User:JediRogue/Ethics

Proposal for Ethics Paper for CSE302

For about a year, I have been a contributor at GuildWiki (http://www.guildwiki.org) which is an unofficial wiki community for the MMO Guild Wars. Recently, it joined the Wikia community (a community of many other wikis which it manages). This acquisition was accompanied by a large payout to one of the primary guild wiki founders, known as Gravewit to the community. However the entire business has raised quite a few issues and angered a large portion of the community for a variety of reasons.

The site’s value has greatly increased since Gravewit first set it up and, although he had no part in the increase of value—Gravewit is not an active contributor or administrator—he is profiting (apparently rather handsomely) from its sale.

The ad revenue for the site is only allowed insofar as it goes toward paying hosting costs. All other monies are profit and disallowed by the licensing of the wiki. Although Gravewit has the right to sell the domain name and provide them a dump of the database, neither of these things would be worth anything close to the amount of money Gravewit is supposed to be getting without the contributions of the community which he does not own.

According to the licensing used by he wiki (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license) the contributions cannot be profited off of and the contributors hold the copyrights to them. While the site can be maintain by ad revenue, that revenue cannot exceed the expenditure. Any money that is made through sale or excess ad revenue would be profit and would apparently violate the license and cheat any person who donated money to the wiki before it started to draw ad revenue as their donations would now be considered investments.

So the entire issue is quite a dilemma. Users are upset because they feel that Gravewit is being paid by Wikia for a site which would be valueless without the hours of work made by countless contributors. They are angered that the entire deal was conducted without input from the community, that Gravewit has been vague about whether GuildWiki was operating at a loss or gain on ad revenue in the past, and about whether the entire sale was legal at all. Especially considering that ArenaNet, the creators of Guild Wars was also interested in acquiring GuildWiki but couldn’t because of legal issues with licensing. The community is distrustful because one group couldn’t acquire GuildWiki and another could.

The whole thing has led to pages and pages of discussions already on GuildWiki with Wikia and Gravewit apparently struggling to placate a hostile and aggrieved community. I, myself, have been watching rather passively as I know little about licensing issues. Still, outside of any legal issues, it leaves a sour taste in my mouth to know that someone is profiting substantially on the hours of volunteer work by me and hundreds of other contributors.