On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 2:46 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:

The French Wikipedia is written in the French language, but it isn't French. It is hosted by an American charity on servers in America (and a few in the Netherlands, I think). French law doesn't apply.

This is quite wrong, and a dangerous fallacy to promote, Thomas. To give an example, a few months back, German Wikipedian Achim Raschka got a phone call from the German police over his addition of a pornographic video to the German article on pornography. The video he added violated German pornography law, which requires an effective age filter for explicit pornographic material. Achim wrote about his experience in the "Kurier" (the German Signpost):

http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Kurier&oldid=1035201... (NSFW)

He took the video out again, and the Verein helped him with a lawyer. In the end the prosecutor's office let him off, it seems because the single edit was too minor an offence for them to prosecute. But there is no question that if you live in a country, and do things in Wikipedia that are illegal in your country, you are individually liable under the laws of your country.

Remember that the legal liability is always first and foremost the contributor's, and not the Foundation's. In the German case, the police and prosecutor's office came for Achim as an individual. They did not come for the WMF or Wikimedia Germany.

Whether or not this is a problem for French Wikimedians working in French Wikipedia depends purely and solely on French law.

On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 11:32 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:

On 19 August 2012 10:54, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:

...

This is quite wrong, and a dangerous fallacy to promote, Thomas. To give

an

...

example, a few months back, German Wikipedian Achim Raschka got a phone call from the German police over his addition of a pornographic video to the German article on pornography. The video he added violated German pornography law, which requires an effective age filter for explicit pornographic material. Achim wrote about his experience in the "Kurier" (the German Signpost):

Achim lives in Germany, so is very much subject to German law. He's equally subject to German law if he edits the English Wikipedia, though. There is no connection between a particular language Wikipedia and the law of a country that speaks that language.

In actual practice, I don't believe this is entirely correct either. If Achim had added the video to the Navajo Wikipedia, for example, rather than the German Wikipedia, then I think the German prosecutor's office would have been less likely to pursue the case in the interest of the German people.

The OP said that the French Wikipedia was illegal, not that contributing to Wikipedia while in France could be illegal. They are very different things.

Well, it's just that you made it sound like there could not possibly be any legal problem, and that French law had no bearing on the matter at all.

It isn't just a French issue, the whole of the European Union has Data Protection Law based on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive

And the categories of "Sensitive" data are similar across the EU. Ethnicity, religion, health and Political opinion being perhaps the most relevant to us. I think that not all countries defined criminal record as Sensitive, and the UK apparently opted out of the philosophical opinions bit, but the legislation across Europe has commonalities, though it would be stretching a point to describe it as harmonised.

But the good thing is that it isn't as simple as a ban on processing such data, there are various exemptions, and I'm pretty sure they include if the individual has made that information publicly known. So French citizens are allowed to know what political party their President is a member of, and they can't be prosecuted simply for categorising the Pope as a Roman Catholic. However just because somebody's parents, siblings and children have self identified as Jewish doesn't mean that they also have disclosed that information about themselves.

Now that we have chapters in some of these countries it might be worth starting a dialogue with the various Information Commissioners (apologies if this is already happening). I would hope that our existing policies largely cover us here, provided that is that we editors living in the EU treat what they consider to be "sensitive" data about living people as contentious data. But there could be some grey areas, for example if no EU source is covering something then an EU editor sourcing a fact from a reliable source in the US might be in difficulty. Especially if that "fact" was something that EU sources weren't covering because they had no legal basis to do so.

I would hope that we could get some guidelines agreed between European chapter and their national Information Commissioners, and that those guidelines could then be communicated to editors; Both to reassure people as to where the boundaries are and so that we in Europe know to leave certain things to our colleagues outside the EU.

WSC

On 19 August 2012 13:23, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:

As French Wikimedians are unlikely to see this thread here on wikien-l (and wikifr-l seems moribund), I've dropped a post about this to wikimedia-l.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-August/121744.html _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l