Hi Teles,
As the head of the Wikipedia Zero program, I would like to respond and provide more context to the important challenges you are bringing up.
Last year, the Foundation increased our security and privacy by requiring HTTPS to access all Wikimedia projects. That change has greatly impacted the Wikipedia Zero program, and most importantly has also allowed editing (and not only reading) and extended the scope of zero-rated access from just Wikipedia to all Wikimedia projects. However, our banners do not reflect this additional zero-rating, but still only appear on Wikipedia.
In your message you highlight two main concerns. One would be the upload of copyrighted materials and overall abuse on Commons. The other concern regards how the editing community should deal with an influx of new good faith edits and potential editors in Portuguese, with particular challenge of the extra work this causes for existing community members.
Regarding Commons, we have experienced abuse from a few subscribers of a Zero partner in Angola. Typically what happens is that the pirates upload copyrighted movies to Commons either directly or in a concealed form (like huge/split PDFs or JPEGs). Then they promote the links on Facebook or a similar public forum for others to download. When partners become aware of this they have flagged it to us and we've, in turn, flagged it to Community Engagement who has worked with editors to try and make sure it's removed.
We agree that this is not an ideal way to handle this problem, and we would prefer to catch it much earlier or simply prevent it outright (without significant limits being placed on good faith editors). Last fall, we had internal discussions on finding technical solutions for this problem. However, we discovered that we could not widely identify traffic from zero rated partners, and that ability was a prerequisite to address this issue. As of December 2015, the Ops team was able to complete that work.
With this task completed, our team, in coordination with community engagement and engineering is working on finding the best approach to resolve this issue. Do you have suggestions or guidance? We are eager to examine multiple approaches and this is a great time to open the discussion. As we evaluate different approaches, we can also update you and the list here.
On the editing topic, the primary goal of Wikipedia Zero is to increase readership. This is measured in potential reach (through subscriber counts) and pageviews within regions with Wikipedia Zero partnerships. There’s not enough information to show that Zero can also increase editorship, but it is something we believe is furthered by expanding reading access. So if that is what is happening in Angola, we see that is a great thing.
However, we understand that it’s challenging for our existing editing community to handle a sudden influx of new editors. This seems to be a crucial and important conversation for the movement at large to have. I hope we can figure out a way to turn this moment in Angola into an opportunity to learn how to deal with new readers and editors.
Best regards, Adele
On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 4:50 PM, Gnangarra gnangarra@gmail.com wrote:
some of the issue stems form the copyright laws of Angola, which are really interesting to read -- read them in english -- https://www.copyright-watch.org/files/Angola.pdf of course I dont expect people to know their copyright laws in detail or to have read them but they do know the principles of it and what they can do
some points of interest
- Non protected works Article 9 section c -- news of the day published
by the press or broadcast
- Chapter IV Uses lawful without Authorisation article 29 section b -
reproduction by photographic process or process analogous to photographic process by <snip> documentation centres <snip> or teaching organisations ..... refers to minimum amount of copies necessary, but wither way Wikipedia would fall into either of these definitions as permitted to reproduce
- article 30 - is the key here it enables translation into Portuguese
after 3 years without any real restrictions - hence why the pt.wikis are having so much of an issue and by extension commons where they encourage uploading of media
Wikipedia zero implementation needs to also consider the implication of local laws especially copyright on the projects where the laws are this outdated and effectively enable copyright issues then WP Zero could provide a read only option for IP's or a no upload option, with a rights request process on commons
On 19 March 2016 at 00:45, Lucas Teles teleswiki@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, everyone.
It is being recently reported on Portuguese Wikipedia and Commons (at least) the increasing ammount of improper editing coming from IP
addresses
located in Angola. Some users believe that this may be related with Wikipedia Zero and a partnership between WMF and a cellphone company [1] that allows reading and editing at free cost.
One of the first reactions to that is a large range block that was just
set
on Commons in order to prevent these edits [2], as they are being done
in a
way that volunteers can't handle.
That seems to be some kind of "second wave" as the first that hit Commons [3] had been already reported months ago [4] and seemed to be controled
or
just paused for a while. On Portuguese Wikipedia, one thing that seemss
to
be clear is that edits are done in good faith. However, they end by being undone as they are incorrect for some reason, whether being pages of
files
about themselves or just test edits. One of the users identified actually confirm [5] that he is editing through Wikipedia Zero.
Concerning that more partnerships may occur in future, I think it is time for us to start talking about ways of dealing with that, other than blocking. Sadly, I don't have an answer to that problem, but I tend to believe that some way of mass reaching these potential users should be
made
out.
The current process is that editors will be the ones to notice that (as I am not aware of any kind of follow up by WMF on that) and they will try
to
solve their way, which may cause too many collateral damage.
I wonder if there is any kind of way to diminish the problem, by using
any
off-wiki strategy.
Kind regards.
Teles
[1] -
http://www.telecompaper.com/news/movicel-offers-free-access-to-wikipedia--11...
[2] -
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Steinsplitter&...
[3] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Teles/Angola_Facebook_Case [4] -
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Forum&oldid=12835...
[5] -
https://pt.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Usu%C3%A1rio_Discuss%C3%A3o:Darwi...
*Lucas Teles*
*+55 (71) 98290 7553Steward at Wikimedia Foundation. Administrator * *at Portuguese Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.*- wikipedista.com _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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