Forwarding from internal.
The right to vanish... or a part of it... proposed as law.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Richard Symonds <richard.symonds(a)wikimedia.org.uk>
Date: Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 11:46 AM
Subject: [Internal-l] Right to be Forgotten
To: internal-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16677370
A new law promising internet users the "right to be forgotten" will be
proposed by the European Commission on Wednesday.
It says people will be able to ask for data about them to be deleted
and firms will have to comply unless there are "legitimate" grounds to
retain it.
The move is part of a wide-ranging overhaul of the commission's 1995
Data Protection Directive.
Richard Symonds
Office& Development Manager
Wikimedia UK
----------------------------------------
As Bence noted:
> You can find the December 2011 draft at http://epic.org/privacy/intl/EU-Privacy-Regulation-29-11-2011.pdf
> (Article 15 is the relevant part).
> The stated exceptions do not include expense or technical difficulty, but include
> " except to the extent that the retention of the personal data is necessary:
> (a) for exercising the right of freedom of expression in accordance with Article 79;
> or
> (b) for historical, statistical and scientific research purposes in accordance with
> Article 83; or
> (c) for compliance with a legal obligation to retain the data by Union or Member
> State law to which the controller is subject; this law shall meet an objective of
> public interest, respect the essence of the right to the protection of personal
> data and be proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued; or
> (d) in the cases referred to in paragraph 4."
>
> I'll leave it to the lawyers to decide how this affects Wikimedia (which is hosted
> outside the EEA) and whether any of the exceptions can be applied to it.
There's an interesting article out in the current issue of the Chronicle:
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Undue-Weight-of-Truth-on/130704/
It's behind a paywall, but in the spirit of fair use and in keeping with
the author's intent (the article is on Wikipedia, and I believe the
author would want to have us discuss it) I reproduce it here:
The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia
By Timothy Messer-Kruse
For the past 10 years I've immersed myself in the details of one of the
most famous events in American labor history, the Haymarket riot and
trial of 1886. Along the way I've written two books and a couple of
articles about the episode. In some circles that affords me a
presumption of expertise on the subject. Not, however, on Wikipedia.
The bomb thrown during an anarchist rally in Chicago sparked America's
first Red Scare, a high-profile show trial, and a worldwide clemency
movement for the seven condemned men. Today the martyrs' graves are a
national historic site, the location of the bombing is marked by a
public sculpture, and the event is recounted in most American history
textbooks. Its Wikipedia entry is detailed and elaborate.
A couple of years ago, on a slow day at the office, I decided to
experiment with editing one particularly misleading assertion chiseled
into the Wikipedia article. The description of the trial stated, "The
prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, did not offer evidence connecting
any of the defendants with the bombing. ... "
Coincidentally, that is the claim that initially hooked me on the topic.
In 2001 I was teaching a labor-history course, and our textbook
contained nearly the same wording that appeared on Wikipedia. One of my
students raised her hand: "If the trial went on for six weeks and no
evidence was presented, what did they talk about all those days?" I've
been working to answer her question ever since.
I have not resolved all the mysteries that surround the bombing, but I
have dug deeply enough to be sure that the claim that the trial was
bereft of evidence is flatly wrong. One hundred and eighteen witnesses
were called to testify, many of them unindicted co-conspirators who
detailed secret meetings where plans to attack police stations were
mapped out, coded messages were placed in radical newspapers, and bombs
were assembled in one of the defendants' rooms.
In what was one of the first uses of forensic chemistry in an American
courtroom, the city's foremost chemists showed that the metallurgical
profile of a bomb found in one of the anarchists' homes was unlike any
commercial metal but was similar in composition to a piece of shrapnel
cut from the body of a slain police officer. So overwhelming was the
evidence against one of the defendants that his lawyers even admitted
that their client spent the afternoon before the Haymarket rally
building bombs, arguing that he was acting in self-defense.
So I removed the line about there being "no evidence" and provided a
full explanation in Wikipedia's behind-the-scenes editing log. Within
minutes my changes were reversed. The explanation: "You must provide
reliable sources for your assertions to make changes along these lines
to the article."
That was curious, as I had cited the documents that proved my point,
including verbatim testimony from the trial published online by the
Library of Congress. I also noted one of my own peer-reviewed articles.
One of the people who had assumed the role of keeper of this bit of
history for Wikipedia quoted the Web site's "undue weight" policy, which
states that "articles should not give minority views as much or as
detailed a description as more popular views." He then scolded me. "You
should not delete information supported by the majority of sources to
replace it with a minority view."
The "undue weight" policy posed a problem. Scholars have been publishing
the same ideas about the Haymarket case for more than a century. The
last published bibliography of titles on the subject has 1,530 entries.
"Explain to me, then, how a 'minority' source with facts on its side
would ever appear against a wrong 'majority' one?" I asked the
Wiki-gatekeeper. He responded, "You're more than welcome to discuss
reliable sources here, that's what the talk page is for. However, you
might want to have a quick look at Wikipedia's civility policy."
I tried to edit the page again. Within 10 seconds I was informed that my
citations to the primary documents were insufficient, as Wikipedia
requires its contributors to rely on secondary sources, or, as my critic
informed me, "published books." Another editor cheerfully tutored me in
what this means: "Wikipedia is not 'truth,' Wikipedia is 'verifiability'
of reliable sources. Hence, if most secondary sources which are taken as
reliable happen to repeat a flawed account or description of something,
Wikipedia will echo that."
Tempted to win simply through sheer tenacity, I edited the page again.
My triumph was even more fleeting than before. Within seconds the page
was changed back. The reason: "reverting possible vandalism." Fearing
that I would forever have to wear the scarlet letter of Wikipedia
vandal, I relented but noted with some consolation that in the wake of
my protest, the editors made a slight gesture of reconciliation—they
added the word "credible" so that it now read, "The prosecution, led by
Julius Grinnell, did not offer credible evidence connecting any of the
defendants with the bombing. ... " Though that was still inaccurate, I
decided not to attempt to correct the entry again until I could clear
the hurdles my anonymous interlocutors had set before me.
So I waited two years, until my book on the trial was published. "Now,
at last, I have a proper Wikipedia leg to stand on," I thought as I
opened the page and found at least a dozen statements that were factual
errors, including some that contradicted their own cited sources. I
found myself hesitant to write, eerily aware that the self-deputized
protectors of the page were reading over my shoulder, itching to revert
my edits and tutor me in Wiki-decorum. I made a small edit, testing the
waters.
My improvement lasted five minutes before a Wiki-cop scolded me, "I hope
you will familiarize yourself with some of Wikipedia's policies, such as
verifiability and undue weight. If all historians save one say that the
sky was green in 1888, our policies require that we write 'Most
historians write that the sky was green, but one says the sky was blue.'
... As individual editors, we're not in the business of weighing claims,
just reporting what reliable sources write."
I guess this gives me a glimmer of hope that someday, perhaps before
another century goes by, enough of my fellow scholars will adopt my
views that I can change that Wikipedia entry. Until then I will have to
continue to shout that the sky was blue.
Timothy Messer-Kruse is a professor in the School of Cultural and
Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University. He is author of The
Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded
Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and The Haymarket Conspiracy:
Transatlantic Anarchist Networks, to be published later this year by the
University of Illinois Press.
---
Two things that the article relates to, currently happening/ in proposal:
A discussion on oral citations (recently revived):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Oral_Ci…
A proposal to examine citations, including the use of 'primary sources':
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Fellowships/Project_Ideas/InCite
---
Cheers,
Achal
Today, we are excited to announce the start of our building of a new
department called the “Legal and Community Advocacy Department.” This new
alignment recognizes that we can combine the best of legal and community
advocacy to foster new ways to advance the interests of the community
consistent with the goals and strategies of the Foundation. For details,
please go to http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal/LCA_Announcement.
As part of this reorganization, I’m pleased to announce that Philippe
Beaudette has been promoted to Director of Community Advocacy. We will
start engaging our community shortly and enter into a consultation period
with it to brainstorm how to build the department. We anticipate that it
will take us about 6-12 months to get the right team and drive the new
department at full speed.
The community is invited to join us on Friday for office hours to discuss
the new Legal and Community Advocacy Department. Details for the IRC chat
can be found at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours.
Geoff Brigham
General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
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Since Wikipedia started in 2001, great effort has been put into
ensuring that it is readable, clear and understandable by visitors.
Good Wikipedia writing is clear, concise, comprehensive and
consistent. Excellent Wikipedia writing is, according to English
Wikipedia's featured article criteria, "engaging, even brilliant, and
of a professional standard". Wikipedia editors work hard to remove
buzzwords, unnecessary jargon, peacock terms, marketing-speak, weasel
words and other similar clutter from their work.
And it's not just Wikipedia: all of the Wikimedia projects aspire to
write clearly, neutrally and factually. English Wikinews says simply:
"Write to be easily understood, to make reading easier."
Sadly, documents and communication from the Foundation, from chapters,
from board members and so on often fall far short of these sentiments.
There are certain places where it is to be expected that communication
won't necessarily be clear: I wouldn't expect a non-programmer to be
able to understand some of the discussions on Bugzilla or
mediawiki.org, but the Foundation's monthly report is something
editors should be able to understand.
>From January 2012, under Global development's list of department highlights...
"India program: Six outreach workshops in January in partnership with
the community as part of an effort to increase outreach and improve
conversion to editing"
An outreach workshop... to increase outreach. Is that a workshop to
train editors on how to do outreach? Or is it a workshop for newbies
teaching them how to edit? Enquiring minds want to know.
Later on in the same document: "We concluded an exercise on distilling
learnings from all Indic communities and started the process of
seeding ideas with communities."
I was bold and changed "learnings" to "lessons". What is a learning?
How does one distill a learning? And "seeding ideas with communities"?
The idea, presumably, is the soil, into which one puts each different
community. I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.
This one is a howler from a subpage of the movement roles discussion:
"At the same time, for Wikimedia to adopt the best of the Olympic
movement would probably raise the bar on accountabilities for chapters
and other organizations"
Accountabilities, plural? I can understand accountability, the state
of being accountable to another. But I have no idea what
accountabilities are. Can you collect them like Pokémon cards? And how
would one raise the bar on accountabilities? Would that mean some
accountabilities can't quite reach the bar? (Also, the idea that we
could learn anything about accountability, singular or plural, from
the Olympics strikes me as hilarious given the extensive history of
corruption at the IOC.)
If you search on Meta, it is possible to find lots and lots of other
documents from the Foundation filled with corporate lingo. Projects
are 'scoped', and there is a list of 'deliverables' -- not just any
deliverables but 'specific deliverables' -- along with 'next steps' to
deliver, err, those deliverables while 'going forward'.
I can't be the only one who reads these things and whose brain stalls
or goes into reverse. There have been numerous things where I've had
to ask Foundation contacts to explain things in clear and simple
language to me. I don't think I'm particularly stupid or uninformed.
Nor do I think that the people who write in the manner I've described
do it consciously. But we do need to fix it. If well-educated,
informed native English speakers struggle with learnings and
accountabilities and so on, what about those who don't natively speak
English? When people see sloppy, buzzword-driven language, they wonder
if this reflects sloppy, buzzword-driven thinking, or perhaps
obfuscation. Clear writing signals the opposite: clear thinking and
transparency.
I'm not suggesting we all need to write as if we're editing Simple
English Wikipedia. But just cut out the buzzwords and write plainly
and straightforwardly like the best writing on Wikipedia.
What can be done about this?
There seem to be two possible solutions to this problem: one involves
hiring a dominatrix with a linguistics degree to wander the San
Francisco office with handcuffs, a bullwhip, a number of live gerbils
and plentiful supplies of superglue, and given free reign to enforce
the rules in whatever way she deems fit. The other, which involves far
fewer embarrassing carpet stains, is to empower the community to fix
these problems. Have a nice little leaderboard on Meta, and encourage
community members to be bold, fix up bad writing, bad grammar and
buzzwords. Reward their efforts with barnstars and the occasional
thank you messages on talk pages.
Commit to clear writing by adopting a policy of "copyediting almost
always welcome" for chapter wikis, Foundation documents and as close
to everything as possible. There are volunteers in the movement who
happily spend hour after hour copyediting on Wikipedia and Wikinews
and Wikibooks and so on. Give them the opportunity to fix up the
language used by the Foundation and the chapters.
Remember: how can community members support and become more deeply
involved with the work of the chapters and the Foundation if they
can't understand what you are saying?
--
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>
Yes, you are right! I forgot to mention you guys, so sorry! I'll punish
myself :P
El 18-02-2012 22:31, "Mateus Nobre" <mateus.nobre(a)live.co.uk> escribió:
Wikimedia Brasil also have a project of indigenous language, the nheengatu
project.
http://br.wikimedia.org/wiki/Nheengattu
_____________________
MateusNobre
MetalBrasil on Wikimedia projects
(+55) 85 88393509
30440865
> Date: Sat, 18 Feb 2012 18:50:20 -0300
> From: osmar(a)wikimediachile.cl
> To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: [Foundation-l] EFE: Indigenous languages entering Wikipedia
>
> Hi everyone!
>
> Yesterday, news agency EFE published a note about the work done mainly by
> W...
> _______________________________________________
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JADP, but there's no keyboard-related reason for people to misspell my
last name as "Goodwin," which is something I've encountered my whole
life. My view is that it's normally best to tolerate the misspelling,
unless there's some particular reason I want to ensure that my surname
is spelled correctly. As someone who frequently must type in French,
German, or Spanish, I wish it were a little easier to get access to
accents and umlauts than it is on most keyboards I have to use, but I
also think there are bigger issues to worry about, most of the time.
The anglophone convention of typing, e.g., "Kurt Goedel" instead of
"Kurt Gödel", is common enough that English-language versions of
search engines will normally produce results for Gödel if you type in
"Goedel."
The general rule of etiquette is, I think, simply to try to get
spelling (and pronunciation, and other things) right, and to ask the
person in question if you're unsure.
For example, although I don't believe I ever addressed Jan-Bart as
"Jan", I do know that I was uncertain early on whether there is a
hyphen in "Jan-Bart" (obviously, I figured out the answer to that
question).
--Mike
I had wanted to keep out of this, but this is the third or fourth time
that Jan-Bart has been referred to as "Jan". It was an understandable
enough mistake to make the first time, but it's been pointed out
enough now that that is no longer an excuse. We do not all have to be
best of mates, but it is not unreasonable that we all should show some
basic courtesy towards each other, and taking the time to get each
other's names right would be a good start.
If you feel that Jan-Bart is being condescending towards you, the best
solution to that problem is not more condescension thrown back in the
opposite direction.
Cheers,
Craig
> Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:07:23 -0200
> From: B?ria Lima <berialima(a)gmail.com>
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Movement roles letter, Feb 2012
> Message-ID:
> <CAA2XHjAg+ummRKsKHE82haTxKOcycXm_tSmKB6nMn36MKDJxmw(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Jan
>
> Provide me a link to work and I will gladly tell on wiki how much your idea
> sucks and how I come up with a better one without dismiss community opinion
> and being condescending like you.
>
> Here we can't solve anything.
> _____
> *B?ria Lima
Jan-Bart,
I am sorry. I didn’t know this is your name and present you publicly my
more sincere apologies for misstyping it.
I personally know the sensitivity about this kind of issues. My name in
Catalan sounds completely different with accent than without. “Gomà” is a
quite extended and ancient Catalan surname while “goma” in Catalan means
rubber. I had to get used with this many years ago because in Spanish they
don’t have accents for capital letters that’s how many official documents
are written and more recently because in many computer keywords there is no
way to write "à".
I assure you that this mistake has been because I didn’t know and that this
won’t happen never again.
>Béria Lima berialima at gmail.com
>Thu Feb 16 04:09:27 UTC 2012
>
>Gomà called him Jan at least 3 times today and no one complained.
Thomas Morton writes:
> Politics is a game, a game that politicians are bred to play. I know this
> because, having spent several years helping fight stupid law making, I've
> seen all the tricks. And, boy, have we been played.
Dude, what am I? Chopped liver? I spent a huge part of my professional
life as a Washington. What's more, I actually know Cary Sherman of
RIAA. As in, I know him personally. We would recognize each other on
the street. My headline should be obvious -- I don't think we we were
played. Being effective in public-policy discussions is a learnable
skill, it turns out. You learned it. Perhaps you will allow for the
possibility I learned it too.
Of course the media companies are spinning this. The spin that Google
really is evil after all was an obvious if unimaginative choice.
But rather than declare this to be Amateur Hour (r), can't you allow
for the possibility that mass action got something right? Politicians
didn't think internet mass action mattered. Now they think it does,
and not just for fundraising or MoveOn or Tea Party campaigns.
Copyright and technology policy in Washington has been deeply screwed
up for some time. One path to fixing it it may be fine-tuning a phrase
or excising it from a bad law. On the other hand, there was this guy
named Martin Luther King who did not rule out mass action -- drew
inspiration from, amazingly enough, a lawyer from India. Who know that
lawyers could change public policy in a fundamental way, without
playing an inside game? The "inside" is as much literal as figurative
-- I'm talking about the Beltway, of course.)
Right now, best guess among policy experts is that SOPA and PIPA are
dead for the rest of the (political) year. That is not nothing. That
is something. And while preaching about the importance of Beltway
politics is almost always helpful, one occasionally comes across some
piece of writing that that has a foot in both worlds. I assume you
didn't enjoy the analysis written by this guy --
http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/02/07/guest-blogger-sunlight-got-it…
-- but he actually seems to make in that very piece. the point you
believe is so revelatory and breathtakingly iconoclastic. Maybe you
would find the piece interesting if you gave it another read.
--Mike Godwin
Hi,
Wikimedia Polska (Poland) has just launched its own scholarships
programme for Wikimedians willing to attend Wikimania 2012 in
Washington, D.C. This year, apart from up to 10 scholarships for
Wikimedians from Poland, we are also going to grant up to 6
scholarships for Wikimedians from other countries. Only countries
which have lower national income per capita than Poland (according to
World Bank 2010 stats) are eligible. We are particularly willing to
reach out to the Wikimedians from the former USSR countries (except
Estonia, which doesn't meet the income criteria) and from the Balkans
(except Greece and Slovenia, for the same reason). The scholarship
covers travel and accommodation expenses, as well as conference fee.
More details are available here: http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2012/en
The closing date for applications is March 9.
Regards,
--
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerekhttp://www.ganicz.pl/poli/http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29&title=tomasz-ganicz