Wait, aren't the chapters composed from people from the wikimedia community?
Also, didn't you guys stop by a second to think the chapter thoroughly discussed the contents of the letter with its members, which may vote in favor or against publishing it?
And if it is on Meta, is open to discussion, no?
Finally, in Venezuela we say "el que se pica es porque ají come". No need to take it personally if you are not among those "certain" Commons admins, right?
Sent from Samsung Mobile
-------- Original message -------- From: Fæ faewik@gmail.com Date: 26/02/2014 18:46 (GMT+02:00) To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open letter on open letters (Was: Open letter from Wikimedia Argentina regarding URAA)
On 26 February 2014 13:51, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Maybe it's a cultural issue, does e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_letter have a geopolitically limited point of view? Open letters are a common tool of *discussion* with the public (= community in our case) in the corners of the world that I know best.
As a major unpaid Commons contributor, I find these emotive and political emails to lists and open letters elsewhere confusing and rather wasteful of the good faith volunteer effort behind them.
If anyone wants to create meaningful and lasting change to Commons, then please create a Request for Comment on Commons[1] rather than making a fuss and criticising Commons (volunteer) administrators in non-Commons discussion channels, which most Commons volunteers are unlikely to either notice or care much about.
For Chapters, I suggest you check who among your active volunteers are most active on Commons[2] and ask them to help engage or create discussion about policy and guideline changes. If you cannot find anyone close to your chapter that is active and engaged on Commons, perhaps you should change that situation before firing off official letters.
Links: 1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:RFC 2. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae/Userlist
Fae
Look, I have no problem with the open letters from WM Venezuela, España or Israel. I might not agree 100% with everything in them, but they are generally on top of the issues, and they focus on the problems they law poses for us and our need for better solutions - all worth bringing to a wider audience.
But the letter from WM Argentina is very different. It condemns the actions of "certain Wikimedia Commons administrators" who have deleted URAA-affected files (without naming them or linking to any of the relevant deletions), and makes various claims about how Commons policy and practice has changed and is inconsistent with statements by the WMF Board and Legal team.
If you want to make these sorts of claims in an open letter, you should be ready to back them up. But WM Argentina cannot do so IMO, because many of their claims are untrue. Our practice is consistent with the WMF Board and Legal team statements, and it isn't true that the "burden of proof has been inverted" - the burden of proof has always been on those who want us to keep hosting a file. These sorts of mistakes could easily have been avoided if they had talked directly to experienced Commons editors first.
I'm a Commons admin, but I'm fairly inactive these days and I don't believe I have deleted any URAA-affected files, so I don't think I am one of the "certain" Commons admins they refer to. But I do find defamation of hard-working members of my community offensive. If WM Argentina wants to "respectfully call the Wikimedia Commons community to reflect" on something, that does not seem the best way to start.
On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 6:03 AM, Carlos M. Colina maorx@wikimedia.org.vewrote:
Wait, aren't the chapters composed from people from the wikimedia community?
Also, didn't you guys stop by a second to think the chapter thoroughly discussed the contents of the letter with its members, which may vote in favor or against publishing it?
And if it is on Meta, is open to discussion, no?
Finally, in Venezuela we say "el que se pica es porque ají come". No need to take it personally if you are not among those "certain" Commons admins, right?
Sent from Samsung Mobile
Wikimedia Argentina is formed by a group of volunteers from the Wikimedia movement. That includes several long-time contributors to Commons that have discussed with us in the past months the situation about URAA. This open letter is not something written by a group of strangers or people that haven't participated in the discussions of the community; probably not all of them have been able to participate before as much as we want in this particular topic, but that doesn't mean their opinions are less valuable than those that take a more active role within the discussions. Some of them have seen in the past weeks their talk pages flooded with DR notices against Argentine free pictures, uploaded even several years ago and they have argued, trying to save them. Saying that they don't know how Wikimedia Commons work to this group of volunteers is also really offensive.
I understand you could feel upset for the strong words of our letter regarding the particular URAA situation, especially when most of the contributors work hardly every day to maintain this project and a lot of them have had a constructive approach to this discussion. If you feel our letter has been disrespectful for the rest of the Commons community, our sincere apologies for that.
However, we still believe in what we wrote on the letter. When you see that, even after the BoT statement there are still new DR coming up [1] and more files being deleted [2], then it is clear that something wrong is happening. The BoT has called to stop the massive deletions unless there are DMCA notices and this has been regarded as a "mere opinion" instead of a statement from the authorities responsible of the project (it would be great, anyway, to have a less ambiguous statement).
You may not agree with the BoT statement or the large majority on the proposal to restore the deleted images on Commons [3], but there should have been more prudence within some administrators and freeze the deletions until we find a consensus for this situation. And it hasn't been the case, clearly. This is what we criticize; this is the kind of attitudes that de-motivates many editors. When one of the strictest interpretations of law is applied without consideration of anything else, is what we labeled "legal fetichism".
Maybe you don't agree with that opinion and that's ok, but it is a feeling that a lot of people share, including even Commons contributors. Not only those that wrote this open letter but also many of those that have voted for the "massive restoration" proposal.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Carlos_Tri... [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Le%C3%B3n_...
[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Massive_restoration_of_deleted_im...
*Osmar Valdebenito G.* Director Ejecutivo A. C. Wikimedia Argentina
2014-02-27 0:28 GMT-03:00 Avenue avenue42@gmail.com:
Look, I have no problem with the open letters from WM Venezuela, España or Israel. I might not agree 100% with everything in them, but they are generally on top of the issues, and they focus on the problems they law poses for us and our need for better solutions - all worth bringing to a wider audience.
But the letter from WM Argentina is very different. It condemns the actions of "certain Wikimedia Commons administrators" who have deleted URAA-affected files (without naming them or linking to any of the relevant deletions), and makes various claims about how Commons policy and practice has changed and is inconsistent with statements by the WMF Board and Legal team.
If you want to make these sorts of claims in an open letter, you should be ready to back them up. But WM Argentina cannot do so IMO, because many of their claims are untrue. Our practice is consistent with the WMF Board and Legal team statements, and it isn't true that the "burden of proof has been inverted" - the burden of proof has always been on those who want us to keep hosting a file. These sorts of mistakes could easily have been avoided if they had talked directly to experienced Commons editors first.
I'm a Commons admin, but I'm fairly inactive these days and I don't believe I have deleted any URAA-affected files, so I don't think I am one of the "certain" Commons admins they refer to. But I do find defamation of hard-working members of my community offensive. If WM Argentina wants to "respectfully call the Wikimedia Commons community to reflect" on something, that does not seem the best way to start.
On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 6:03 AM, Carlos M. Colina <maorx@wikimedia.org.ve
wrote:
Wait, aren't the chapters composed from people from the wikimedia community?
Also, didn't you guys stop by a second to think the chapter thoroughly discussed the contents of the letter with its members, which may vote in favor or against publishing it?
And if it is on Meta, is open to discussion, no?
Finally, in Venezuela we say "el que se pica es porque ají come". No
need
to take it personally if you are not among those "certain" Commons
admins,
right?
Sent from Samsung Mobile
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
It would be nice if all of the chapters send to their governments a petition to allow a global standardized use of media just for wikimedia projects, it is a big problem that every country has different laws on copyright and public domain media, and that wikimedia has to comply with U.S law just because the servers are in there, we as a community should ask a global standardized media handling law for wikimedia which might or might not include giving special licenses for wikimedia projects, trying to keep in line with the foundation ideals, I know it sounds a bit crazy, but hey it's the biggest compilation of human knowlege, it should be following laws (copyright and public domain in this case) that all of human kind reach in consensus, not just the laws of the place where the servers are.
Dennis Pierri
On 27/02/2014, at 19:23, Osmar Valdebenito osmar@wikimedia.org.ar wrote:
Wikimedia Argentina is formed by a group of volunteers from the Wikimedia movement. That includes several long-time contributors to Commons that have discussed with us in the past months the situation about URAA. This open letter is not something written by a group of strangers or people that haven't participated in the discussions of the community; probably not all of them have been able to participate before as much as we want in this particular topic, but that doesn't mean their opinions are less valuable than those that take a more active role within the discussions. Some of them have seen in the past weeks their talk pages flooded with DR notices against Argentine free pictures, uploaded even several years ago and they have argued, trying to save them. Saying that they don't know how Wikimedia Commons work to this group of volunteers is also really offensive.
I understand you could feel upset for the strong words of our letter regarding the particular URAA situation, especially when most of the contributors work hardly every day to maintain this project and a lot of them have had a constructive approach to this discussion. If you feel our letter has been disrespectful for the rest of the Commons community, our sincere apologies for that.
However, we still believe in what we wrote on the letter. When you see that, even after the BoT statement there are still new DR coming up [1] and more files being deleted [2], then it is clear that something wrong is happening. The BoT has called to stop the massive deletions unless there are DMCA notices and this has been regarded as a "mere opinion" instead of a statement from the authorities responsible of the project (it would be great, anyway, to have a less ambiguous statement).
You may not agree with the BoT statement or the large majority on the proposal to restore the deleted images on Commons [3], but there should have been more prudence within some administrators and freeze the deletions until we find a consensus for this situation. And it hasn't been the case, clearly. This is what we criticize; this is the kind of attitudes that de-motivates many editors. When one of the strictest interpretations of law is applied without consideration of anything else, is what we labeled "legal fetichism".
Maybe you don't agree with that opinion and that's ok, but it is a feeling that a lot of people share, including even Commons contributors. Not only those that wrote this open letter but also many of those that have voted for the "massive restoration" proposal.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Carlos_Tri... [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Le%C3%B3n_...
[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Massive_restoration_of_deleted_im...
*Osmar Valdebenito G.* Director Ejecutivo A. C. Wikimedia Argentina
2014-02-27 0:28 GMT-03:00 Avenue avenue42@gmail.com:
Look, I have no problem with the open letters from WM Venezuela, España or Israel. I might not agree 100% with everything in them, but they are generally on top of the issues, and they focus on the problems they law poses for us and our need for better solutions - all worth bringing to a wider audience.
But the letter from WM Argentina is very different. It condemns the actions of "certain Wikimedia Commons administrators" who have deleted URAA-affected files (without naming them or linking to any of the relevant deletions), and makes various claims about how Commons policy and practice has changed and is inconsistent with statements by the WMF Board and Legal team.
If you want to make these sorts of claims in an open letter, you should be ready to back them up. But WM Argentina cannot do so IMO, because many of their claims are untrue. Our practice is consistent with the WMF Board and Legal team statements, and it isn't true that the "burden of proof has been inverted" - the burden of proof has always been on those who want us to keep hosting a file. These sorts of mistakes could easily have been avoided if they had talked directly to experienced Commons editors first.
I'm a Commons admin, but I'm fairly inactive these days and I don't believe I have deleted any URAA-affected files, so I don't think I am one of the "certain" Commons admins they refer to. But I do find defamation of hard-working members of my community offensive. If WM Argentina wants to "respectfully call the Wikimedia Commons community to reflect" on something, that does not seem the best way to start.
On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 6:03 AM, Carlos M. Colina <maorx@wikimedia.org.ve
wrote:
Wait, aren't the chapters composed from people from the wikimedia community?
Also, didn't you guys stop by a second to think the chapter thoroughly discussed the contents of the letter with its members, which may vote in favor or against publishing it?
And if it is on Meta, is open to discussion, no?
Finally, in Venezuela we say "el que se pica es porque ají come". No
need
to take it personally if you are not among those "certain" Commons
admins,
right?
Sent from Samsung Mobile
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Dennis Pierri, 28/02/2014 07:41:
It would be nice if all of the chapters send to their governments a petition to allow a global standardized use of media just for wikimedia projects, it is a big problem that every country has different laws on copyright and public domain media, and that wikimedia has to comply with U.S law just because the servers are in there, we as a community should ask a global standardized media handling law for wikimedia which might or might not include giving special licenses for wikimedia projects, trying to keep in line with the foundation ideals, I know it sounds a bit crazy, but hey it's the biggest compilation of human knowlege, it should be following laws (copyright and public domain in this case) that all of human kind reach in consensus, not just the laws of the place where the servers are.
This is being done at least for EU, see consultation for which there is time till March 5. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/European_Commission_copyright_consultation/Single_EU_copyright_title
Nemo
The servers are still in the US, has anybody proposed a global effort? Will Wikimedia move the servers to EU in case this is accepted?
On 28/02/2014, at 03:19, "Federico Leva (Nemo)" nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
This is being done at least for EU, see consultation for which there is time till March 5. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/European_Commission_copyright_consultation/Single_EU_copyright_title
Nemo
On 28 February 2014 21:49, Dennis Pierri dennis6492@gmail.com wrote:
The servers are still in the US, has anybody proposed a global effort? Will Wikimedia move the servers to EU in case this is accepted?
No. There is quite a bit of stuff on Wikimedia severs that is in breach of criminal law in parts of the EU. Nothing special just the usual mix of blasphemy, breach of court orders, insulting foreign heads of state and extreme pornography. There may be some other stuff but there is a limit to the number of legal systems I can keep track of.
Thanks for your reply :)
On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 5:37 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 28 February 2014 21:49, Dennis Pierri dennis6492@gmail.com wrote:
The servers are still in the US, has anybody proposed a global effort? Will Wikimedia move the servers to EU in case this is accepted?
No. There is quite a bit of stuff on Wikimedia severs that is in breach of criminal law in parts of the EU. Nothing special just the usual mix of blasphemy, breach of court orders, insulting foreign heads of state and extreme pornography. There may be some other stuff but there is a limit to the number of legal systems I can keep track of.
-- geni _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
On 28 February 2014 06:41, Dennis Pierri dennis6492@gmail.com wrote:
It would be nice if all of the chapters send to their governments a petition to allow a global standardized use of media just for wikimedia projects, it is a big problem that every country has different laws on copyright and public domain media, and that wikimedia has to comply with U.S law just because the servers are in there, we as a community should ask a global standardized media handling law for wikimedia which might or might not include giving special licenses for wikimedia projects, trying to keep in line with the foundation ideals, I know it sounds a bit crazy, but hey it's the biggest compilation of human knowlege, it should be following laws (copyright and public domain in this case) that all of human kind reach in consensus, not just the laws of the place where the servers are.
D
Wikimedia only licences aren't helpful. Finding out their position on goverment works with expired copyrights is somewhat more useful. Brits did it back in 2005:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-May/022055.html
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org