I'm not 100% comfortable with the approach of doing it because we legally can - we do a lot of stuff because it's the right thing, not just because we're legally obliged to. The concern is a real one and worth giving serious consideration.
(As I noted in my email about the GDPR, we do a lot of stuff because it's the right thing to do, not just because we're forced to - hence our ridiculously low DMCA rate.)
It occurs to me: Has anyone gone through the cat and made sure every instance is cited to best BLP standards?
- d.
On 28 May 2018 at 00:33, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
"Privacy" is often censorship by another name. Seems so here too.
Of course, if the information is not sourced, or is not well sourced, it can and should be removed as a potential BLP issue. But if it is sourced, we're not making anything available to the public that wasn't already publicly known--after all, our source already published the information!
It has nothing to do with "humble" or not. We don't, and shouldn't, worry about the laws of countries with no jurisdiction. Be that France or Vatican City, doesn't matter. We of course have to follow US law, because the US actually does have jurisdiction.
Todd
On Sat, May 26, 2018 at 8:41 AM, sashi learning@creoliste.fr wrote:
Hello again,
Thanks for your input on this question! I'll add a few clarifications here to respond to points raised in the discussion so far. (As I'm subscribed in digest mode, I'll have to cut & paste.)
Nathan commented: "I'm not seeing an argument here for why Wikimedia should adhere to this law, if it is correctly stated by the OP. If France passed a law banning Internet-published photos of living people, how
would
we approach that law? If Germany barred publishing the place of birth,
date
of birth or religious preference of public figures? If the United States banned publishing the name of individuals accused of mass murder?"
Since I quoted it the law of 6 January 1978 in French, I'm pretty sure I got it right. ^^ On the other hand, I didn't translate or interpret the
law
in the context of current jurisprudence, so yes, maybe some more should
be
said...
It is legal in France to write an article about a notable person and mention their religious affiliation if they volunteer that information. What is *not* legal is to extract that information about them and add it
to
a database which lists Catholics -- as was done during the Vichy regime with punchcards. How exactly were Jewish people rounded up and sent off
to
concentration camps? (How did prefects go about locating Freemasons
during
the war?). While there was certainly some collaboration with the National Statistics Service (SNS) established during the Occupation, the most
recent
research suggests that this collaboration was not as significant as was once commonly assumed. The 1978 law was written before this research.
The fact that -- today on en.wp -- these religious categories are being overwhelmingly applied to Jews (and to a lesser degree to Freemasons) is certainly striking. (cf. the 862 members of Category:French Jews & the
21
members of the Category:French Christians).
Regarding the hypothetical situations you evoke (the first of which, of course, being particularly relevant since people in France do have a
right
to refuse the publication of their image (*unless* they are for some
reason
newsworthy))... I imagine that they will have to be dealt with on a case by case basis until national laws have been superseded by the new-wikiwiki-order of supranational arbitration.
Todd commented: "We should no more follow French censorship laws than we should follow Turkish ones. All editors are responsible for compliance
with
the laws in their jurisdiction."
First, the issue is privacy, not censorship. Nobody has prosecuted or will prosecute a newspaper for mentioning, for example, that Vincent Bolloré is Catholic (since he is open about that fact and does not object to having it reported). However, when the CRIF (a Jewish foundation) petitioned the CNIL for the right to compile a list of folks whose
surnames
were the same as the 150 most common donors to the foundation for the purposes of a survey they were told this would be a clear violation of
the
law. (https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCnil.do?oldAction=rech ExpCnil&id=CNILTEXT000017651919)
What exists on en.wp is an ad-hoc categorization that does not guarantee the quality of sourcing. Anyone can add the category "French Jews" to
100s
of living people's biographies with hotcat in a matter of minutes (with
or
without a source). Only the vigilance of the community is a safeguard against this sort of action. The state of the database at the moment is, again, telling: there are not 40 times more Jews in France than
Christians
nor are Freemasons likely to be 7 times more numerous than Christians.
Yet
this is precisely the *deformed* picture that emerges from this ad-hoc categorization system. As James and Yarsolav both observed, this is
likely
due to a problem of "bad editing" on en.wp. (I didn't mention it in my
OP,
but just as there are no such categories on French Wikipedia, Wikidata
also
does not seem to have categories based on the religion of living French people. Based on my limited research into the question, the ontology at Wikidata does indeed seem more respectful of personal privacy.)
Second, concerning legally responsibility: of course! The WMF only supplies the platform. The anonymous individuals who make use of it are legally responsible for their contributions. As a result, living people not wanting to have their religion included in a system of automatic list-generation would need to file a complaint against X (porter plainte contre X) in order to try to get the WMF to react to the violation of
their
privacy if they cannot convince the anonymous volunteer they contact in order to enforce their privacy rights (by deleting the ethnic/religious category from their Wikipedia entry).
Still, it could be persuasively argued that a foundation has a *duty of care* to its volunteers and should not facilitate their contributors
(whose
age they don't verify) falling afoul of their national laws. Simply excluding members of Category:BLP & Category:French Jews/Catholics/Muslims/Freemasons/etc. from the hidden Category "requiring diffusion" and adding them to the hidden Category "noindex" would go a long way towards protecting privacy rights (at least as far as google is concerned).
Finally -- again -- how useful are these automatically generated lists towards advancing the "freedom of knowledge" (as Nathan put it)? To repeat: these categories make it seem that there are/have been 40 times more notable Jewish people and five times more notable Muslims in France than notable Christians . This (derived) "knowledge" is patently false. Now, granted, the purpose of the automatically generated categories is
not
to come up with a comparative tally of noteworthy people; but I think
what
this tally shows is in itself revealing: Wikipedians are 40 times more likely to tag notable Jewish people as Jews and 5 times more likely to
tag
notable Muslims as Muslim than they are to tag notable Christians as Christians. This is worth thinking about for a minute...
Why would it be so hard to be humble and respect national laws by making it such that membership in the category would not be diffused concerning living people in countries where such lists are illegal? (As Yaroslav points out, there is no guarantee of the quality of the sourcing). En.wp might be wise to learn from the conservative approach to this question taken by fr.wp and wikidata.
I hope this helps to clarify the original post.
sashi
ps: *Correction*: Contrary to what I mistakenly wrote in my OP there
are
96 members of the category French Muslims (not 0).
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