Please see discussion at en:Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)#Adding notice about image copyright. Can the suggested change be done here? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:14, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
Topic on Extension talk:WikimediaMessages
"Here" is a wiki page, talking about a piece of our technical infrastructure. :-) If you want to change the wording of the WMF Legal-mandated texts, you should raise it with them. Certainly, the technical implementation would be inside the extension, but the implementation work is trivial compared to the Legal sign-off.
"Here", in the context of my OP, is the WikimediaMessages extension. I was in the discussion to which I linked that the change should be "probably be done there".
At which venue do you suggest I request "Legal sign off"? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:26, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
"Here", in the context of my OP, is the WikimediaMessages extension. I was in the discussion to which I linked that the change should be "probably be done there".
Indeed. Who gave you such poor advice?
At which venue do you suggest I request "Legal sign off"?
I imagine m:Wikimedia Foundation Legal department#Wikimedia Foundation Email Contacts in the usual way? These kind of once-in-a-decade proposals don't have a great mechanism for raising, really. You're effectively proposing a change to the (implementation of) the Terms of Use, which is a major thing, and likely won't happen swiftly or be initiated at all without some consideration.
Thank you for the email link. "legal@" is said to be "For third-party legal issues and threats". Nonetheless I will try that and let folk here know what response I get.
As can be read in the discussion to which I linked, the advice was given by @Anomie
What I said was that I thought the change should probably be done in this extension rather than only locally on enwiki. I didn't mean for you to post to this talk page, although I can understand why you interpreted it that way rather than say opening a task in Phabricator.
I think we could also just ping @Slaporte (WMF). If there are no legal roadblocks, then an RfC at Meta could establish consensus to implement here.
Personally, I would support the change. People assuming that "freely licensed" means "I can borrow it for any purpose without worrying about attribution or anything else" is a big problem, and while this won't solve it, it's a small step in the right direction. (A different step I'd like to see would be a process for volunteers to request the WMF send a strongly worded legal notice to entities that use Commons images without attribution.)
An RfC about what the community wants is of course informative, if you think such a change would be controversial and need community sign-off as well as Legal sign-off, but that's insufficient for this kind of change.
Please do not just ping lawyers expecting an on-wiki answer, especially when I've already pointed to the contact page with details of how to get support
Using Wikimedia's communications system (talk pages) to discuss topics related to Wikimedia, rather than the non-Wikimedia system of email, is the norm. I have no objection to using email, but I object to your objection to using pings.