Wikipedia:Don't encourage people to tell lies

Having more boxes to check will not solve your problem.

When we see a pattern of unwanted behavior, such as editors misusing LLMs or being undisclosed paid editors, it is tempting to believe that the problem can be solved by asking for disclosure. "Just tick the box" – what could be easier? The problem is that people will not tick the checkbox if they believe that ticking the box will prevent them from accomplishing their goal either directly (software prevents an edit unless you tick the box) or indirectly (patrollers will scrutinize this edit more severely).

Wikipedia's processes and interface should be constructed in a way that we don't encourage people to tell lies to accomplish their goals. If editors believe that their goal is reasonable, and accomplishing their goal requires them to tick box a box saying that they will give their first-born child to Rumpelstiltskin, then they will tick that box all day long. If they believe their goal might be frowned upon or that ticking the box, then they won't check that box even when they know they should.

Cross-wiki image uploads

Wikipedia has strong proof of this: When we added in-editor tools to upload images directly from Wikipedia to Commons in 2016, Commons was flooded with copyright violations.

The uploaders were required to tick a box saying "This is my own work. I attest that I own the copyright on this file", but they ticked this box even when they knew that they didn't own the copyright.

Why did these editors tell lies? Because if they didn't tell a lie, then they couldn't use this tool to upload the image.

These editors thought their goal was reasonable. The image was frequently a corporate logo, music album, or other common top-of-article image. In some cases, the image was public domain and eligible for uploading through other tools. They saw the tick box as a procedural software barrier to accomplishing their goal, rather than an important factual statement with legal consequences.

Commons eventually had to address this by blocking cross-wiki uploads of most images, especially lower-resolution images.

Click wrap

Clickwrap and browsewrap agreements are contracts used on websites and software packages that obligate the user to agree to the terms set by the provider before they can use the service.

Studies have shown that most people don't read the agreement at all, and that those who look at any part of the agreement usually don't read the whole thing. Under real-world conditions, a third of people self-report as never reading any of the terms of service or privacy policies they're agreeing to, and only 6% of people even claim to always read the terms. Of people who read at least part of the terms and disliked them, about 70% agreed to them anyway, mainly because the alternative was not being able to use the website or service.

In one academic study, 83% of middle-aged adults clicked the button and agreed to a terms of service contract that obligated them to donate a kidney. They presumably wouldn't have agreed to this if they had believed that they were making a meaningful, legally enforceable free choice.

Doing your job

One of the inconvenient truths about workplace security is that people care more about getting their jobs done than about the IT department's pronouncements about security practices. This means that if the organization has a policy saying that, to protect confidential information, no one can use certain external services without prior authorization, but the employee believes that using these services is necessary to get their work done, they will use those services whenever they believe it necessary: Files that are too big to be sent (or received) as e-mail attachments will be uploaded "just this once" to unvetted and unauthorized file-sharing websites. Sensitive personnel and legal documents will be run through machine translation. Confidential projects or private medical information will be discussed in a chatbot. People will break rules and tell lies to get the job done.

Even with volunteers, if clicking a button or ticking a checkbox will save them time or allow them to accomplish their goal, they will do it. This may be especially true for volunteers, as employees can remind themselves that at least they're being paid to waste their time on a slower or worse process, but volunteers have no such consolation.

See also

• Wikipedia:Nobody reads the directions