Wikipedia has many active features which are broken. Conventional product development practices the idea of the minimum viable product in which there is a schedule of feature rollout to give most users a narrow but working experience. With Wikipedia, anyone can integrate a new product into the user experience and if there is any oversight it is by volunteers. Some places in Wikipedia have more oversight and some places less, but there are critical high profile usage patterns where the process lacks any evidence of coordinated design. I will share one, which is Wikipedia’s identity verification process. Earlier this year I drafted Wikipedia:Identity verification as guidance on this.
“Identity verification” is when a website confirms the identity of the person or organization operating a user account in order to confirm some privilege to that account. This comes up often in two contexts in Wikipedia: one is confirming that we are securing compatible copyright licenses from rightsholders when accepting files into Wikimedia Commons, and the other is when a person or organization claims a right to edit an article about themselves or something close to them. One challenge with all of this is that performing reasonable identity verification of the sort most people would imagine is complicated and expensive. If Wikipedia had a hard definition for its standard of verification then either the standard would need to be low to meet, or costly to achieve, or we could usually achieve it but with frequent flagged exceptions. In practice right now we strive for a high standard but have many exceptions, and the entire process is more labor intensive than I would like. Another challenge is that upon confirming an identity, we lack consensus about what rights this should confer. The challenge of implementing an identity verification process is something I would talk about with Wikipedians, but the issue of user rights is a matter of broader public interest since it affects how everyone’s community relates to Wikipedia. I will say more about that second challenge here.
Commons has a default practice of encouraging high-profile copyright holders to hide their identity when making media uploads to Commons. I think that this has always been a long-standing procedural error. Like for example, if famous photographer or an organization wishes to apply a free and open license to media, then the usual case would be they have no need to hide their identity, because obviously the copyright of the media could only come from that well-known organization or person when it is common knowledge that they should be the copyright holder.
I would like to change the Wikipedia default practice from “hide the identity of the copyright holder of media” to “only by request, hide the identity of the copyright holder of media”. My expectation is that in 90%+ of cases, most people and organizations would not request to have their identity hidden for media uploads. I see no reason to believe that users are even aware that we have a practice to obscure their identity. We go to a lot of trouble to hide identity, and hiding identity means that people who reuse media can have doubts for 95 years (until public domain) that the media actually came from the copyright holder.
This confusion starts because there is a longstanding practice of our Wikimedia Commons community performing a number of functions to assist with media uploads by email. The Volunteer Response Team is a global collective serving every language and wiki project for anything necessary to discuss by email. Many wiki administrator type people call this service Commons:OTRS which is a name I try to avoid because those letters are a brand name of some software we use for part of the process. There are documentation pages about various language and subgroups of this team at the Wikidata item.
A particular problem is the use of template PermissionOTRS. The designed use of this template is to mark that privately, trusted Wikipedia administrators have performed identity verification with the copyright holder of media uploaded in Wikipedia. The identity verification validates a copyright license which the uploader has chosen, and all of this indicates that a file has a free and open copyright license. I advocate for this process to happen in public rather than in an email backchannel.
Suppose that the office of a public figure, like a corporate executive, the head of a nonprofit organization or NGO, faculty at universities, a government officer, or anyone similar writes into our email service to share their publicity photo. In the Volunteer Response Team queue, there is a process for identity verification of the rights holder, then if the file passes verification, it gets that template above marking it to communicate that in private email the file has come to Wikimedia Commons with a Wikimedia compatible copyright license from the copyright holder. This typically happens for organizations which publish photos with conventional copyright on their website, but then want some of those photos mirrored in Wikipedia with a compatible copyright license.
The change that I think I want is that by default, when anyone with a public identity applies a copyright license to content with Wikimedia Commons mediating as witness to their application of the license, then we do all this in public, seeking to publish the identify the copyright holder. Again, our norm right now is privacy, and I would still allow that privacy for special cases by request, but I believe that in many cases this privacy is an unwanted burden to the rightsholder, our readers, and a labor burden in our administration.
If I were to go further, I wish that we could make all this OTRS permission process public by default, so that anyone could review the license. The norm for Commons is associating uploads with Wikimedia accounts, which is already pseudonymous and which anyone can have. For people who write in by email, the new process I want is that by default we share some aspect of their identity (maybe their name, maybe their domain name if it is a company or org or personal domain), or we offer them some other pseudonymous process including perhaps the one we have in place if they request it.
I know that this is a discussion which needs to include various agents in the Volunteer Response Team. It is still so challenging to organize meetings in the Wikipedia space. I meet monthly for online chats with about 10 Wikipedia groups already. I have capacity to meet more, and volunteers enjoy joining these meetups, but no one enjoys administering the meetup rooms to poll for an acceptable time and perform the hosting functions of the online meeting space. There are many such challenges which have in their solution a few meetings with voice and video.
I was thinking about this issue because on 20 December 2019 Slate published an article about some public relations representative trying to share a publicity photo of a United States presidential candidate. The article is able to generate a lot of journalism over what ought to be straightforward, which is the act of uploading a photo. I recognize that there are multiple issues in the article, but one that has my attention is how we scale up the ability of every public figure and organization in the world to be able to upload publicity photos in the Wikipedia network without requiring so much of our human attention and to operate at scale.