Revised Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines up for vote, WMF counsel departs, generative models under discussion: UCoC draws nearer, alongside the rise of the machines, in mainspace this time.
The Wikimedia Foundation has announced, on the mailing list and on Meta, that there will shortly be another vote on the Enforcement Guidelines for the Universal Code of Conduct:
In mid-January 2023, the Enforcement Guidelines for the Universal Code of Conduct will undergo a second community-wide ratification vote. This follows the March 2022 vote, which resulted in a majority of voters supporting the Enforcement Guidelines. During the vote, participants helped highlight important community concerns. The Board’s Community Affairs Committee requested that these areas of concern be reviewed.
The volunteer-led Revisions Committee worked hard reviewing community input and making changes. They updated areas of concern, such as training and affirmation requirements, privacy and transparency in the process, and readability and translatability of the document itself.
The revised Enforcement Guidelines can be viewed here, and a comparison of changes can be found here.
Voting will open on 17 January. For information on how to vote, eligibility, and the like, see the detailed Voter information page on Meta. – AK
WMF General Counsel Amanda Keton has announced that she will move on to her "next adventure". She joined the Wikimedia Foundation in 2019, having previously served as head of the Tides Foundation and CEO of Tides Advocacy.
Amanda will be succeeded in her role as General Counsel by current Deputy General Counsel Stephen LaPorte (also known as User:Slaporte), who will take over on 1 February 2023.
The Signpost wishes Amanda and Stephen all the best. – AK
For the last few weeks, a discussion at the Village Pump has been ongoing about the potential use of text generated by large language models (like GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-J and ChatGPT) in Wikipedia; near the end of December, a thread on the wikimedia-l mailing list discussed the issue as well, going over the potential benefits, drawbacks and use cases for these models.
Recent coverage in Slate describes a series of discussions which took place at Talk:Artwork title concerning the article (Artwork title), whose initial draft consisted of prompted output from ChatGPT. Various demonstrations have been done of the use of these models to assist in writing, editing and formatting (User:JPxG/LLM demonstration and later User:Fuzheado/ChatGPT). Currently, a proposed set of guidelines for the use of these models is under discussion (and, frankly, could use some more eyes on it).
The August 2022 issue of The Signpost explored some of these issues as they concern this publication; see the From the editors page titled "Rise of the machines, or something" for an introduction. – J, B
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