New subject: Supporting community actions relating to the EU Copyright Direction

16 Mar 2019

Hello all,

As you are aware, the German community has voted in favor of a blackout of
German Wikipedia. The blackout is set to take place on March 21st. We have
been working closely with the German community to develop a strategy to
best support the implementation of this decision. We are currently
fine-tuning the text and design for the blackout to ensure the messaging is
clear and accurate.

A number of other communities are in active discussions some of which
appear to be expressing consensus in favor of a banner, a blackout, or a
combination of the two. We want to ensure materials including, banners and
blackouts are easily accessible and adaptable for use on all languages in
the com

Those materials we are preparing will be ready in the next few days, but
we’d like to take this opportunity to contextualize them by outlining our
approach. Our materials aim to do the following:

- *Avoid invoking party politics. - *We want the campaign to be clearly and
unequivocally about the Directive text, not about particular parties or
candidates. We will also avoid linking to any campaigns that encourage the
support or opposition of specific candidates

- *Focus on the issues.* - We will hone in on the particular articles in
the Directive that are causing problems with the text, specifically
Articles 11 and 13.

- *Contain our own neutral material. *We believe it's imperative to have
airtight arguments and intentional framing. While other sites have great
initiatives underway, we cannot ensure that external content will remain
consistent with our message.

- *Have a uniform call to action.* Where we link to content, we will link
to fixcopyright.wikimedia.org, which will when updated direct users to
contact their MEPs through the European Parliament's website, We believe
concerted action will have more effect than disperse, uncoordinated action
between communities.

- *Communicate in a concise, direct and factual style*, so as to avoid
confusing our message.

Please distribute this message to your communities as you see fit. We would
like the communities voting in favor of an action to know that we are
working on the tools and messaging to support their decision.

Feel free to contact myself if you have any questions about the
implementation of on wiki community actions.

Many thanks!

Seddon

[1]
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meinungsbilder/Protest_gegen_EU-Urh…