivia for you. As an NGO, it has a public service status in Poland. We can do it, Poland is required to have a phone number operated by a real human that every at every policy student can call. And I already know why, but we are required by a lot to do that and our office manager handled this phone. And then I took him to answer it. Once he Took the phone, put it on his desk and the person was speaking for 20 minutes. Didn't even realize, he wasn't speaking.
Community Member: So, do not mind this call. It's mostly older people calling that. They know that their grandfather was hurt by their neighbor because their neighbor has a long lasting ability against them. It is the stories people tell would make for a really good sitcom, but it's not an interesting phone to have
WMF Legal Team: Yeah we and there is a foundation phone number like you can call the office and leave a message and we do occasionally get some it's currently set up to just generate like an email of the voicemail and then we usually try to address it over email but we don't get that many of them. I think it's one of, like, one of the interesting unknowns that I think about when I look at the legal reform is like Do we do? We already get all the complaints that we would get. Like it does everyone who's angry about Wikipedia already complains. And therefore if new systems are put in place for how those complaints are handled, the volume wouldn't change, just the routing.
WMF Legal Team: Or is there a whole universe of people who maybe like, get better legal advice than the ones who complain to us, who would complain if they had a better structure to like, get what they wanted? But they're not complaining now because it would, it's too difficult or too unlikely to succeed. And we, we really, I don't know if there's any way to know that in advance like we can we can change things and then see if there's a flood of new complaints, or we can have things changed on us and see if there's a flood of new complaints. Um and then if that happens, we'll have to respond accordingly either with, you know, staffing or collaboration with the communities. Like we'll sort of, we'll see what happens.
WMF Legal Team: But, I hope, I hope that we're in a world where we are already getting the complaints that we are, we would expect to get. And so we do not see a flood of new things.
WMF Legal Team: It's just to mention that with the dissociation. For example, there is a renewed emphasis on being very clear to the public about how they can get in touch with us with a complaint And that hasn't always been very clear. I think about different projects and different language versions of the projects. Quite different contacts as pages. And that might be therefore saying we have to look to standardize. I think there are advantages as well in that there's currently a lot of confusion about, for example, whether VRT Is a good place to send legal threats and that, unfortunately, even means that some VRT members have been specifically, you know, threatened or involved in legal action. So,
WMF Legal Team: Whilst I'm not sure the mode of communications will be changing. Perhaps we do need to look more closely at more consistently across all the projects. Okay, the foundation is the host. So if you really want to leave threaten someone to get stuff taken down, we're it
Community Member: I think also I would be just trying out whether there are some queries in terms of those complaints. Obviously, there isn't sort of in the sense of anything like a service level agreement, but
Community Member: when it comes to sort of sufficient handling of them, there isn't any significant backlog for the English Wikipedia primary VRT but Other projects that aren't who do have VRTs but that's not the case.
Community Member: Is there some sort of essential issue? Particularly in say some of the some EU countries, but you countries, where they don't have, particularly large projects getting complaints, that just aren't handled. Because the VRTis not on so on our tax for enough, that would normally have these things and then is a notable example, Brian.
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Community Member: That says then sort of blows back on the foundation in terms of their responsibilities that way.
WMF Legal Team: Yeah, I think. I mean, that does happen. It really is a question of volume. Like there are people who get upset about these sorts of things, you're out how to post on a talk page or they figure out how to contact admins. If they're not getting any traction through email and they solve their problem. There are a handful that come to us and make threats and we are able to get that too. As he was putting in the sidebars, Sometimes it's just like How do we figure out how this particular language is actually doing work? Maybe it's like getting it to a certain admins or getting it on a talk page or a discussion board where it needs to be. Um and then there's occasionally somebody that sort of shows up with a lawsuit after getting a little bit frustrated that they can't solve their problem.
WMF Legal Team: I guess the advantage of that for the lawsuit people is that the lawsuit makes it very real in a way that is sort of like. Now we're going to have to defend that and if we are looking at it, it's not particularly defensible. We're going to try really hard to make sure that the local community actually pays attention to it because it is a lawsuit and so it sort of jumps the queue in that regard. but I think most of the time we try to get things resolved in advance of that, so that if it actually becomes a lawsuit, we can Defend it and defend it successfully. And I feel like strategically the foundation's approach is to defend everything. So that like unless it's really clear that it's going against us, we we are going to defend everything, it sort of the same way as like
WMF Legal Team: You know bus services or other sort of public services like public services that you know they don't settle because you don't want people to make a bunch of false claims and try to get them to settle. So you just defend everything and people know that you're not an easy target.
WMF Legal Team: Yeah, I think that question of scale is really one of the big ones. I worry about changes in scale. If there are really major changes in scale in the next few years, and it is possible, there will be, I don't think it's super likely but it is possible. That's going to be something where we will have to think about a kind of what our emergency response is like, like the scale changes suddenly and we have a ton of backlog. What is our way of like emergency resolving that out and then be, what is the long term change for like how we can handle that? Like, is that if that scale changes in that way, is that something that requires foundation staffing? Is it something that requires a different sort of community process? Or both in some cases, you know, does it require a change in foundation process with the same staffing in order to get through more things faster?
WMF Legal Team: You know, when I think about it from a corporate process angle, a lot of it is about mistake tolerance like If you have tons more stuff coming in and you need people to go through it faster, you would anticipate that mistakes are going to happen instead of getting everything, right? You're gonna have people go through a bunch of stuff faster and they're gonna get it 95%, right. But there's gonna be a handful of cases they get wrong and can we, you know, figure out how to fix those after the fact in some way for example, So I don't know what that looks like in practice yet, but if it does happen, we will have to do something.
WMF Legal Team: Back over to the other question.
Community Member: Yes, I have a question about the more of a, more of a technical side to the consultations. I can see that shift on the consultations until April 24th, which is by the way, my birthday and I was wondering what is the timeline after that for the changes? But basically, when are the changes going to be done and when will the new terms of use apply?
WMF Legal Team: I think mid to late May we don't have a hard date on it at the moment because we didn't want to force that on staff. But it should be like we finish the consultation on April 24th. We will take the last round of feedback. I think we're going to try and get one more update of the To out, maybe like 10 days before that so that people can see what we're looking at. As like the planned final version was still like a week or so, to do final comments. But then we'll hit the 24th, we'll take the last bit of feedback. We will take a final pass on the document. We'll take a final grammar pass on the document after that. And reach what we think is the final. We'll try to do some kind of summary of the consultation as well similar to past ones and then we will we will wikify it and put it on foundation wiki And oh yeah, absolutely.
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WMF Legal Team: And so then we'll wikify it and put it on foundation wiki. And when it is updated on foundation wiki that is when it is like the official update there will, there will also be a board of trustees resolution. So when it is in its final form, we will send it to the Board of Trustees to sign off on it. I think in their main meeting if we get the timing, all correct. If not, it might have to actually wait until June to go up on wiki, but we would like we'll get the final version, so we will send it to the Board of trustees. They will approve it and then it will become official and go up on Foundation Wiki so I think late may like I'm guessing that it'll take us just like a week or two to do that sort of final review process and then get it going and then we'll maybe like another week to get it on wiki once the board approves it
WMF Legal Team: Yeah, so either late May or in June once the board meeting happens.
Community Member: Okay, thank you very, for the answer. Unfortunately, I have to jump. Thank you all for the great hour and have a great week. And happy Easter for those who celebrate.
WMF Legal Team: Awesome. Happy Easter as well.
WMF Facilitator: Thank you so much. I guess with this last question we are coming to close to the end of the meeting. And yeah, everyone thank you for joining this conversation. Yeah. Have a nice continuation of your day or evening and see you in other meetings.
WMF Legal Team: All right. Thanks everyone.
WMF Facilitator: Thank you everyone. Bye.