Administrative update to the Wikimedia Foundation Terms of Use

This blog is to share that the Wikimedia Foundation has made an administrative update to our Terms of Use (ToU) and what that means. You can see the changes here! 

To start, an administrative update is a type of ToU update that doesn’t go through the normal community consultation process, and so we only do it for minor changes (hence calling it administrative). Our standard for this is that if the update actually changes what’s allowed on the Wikimedia projects or changes how the Foundation enforces its terms, it’s not administrative and requires a community consultation. 

The administrative update we’ve done is an update to adjust language for clarity, to be up to date with suggestions from our first Digital Services Act (DSA) audit and to make sure the language of the legal sections aligns with international case law. To do that we’ve made a few changes.

Section 4:

• We took out one use of “United States of America” as it was redundant with the definition of applicable law.
• We swapped the order of two paragraphs near the end. This is a change for readability to make it clear that the “marketing company mediations” part goes with the undisclosed paid editing text.

Section 8: 

• We renamed this section and added a new introduction to make it more international instead of just about the DMCA. This does not change how the Foundation handles complaints of copyright violation, it just offers clarity and direction to read section 10 to reduce confusion of international readers (a point raised in our audit).

Section 10:

• We added a line explaining that our contact in this section works as our grievance redressal mechanism to clarify this for jurisdictions which use this terminology.
• We added a link to the EU compliance page we had made separately on Foundation wiki for ease of access.

Section 14:

• We added some technical language acknowledging, for the benefit of readers worldwide, that there are some countries in which “choice of forum” and “governing law” clauses like this one, may not apply.

And that’s all the changes. While these changes are minor, we haven’t made updates to the Terms of Use very often historically, so we want to share this and make sure people are aware. If you have questions about the changes, feel free to reach out to the legal team at legal@wikimedia.org.