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.

PAPER
For about a year, I have been a contributor at GuildWiki (http://www.gw.gamewikis.org) (1) which is an unofficial wiki community for the MMO Guild Wars. A wiki is, according to Wikipedia, “a kind of computer software that allows users to create, edit, and link web pages easily. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites.”(10) GuildWiki stores everything from quest walkthroughs to helpful usage tips for skills to commentary on updates to screenshots of armor, weapons and bestiary. It is run like any wiki community: that is, it is contributed to by volunteers, administrated by volunteers and maintained by volunteers.

On September 10, 2007, it was announced that GuildWiki would be joining the Wikia community (a community of many other wikis which it manages) (2). This acquisition was accompanied by a large payout to one of the primary GuildWiki founders, known as User:Gravewit to the community. (Please note that I will be referring to all users by their user names as that is what they are known as 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. (4)

GuildWiki was formed by a merger of two separate wiki communities run by User:Tanaric and User:Gravewit. A key thing to notice at this point is that GuildWiki was not solely founded by User:Gravewit. GuildWiki was used as a starting point for a wiki farm known as (Gamewikis.org). This URL, unlike www.guildwiki.org, was owned by User:Gravewit. It was this URL which was sold to Wikia. (6)

User:Gravewit never owned the URL: www.guildwiki.org. This URL was owned by User:MartinLightbringer(CS) who had it forwarding to gw.gamewikis.org. This URL was not purchased and is still owned by him. (9, 6)

User:Gravewit himself has made few contributions to GuildWiki. He has been referred to as an “absentee owner” (4) by many users. He paid for the servers and arranged for advertising. The maintenance of the servers and much of the technical work was done by User:Fyren and before him User:Nunix, who contributed their servers like all the other users, as a volunteer.(6) The administration of the wiki was done by other admins. They designed templates and images, watched out of vandals and kept things running smoothly. Finally, the volunteers of the community added all the content. The website would be worthless if not for the entirely volunteer efforts of these people. Therefore User:Gravewit profited from something whose entire value is rooted in volunteer work. Although GuildWiki is a volunteer community it still needs to pay for hosting costs. It is a huge website and its hundreds upon hundreds of visitors consume a huge amount of bandwidth. This means it has to be paid for.

Originally, GuildWiki’s hosting fees were paid via donations. Many users, among them User:Karlos, donated money back then. However donations couldn’t cover it. GuildWiki began having advertisements. Advertisements can generate money every time a page is loaded and even more when the ad is clicked on. With hundreds of views there are hundreds of page loads. Even at a minute profit per page load, it still generates quite a bit of money.

It seems fair to say that User:Gravewit should be able to make enough money through advertising to pay for hosting costs. But is fair to make more money than that? User:Gravewit stopped posting any information about the financial state of GuildWiki shortly after advertising started. Finally, User:Gravewit stated that he is operating GuildWiki (5, 6) at a loss but User:Tanaric revealed that User:Gravewit had previous revealed to him that they were greatly exceeding operating costs. (6) So the question arises, was User:Gravewit making money on GuildWiki before the Wikia purchase? How much money? Is selling GuildWiki to Wikia just the tip of the iceberg?

Any money made apparently transforms GuildWiki into a commercial entity. This would be in violation of the licensing of GuildWiki.

Contributions to GuildWiki are all contributions to GuildWiki are considered to be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license (CC 2.0 by-nc-sa). This license basically says: Contributions are owned by the original poster; contributions can be distributed to non-commercial entities as long as the original poster is credited; the license cannot be changed if it is distributed. To quote the most relevant section of the license: (7, 8)

“You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 [to reproduce, copy, create derivative works of, and distribute the work] in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be … toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.” - Section 4 (c) Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 (8)

This licensing is an extremely important issue because it dictates how contributions can be used. It is because of this license that ArenaNet (company that produces Guild Wars) began a separate wiki rather than acquiring GuildWiki. ArenaNet’s official wiki, Guild Wars Wiki, operates under the GNU Free Document License. (5)

ArenaNet stated that it would violate the CC 2.0 by-nc-sa license by purchasing GuildWiki from User:Gravewit because User:Gravewit doesn’t own the contributions. Additionally, since ArenaNet intended to us their wiki as an official guide for their game, it couldn’t be considered non-commercial and would not be covered by the license.(5) Tanaric’s open letter to User:Gravewit pointed out the incongruity of selling to Wikia, “a similar commercial entity” when GuildWiki could not be sold to ArenaNet. (6)

Because of this license, you can know that the content itself cannot be sold. So what was sold? Why did Wikia give User:Gravewit so much money to have GuildWiki join them?

What was sold was the domain name (http://www.gamewikis.org), the rest of the gamewikis wiki farm (not under the same license). Wikia is now responsible for the advertising, etc. Their contract states that User:Gravewit can no longer host anything having to do with http://www.gamewikis.org and that User:Gravewit is to provide Wikia with a dump of the database.(3)

What does this mean to the actual use and functionality of GuildWiki? Nothing. GuildWiki looks and works exactly the same as before. Contributions are still owned by the original contributors and protected by the CC 2.0 by-nc-sa license. The history of a page (which tracks users’ contributions and provide for the attribution part of the license) is still intact.

The legality of the issue is vague. Any profits User:Gravewit made from either advertisements or the sale could be considered commercial use and therefore violate the license. However, they could also be considered profits from the ownership of the domain, payment for handling hosting, etc. Still, from an ethical standpoint, it must be considered that all these things which User:Gravewit is legally allowed to profit on have no value without the content which cannot be profited on. This is analogous to selling a tape of a bootlegged film. You can claim that all you are selling is the physical tape and the time and effort you took to make it, but its still wrong because you are selling someone else’s copyrighted work.

Users reflected that they would not have been opposed to the move over to Wikia if presented the plan beforehand. There are some benefits to being a part of Wikia: we don’t have to hunt down User:Gravewit with technical concerns because we can contact them. If something ever happened to User:Gravewit, we might have never known and GuildWiki would have been lost. But, we are angry over the amount of compensation User:Gravewit apparently got for it and how this whole matter was conducted behind our backs.

So who is really affected by this? Who are the stakeholders? Why, every user on GuildWiki has stakes in this issue. Indeed users of all wikis using the by-nc-sa license are affected because this may be setting a precedent. To say that the domain and servers can be sold for a price that reflects the value of the content and not violate this license can allow any wiki to be sold like this. And any person who can start a wiki on a ripe target can build on the volunteer work of others and make a profit later.

Even were one to argue that our time and efforts can have no monetary value, that we cannot be compensated for it, there are still those users who donated real money. These users donated to the hosting costs, to the very thing that was sold. Once this was sold, and its monetary value was defined, these donations became investments. These users are most definitely entitled to a full return of their investment at the very least.

User:Gravewit apparently did agree to refund all these users’ donations. But only after many angry words were posted on discussion pages including User:Karlos’s and User:Tanaric’s threats of legal action. (11)

Many users view their contributions as donations. We donated our time and energy into contributing to a non-profit entity. When one person is making a profit off of that, we are betrayed and cheated. Users are upset because we feel that User:Gravewit is being paid by Wikia for a site which would be valueless without the hours of work made by countless contributors. We are angered that the entire deal was conducted without input from the community, that User: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.

The whole thing has led to pages and pages of discussions already on GuildWiki with Wikia and User:Gravewit apparently struggling to placate a hostile and aggrieved community. (4) User:Gravewit attempted to placate the community in other ways. He claimed that he was going to renegotiate the contract so that the community would get a percentage of the profit. This never occurred. The whole thing fizzled out.

Verily, the whole matter fizzled out. Many of the most vociferous contributors to the discussions of the issue moved over to the official wiki. Today GuildWiki operates on a somewhat subdued level. Although the advent of the official wiki, and the lack of new content being added to the game are large contributors to this, the Wikia move is also a good part of it.

This may have set a poor precedent for allowing the sale of wikis under the by-nc-sa license but there are good things that come out of it: The benefits of being run by Wikia are still there and Wikia has reevaluated their acquisition procedures so hopefully it won’t occur again.(4) Personally, I am a strong believer in capitalism. That there is nothing wrong with making a profit. But to make a profit off the hard work of others, people who were working hard for a non-profit community, who donated time and money… It can’t be right. This is a down on the line where legality and ethics clash. In the words of one user:

“User:Gravewit owns the servers and the domain name, he can sell those. The problem is he is selling the data, our contribution even if you are saying you are only buying the domain name. I know that legally that will protect him but it's morally wrong.”
 * -User:Aratak (4)

Legally, the amount of compensation User:Gravewit receives doesn’t matter. Whether he gets ten dollars or ten thousand dollars, he still is making a profit. Yet no one finds him getting ten dollars wrong. It’s the sum of the money: $62,000.00 and $3,000.00 in Wikia stock. (3)

No one feels that User:Gravewit should receive no compensation for his work in hosting and advertising, his ownership of http://www.gamewikis.org. However, this sum seems far in excess of the value of his sale. There is a feeling that it is in fact the content which is being sold. As one user put it:

“The data contributed under the by-nc-sa license is what drove traffic to this site, and that traffic is what is being seen as the value for the sale.”
 * -User:Barek (4)

Essentially, the community feels as though it has been cheated. User:Gravewit conducted the entire deal behind closed doors and without consulting the community. He sold a domain name whose value was based in the volunteer contributions of the users. The financial history of GuildWiki has been shown to be shady at best.

User:Gravewit participated minimally in what made the site so valuable: the content. He put in minimal effort to maintaining or running GuildWiki. Yet only he has profited from this sale. He has profited from the hard work of others.

The contract was signed on October 23, 2007, by Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia and Phil Nelson, User:Gravewit. (3) Works Cited
 * 1) GuildWiki : http://gw.gamewikis.org
 * 2) Wikia : http://www.wikia.com
 * 3) The contract : Wikia_Move
 * 4) The GuildWiki page dealing with the sale and accompanying discussions : Wikia_Move
 * 5) ArenaNet FAQ on their wiki : http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_Wiki:About
 * 6) Tanaric’s open letter to User:User:Gravewit : User_talk:Gravewit
 * 7) GuildWiki copyright disclaimer : Copyrights
 * 8) Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license : http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/
 * 9) Discussion on domain http://www.guildwiki.org : User_talk:Tanaric/Archives4
 * 10) Wikipedia on wikis : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
 * 11) Discussion on donations : User_talk:Gravewit