Talk:Terms of use

Thank you

Thank you for posting this page Michael. I can see a lot of work has gone into preparing the terms of use. These do set out quite clearly a set of behaviours which reasonable people would find acceptable. In some ways they are an elaboration of the fundamentals of effective collaboration, which is very useful as we could all probably use a reminder from time to time. I also think it's important that you noted the distinction between the Wikimedia UK wiki and Wikimedia Foundation projects. Thanks for all of your work on this. Stevie Benton (WMUK) (talk) 09:46, 29 April 2014 (BST)

you agree to abide by

I'm sure a similar question could be asked of most terms of use, but what does it mean by "you agree to abide by"? Does it mean "If you don't abide we'll try to stop you using"? Does it mean "If you don't abide, we'll sue you for breach of contract?". Yaris678 (talk) 19:56, 30 April 2014 (BST)

It's a common legal expression, and simply means that (if it came down to it) a court could hold that, by the act of editing and continuing to edit, you have agreed to comply with the terms. There's no implication about what action WMUK might take should that the agreement be breached, and that would depend on the circumstances. Action could very from nothing at all, to a block, or in principle all the way up to a court case. Though in practice it's highly unlikely that WMUK would want to take anyone to court unless for something really serious like fraudulent use of our servers to empty our bank account. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 22:58, 30 April 2014 (BST)