Category: French Jews on en.wp / GPDR - Wikimedia-l

25 May 2018

Hello,

I am writing to ask if there are any plans to render the English 
Wikipedia compliant with French privacy laws.  Currently, if a French 
high school student goes to a French library, reserves a computer, and 
types "List of French Jews" into Google, Duckduckgo, or Dogpile, an 
adhoc en.wikipedia list of over 850 people (approximately half of them 
living) appears in the #2 position (Category: French Jews). In the first 
position is the English Wikipedia page "List of French Jews" containing 
the following text, originally added in 2010, showing that the 
en.wikipedia community is aware that they are breaking French law:

"The French nationality law itself, strongly secular, forbids any 
statistics or lists based on ethnic or religious membership."

A French person tagging biographies of living people in en.wp with the 
category "French Jews" is a violation of French privacy law which would 
expose the Wikipedian to a penalty of €300,000 and/or 5 years imprisonment:

"Le fait, hors les cas prévus par la loi, de mettre ou de conserver en 
mémoire informatisée, sans le consentement exprès de l’intéressé, des 
données à caractère personnel qui, directement ou indirectement, font 
apparaître les origines raciales ou ethniques, les opinions politiques, 
philosophiques ou religieuses, ou les appartenances syndicales des 
personnes, ou qui sont relatives à la santé ou à l’orientation ou à 
l'identité sexuelle de celles-ci, est puni de cinq ans d’emprisonnement 
et de 300 000 € d’amende." (source:  
https://www.cnil.fr/fr/les-sanctions-penales )

There is, to the best of my knowledge, no such category on fr.wp, as 
people in France are well aware of the law.

See also "List of West European Jews" / Category: French People of 
Jewish descent / Category: French People of Arab descent / Category: 
French Freemasons (167), Category: French Atheists (93 including a 
recent president), etc.

I noticed in researching the question that the Category "French rapists" 
(2 BLP) is associated with the hidden category "No indexed", whereas the 
category "French Jews" (100s of BLP) is associated with the hidden 
category: "categories requiring diffusion".  As a temporary measure (to 
avoid actively feeding this info into search engines), perhaps 
categories related to racial/ethnic origins, religious & philosophical 
opinions could be tagged "No indexed" rather than "requiring
diffusion"?

The WMF hosts their servers in the US, the Netherlands and will soon 
also be hosting off-shore in Singapore, which probably leads WMF legal 
to believe that this grants them immunity from French privacy laws.  
Nevertheless, I thought I would mention that this is a potentially 
significant problem going forward.  Discussion leading to action 
correcting this potential avenue of abuse might help the WMF to avoid 
litigation, given that the current policies on English Wikipedia 
actively facilitate violation of French laws.

(data from petscan.wmflabs.org): French Christians (21 members), French 
Hindus (17 members), French Buddhists (9 members), French Muslims (0 
members), French Jews (862 members).

Thank you for your time considering how best to address this problem.

sashi