As I mentioned on the forums 3 months ago, we hired a lawyer to rewrite our Terms of Use and Privacy policies. Our old Terms of Use was over 7 years old and is now quite out of date. We were well overdue for a tune up. http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Terms-of-Use
http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Privacy-Policy
A bit about how these documents were produced: We hired a large law firm with a big practice in Silicon Valley that does tons of these sorts of documents. They printed out their standard documents that get used on most websites that hire them. Then Lewis Collard and I edited them to make them more applicable to wikiHow’s unique circumstances. Considering that the lawyer bills out at $775 per hour (yes really), I tried to limit our changes and discussion with them! Because these were based on standard documents there are some provisions that don’t really apply to us. For example the sections on the privacy implications of the “find your friend” features don’t apply to us since we don’t have that feature and currently have no plans to build it. So if you are reading these documents and find areas that don’t apply to us, now you will know how they got there. We just didn’t change everything from their standard documents out of desire to keep our legal fees down. In terms, of policy changes to wikiHow, we were careful to NOT change any policies that the community has built. So in terms of how you use wikiHow it should be exactly the same today as it was yesterday. For example, we will still request users we know to be under 13 to complete the http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:COPPA-Parental-Permission-Form
before contributing to wikiHow. There are 2 changes that I wanted to highlight though: 1. We upgraded our CC license from v 2.5 to v 3.0. In other words, we are going from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
I don’t think there is a huge diference between these two licenses, but figured it was smart to use the latest version of the CC license. This may mean we want to update our templates and similar. 2. More important: We created a new section called “Trusted Users”. See: http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Terms-of-Use#Trusted_Users
If you are a admin or a NABer you are a “Trusted User”. As a Trusted User you may gain access to private or confidential information that most websites only give to their staff. For example: *Check users can see IP addresses of users. *Admins on the blocked@wikiHow.com
email list can see the private email address of anyone that writes that address. *Admins on the email list can see the private email addresses of other admins. *We recently sent a “secret” email out to several trusted users telling them about things we didn’t want our competitors to know about. When you receive information like the above you will need to keep this information private and confidential (in other words follow the terms of our Privacy Policy). Now this has really always been the case and we have never had a problem with any admins ever releasing private info publicly, but the lawyers pointed out that we needed to document the reality that our Trusted Users do possess private data. Other than these 2 changes, our new Terms of Use and Privacy Policy should not change the way we do anything on the site. Given the cost of even emailing a lawyer to make further changes to the documents, I’m hoping that these new documents will last us for several years! Finally thanks to Lewis Collard who helped me trim these original documents down to something usable on wikiHow.
system
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775/hour…how much did you pay Lewis to fix it? Just kidding, the old CC V2.5 licenses won’t need to be changed, just future ones?
Thanks for keeping us abreast of the changes, @JackHerrick
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Yeah we can leave old images as is. But if we have new default templates for images we should change them to 3.0
And our lawyers have also written a “cookie policy” for us. Much like the TOS, this new policy is creating no changes in the way wikiHow works. It just documents how we handle cookies in the interest of transparency. http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Cookie-Policy
