Yann Forget writes:
In addition, I receive a personal letter, as "the main editor" of these texts, according to Gallimard. We didn't receive any information from the Wikimedia Foundation, and I know the details only because I have been personally involved.
Yann seems to be suggesting here that the Wikimedia Foundation did not notify him about the Gallimard takedown, but at the same time Yann acknowledges that he knew about the Gallimard takedown. It is precisely because we knew Yann knew about Gallimard's takedown demand (it wasn't a "request") that we did not send him additional correspondence to inform him about something he already knew about. I still have in my email storage correspondence with Yann regarding this event from March of this year -- it seems odd to have Yann complaining that he didn't know enough about it.
Furthermore, when we noted in the takedown who was demanding the takedown (Editions Gallimard) *and we further listed their contact information* so that francophone Wikimedians who disagreed with the takedown demand could make their feelings known to Gallimard. We did this at the very beginning of the takedown process, which we are obligated by international law to obey.
Now three months later, we didn't receive any information from the Foundation about this, and the texts are still deleted.
Yann seems here to say that some unnamed group did not know about the takedown. We posted the takedown information publicly. Yann in fact knew about it from the beginning. What's more, we listened to Yann's feedback, including claims that some of the material Gallimard demanded taken down was material they had no right to make such demands about. We narrowed Gallimard's takedown demand accordingly. Yann knows this.
Many contributors are obviously not very happy, and feel that the Foundation submitted to the pressure of a commercial publisher. Comparing with the National Portrait Gallery affair on Commons, it looks like a double standard was applied.
I strongly suspect that any contributors who feel as Yann says they feel are relying on mistaken information and assumptions. We absolutely did resist the demands of Gallimard within the full extent that French law allows. We retained French counsel who represented us in discussions with Gallimard, and we forced Gallimard to make their demands both more specific and narrower. The "pressure of a commercial publisher" played no role. (A noncommercial entity making the same legal demand would be entitled to the same takedown, assuming that the formalities were met.)
Comparing the National Portrait Gallery affair suggests lack of knowledge about the underlying copyright issues involved. The NPG dispute involved art works that unquestionably were no longer protected by copyright according to the law of most signatories of international copyright treaties. The NPG actually knows this, and did not press any legal challenge, likely because of uncertainty whether their anomalous theory of copyright protection for digitized centuries-old artworks would be upheld even by British courts. The Gallimard case is fundamentally different, since most of the works they demanded taken down were asserted to be modern works that are clearly within the period of French copyright protection.
Just a few days before these texts were deleted, I asked Cary what was
the official opinion of Wikimedia Foundation about texts which are in the public domain in USA, but not in France. I was told that "the community is entitled to decide by itself".
Cary is correct that the Wikimedia Foundation is not purporting to give you legal advice about copyright and the public domain. We're not your lawyers. For that, you are best served by consulting French legal counsel.
--Mike
2010/6/2 Mike Godwin mnemonic@gmail.com:
Yann Forget writes:
In addition, I receive a personal letter, as "the main editor" of these texts, according to Gallimard. We didn't receive any information from the Wikimedia Foundation, and I know the details only because I have been personally involved.
Yann seems to be suggesting here that the Wikimedia Foundation did not notify him about the Gallimard takedown, but at the same time Yann acknowledges that he knew about the Gallimard takedown. It is precisely because we knew Yann knew about Gallimard's takedown demand (it wasn't a "request") that we did not send him additional correspondence to inform him about something he already knew about. I still have in my email storage correspondence with Yann regarding this event from March of this year -- it seems odd to have Yann complaining that he didn't know enough about it.
Furthermore, when we noted in the takedown who was demanding the takedown (Editions Gallimard) *and we further listed their contact information* so that francophone Wikimedians who disagreed with the takedown demand could make their feelings known to Gallimard. We did this at the very beginning of the takedown process, which we are obligated by international law to obey.
Now three months later, we didn't receive any information from the Foundation about this, and the texts are still deleted.
Yann seems here to say that some unnamed group did not know about the takedown. We posted the takedown information publicly. Yann in fact knew about it from the beginning. What's more, we listened to Yann's feedback, including claims that some of the material Gallimard demanded taken down was material they had no right to make such demands about. We narrowed Gallimard's takedown demand accordingly. Yann knows this.
I didn't know you narrowed Gallimard's takedown demand. AFAIK you never informed me nor Wikisource about this. Yet there are works which are in public domain in France and which are still deleted in Wikisource following Gallimard's demand. In fact, you didn't inform Wikisource about the details of Gallimard's demand. I received Gallimard's letter only one month _after_ the works were deleted on Wikisource. I answered to Gallimard and I didn't receive any news from them. I don't expect to receive anything from Gallimard since their FUD tactic worked very well, and the works are not on-line any more on Wikisource. And I am not so foolish to ask Gallimard for objective information. In fact Gallimard has made at least two mistakes in their request: one of the author's date of death is false, and in one case, they miscalculated the duration of copyright, forgetting the 30 years extension for authors who died in action.
Many contributors are obviously not very happy, and feel that the Foundation submitted to the pressure of a commercial publisher. Comparing with the National Portrait Gallery affair on Commons, it looks like a double standard was applied.
I strongly suspect that any contributors who feel as Yann says they feel are relying on mistaken information and assumptions. We absolutely did resist the demands of Gallimard within the full extent that French law allows. We retained French counsel who represented us in discussions with Gallimard, and we forced Gallimard to make their demands both more specific and narrower. The "pressure of a commercial publisher" played no role. (A noncommercial entity making the same legal demand would be entitled to the same takedown, assuming that the formalities were met.)
Happy to hear that. It would have been much better if you would have informed the Wikisource community about it.
Comparing the National Portrait Gallery affair suggests lack of knowledge about the underlying copyright issues involved. The NPG dispute involved art works that unquestionably were no longer protected by copyright according to the law of most signatories of international copyright treaties. The NPG actually knows this, and did not press any legal challenge, likely because of uncertainty whether their anomalous theory of copyright protection for digitized centuries-old artworks would be upheld even by British courts. The Gallimard case is fundamentally different, since most of the works they demanded taken down were asserted to be modern works that are clearly within the period of French copyright protection.
Partly false, misleading at the minimum. Some of the deleted works are in the public domain in France. At least half of them are in the public domain world wide, except in France. These are published on many web sites, including the National French Library.
Just a few days before these texts were deleted, I asked Cary what was
the official opinion of Wikimedia Foundation about texts which are in the public domain in USA, but not in France. I was told that "the community is entitled to decide by itself".
Cary is correct that the Wikimedia Foundation is not purporting to give you legal advice about copyright and the public domain. We're not your lawyers. For that, you are best served by consulting French legal counsel.
Well, I am now in India, so I am not sure how much French law in relevant. Most of the deleted works are in the public domain in India. Any way, you answered beside the point. I know very well what is the copyright status of these works in France, and elsewhere. What I ask is that you inform _the Wikisource project hosted by Wikimedia Foundation_ about _WMF official legal policy_, whatever is that policy.
--Mike
Regards,
Yann
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 12:21 PM, Yann Forget yannfo@gmail.com wrote
I didn't know you narrowed Gallimard's takedown demand. AFAIK you never informed me nor Wikisource about this.
We cannot inform you about all the details communicated in an ongoing negotiation with parties threatening us with litigation. Apart from whether doing so would be consistent with legal ethics, it would also provide a disincentive for complaining parties to negotiate with us at all.
In fact, you didn't inform Wikisource about the details of Gallimard's
demand. I received Gallimard's letter only one month _after_ the works were deleted on Wikisource.
In fact, the note for every takedown specified that the takedown occurred because of a Gallimard demand, and it listed Gallimard's contact information. This was done at the time of the takedown, not one month later.
Happy to hear that. It would have been much better if you would have informed the Wikisource community about it.
It would be a delightful world if all legal negotiations could be shared with everyone instantly. We do not live in that world, however. What we did do, at my direction, was make clear at the time of the takedown who was responsible for the takedown demand and how to contact the entity responsible. At some point, it seems fair to expect concerned individuals -- especially those who already know about the complaint -- to be aware of public notices about what was taken down and why. You seem to be complaining here because you knew about the Gallimard takedown demands, but didn't bother to track the followup to those demands on Wikisource. This is a shame, because we did try to make it easy for you to know what had happened.
Partly false, misleading at the minimum.
Not false at all.
Some of the deleted works are in the public domain in France.
You're still missing the point. NPG did not send a formal takedown notice.
At least half of them are in the public domain world wide, except in France. These are published on many web sites, including the National French Library.
Please understand that if you have problems with French copyright law, there's nothing I can do about that from here in California.
Well, I am now in India, so I am not sure how much French law in relevant.
Whether Gallimard would prevail in an infringement lawsuit based on these works is irrelevant to the question of how to respond to a takedown notice.
What I ask is that you inform _the Wikisource project hosted by Wikimedia Foundation_ about _WMF official legal policy_, whatever is that policy.
Official legal policy is to comply with properly crafted takedown notices. This has been our policy since long before I arrived at WMF. I'm surprised that you didn't know this before now.
--Mike
It's a shame that exchanges like this end up as back-and-forth arguments, instead of normal discussions.
I think the Foundation should be as open as possible with project communities about legal action, even if in some cases that poses an obstacle to negotiation. The spectre of legal jeopardy can put a serious damper on participation, and when the Foundation takes action pursuant to legal claims more is needed than a deletion note saying who made the demand.
Yann suggests that he (and the Wikisource community) did not know about the takedown in a timely manner; anyone not watching the files or the deletion logs might have missed it if the only note was in the deletion log. The project was not aware that the Foundation resisted the scope of the demand, or that the steps ultimately taken were the result of negotiation. Mike says Yann was aware of all of this, Yann says he didn't receive notice about the takedown until a month after it occurred, but either way... The lesson seems to be that there is room for improvement in communication, at the very least. When files are deleted by staff, why not leave a message on the village pump page or ask someone on the OTRS team for that language to do so? If you can't communicate certain facts during negotiations, why not do so afterwards? I don't imagine the WMF has non-disclosure agreements about this sort of thing, at least I hope not.
There is some tension built into this general issue, though; Cary advises that the fr.wikisource project needs to make its own decisions about what content to allow, based on a local interpretation of applicable law -- and then the Foundation deletes content without (a) providing advice on what is acceptable and what isn't and (b) without referring to the local decisions the project was advised to take. I'm not sure how this can be resolved, but surely its a legitimate source for grumbling and not grounds for a personally accusatory response from the WMF.
Nathan
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:15 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
Yann suggests that he (and the Wikisource community) did not know about the takedown in a timely manner; anyone not watching the files or the deletion logs might have missed it if the only note was in the deletion log.
But of course, the deletion log was not the only notice. And Yann Forget knew about the deletions at the time they occurred.
If you can't communicate certain facts during negotiations, why not do so afterwards?
Sometimes you can. I just did. But of course sometimes you can't, for reasons I've already outlined. (There's nothing magical about the passage of time that eliminates the disincentive effect of disclosing negotiations.)
There is some tension built into this general issue, though; Cary advises that the fr.wikisource project needs to make its own decisions about what content to allow, based on a local interpretation of applicable law -- and then the Foundation deletes content without (a) providing advice on what is acceptable and what isn't and (b) without referring to the local decisions the project was advised to take.
I'm not sure what advice you think it is even theoretically possible that the Foundation could have offered. Are you suggesting that the Foundation is acting as the lawyer for everyone who posts content to Wikisource? There are obvious reasons that is not a sustainable or feasible model.
You seem to have the impression that the Foundation staff directly deleted the content. Actually, I shared the list with Cary, who shared the list with community members who implemented the takedown. (I deleted no content myself.) So you can see why the whole notion that the takedown wasn't shared with the community seems flatly wrong to me. We absolutely engaged community members in implementing the takedown. Yann seems to suggest that our actions have been some kind of big secret. The reality, however, is that we did nothing in secret, and that Yann in fact has known what we did for quite a while now. We even made it trivially easy to contact Gallimard and complain about the takedown. But I do understand that it is easier to complain about WMF than it is to pursue Gallimard directly, even though doing the latter might be a more effective choice.
I'll note also that the real complaint, as I perceive it, isn't really that we didn't communicate what we were doing. The real complaint is that we actually complied with a formally correct takedown notice, consistent with longstanding policy. Now that it's clearer that we really couldn't make any other choice but to comply, consistent with our fiduciary responsibilities, the need to complain shifts to another target. I hope I may be forgiven for believing that if we had put our compliance with Gallimard's takedown notice in a banner on every project page, we'd still face complaints -- likely from the very same people -- for other ostensible reasons.
In short, the real unhappiness here is that we complied with a formally correct takedown notice. All the rest is distraction, IMHO. But as a matter of official policy, we will comply with such notices as we have in the past. Other contributors have responded to our takedowns by reposting the content with appropriate affidavits ("put-up notices"), and we've left the content up in spite of followup demands that we remove it. I do not believe such legally correct responses are beyond the ability of contributors to Wikisource or other projects.
I'm
not sure how this can be resolved, but surely its a legitimate source for grumbling and not grounds for a personally accusatory response from the WMF.
I'm not sure what you're perceiving as "a personally accusatory response" -- I've simply shared the facts as I understand them. (Did you think Yann Forget's posting was not "personally accusatory"? I noticed that Cary and I are mentioned by name, personally.) I do share as much as I can, within the constraints of law and professional ethics. I am forbidden to step beyond those constraints.
I don't have much to say beyond this. But I do ask that you not assume anything about the takedowns without looking at them yourself. And I'll respond privately to any queries about how we proceeded, if I can.
--Mike
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I've been watching the dialogues between the WMF and this mailing list for a while now and most of the conflicts are the same: bad communication. This is apparently not due to individuals but institutional.
I'm still ignorant of many aspects of the internal mechanisms and interactions of the WMF, its projects, chapters, communities, sites, tools, pages, agendas and mailing lists and to be honest I think it's a maze. One has to invest months, maybe years of investigation to really know where he should be communicating, searching or waiting for certain kind of information. Maybe these very considerations should be put instead on the meta, on the strategic, on the village pump, on another mailing list, or on several lists, or directed to the WMF, globally or to certain dedicated persons only?
So let me ask some genuinely ignorant questions: - - are there somewhere an organizational map and schematics of the overall components of the Wikimedia institutions, projects, foundations, chapters and communities, their governance, roles, duties and interactions, synthesized in one main page instead of dozens, each one in a different part? - - is there one main page instead of dozens for announcements and news, with a RSS feed system, with selectable categories to choose what kind of information one wants to follow ? - - why, simply, the activity of the WMF is not published each day or week? For example why the Gallimard letter and negociations were not made public? why the confidentiality instead of a transparency policy? why the causes, debates and decisions of Jimmy and the board in the recent censorship controversy were not published in time? I sincerely don't understand. - - how a newbie could understand the current activities and projects? where to start? who to contact? - - in case of emergency like the Fox News attack, is there a plan? protocols? a priority channel? plannified meetings and groups of reflexion/discussion? plannified ways of updating the situation, of sharing official declarations and resources? - - are there ways to delegate, federate, synthesize, communicate opinions and information between each community, chapter, board members?
I don't mean to force a type of governance or another, but simply to organize the information so it's easier for everybody to know what's happening.
Everything seems so fuzzy and chaotic currently. It seems that it all depends of the charism of hyperactive community members and the good will of board trustees. Please enlighten me.
On 02/06/2010 23:49, Mike Godwin wrote:
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:15 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
Yann suggests that he (and the Wikisource community) did not know about the takedown in a timely manner; anyone not watching the files or the deletion logs might have missed it if the only note was in the deletion log.
But of course, the deletion log was not the only notice. And Yann Forget knew about the deletions at the time they occurred.
If you can't communicate certain facts during negotiations, why not do so afterwards?
Sometimes you can. I just did. But of course sometimes you can't, for reasons I've already outlined. (There's nothing magical about the passage of time that eliminates the disincentive effect of disclosing negotiations.)
There is some tension built into this general issue, though; Cary advises that the fr.wikisource project needs to make its own decisions about what content to allow, based on a local interpretation of applicable law -- and then the Foundation deletes content without (a) providing advice on what is acceptable and what isn't and (b) without referring to the local decisions the project was advised to take.
I'm not sure what advice you think it is even theoretically possible that the Foundation could have offered. Are you suggesting that the Foundation is acting as the lawyer for everyone who posts content to Wikisource? There are obvious reasons that is not a sustainable or feasible model.
You seem to have the impression that the Foundation staff directly deleted the content. Actually, I shared the list with Cary, who shared the list with community members who implemented the takedown. (I deleted no content myself.) So you can see why the whole notion that the takedown wasn't shared with the community seems flatly wrong to me. We absolutely engaged community members in implementing the takedown. Yann seems to suggest that our actions have been some kind of big secret. The reality, however, is that we did nothing in secret, and that Yann in fact has known what we did for quite a while now. We even made it trivially easy to contact Gallimard and complain about the takedown. But I do understand that it is easier to complain about WMF than it is to pursue Gallimard directly, even though doing the latter might be a more effective choice.
I'll note also that the real complaint, as I perceive it, isn't really that we didn't communicate what we were doing. The real complaint is that we actually complied with a formally correct takedown notice, consistent with longstanding policy. Now that it's clearer that we really couldn't make any other choice but to comply, consistent with our fiduciary responsibilities, the need to complain shifts to another target. I hope I may be forgiven for believing that if we had put our compliance with Gallimard's takedown notice in a banner on every project page, we'd still face complaints -- likely from the very same people -- for other ostensible reasons.
In short, the real unhappiness here is that we complied with a formally correct takedown notice. All the rest is distraction, IMHO. But as a matter of official policy, we will comply with such notices as we have in the past. Other contributors have responded to our takedowns by reposting the content with appropriate affidavits ("put-up notices"), and we've left the content up in spite of followup demands that we remove it. I do not believe such legally correct responses are beyond the ability of contributors to Wikisource or other projects.
I'm
not sure how this can be resolved, but surely its a legitimate source for grumbling and not grounds for a personally accusatory response from the WMF.
I'm not sure what you're perceiving as "a personally accusatory response" -- I've simply shared the facts as I understand them. (Did you think Yann Forget's posting was not "personally accusatory"? I noticed that Cary and I are mentioned by name, personally.) I do share as much as I can, within the constraints of law and professional ethics. I am forbidden to step beyond those constraints.
I don't have much to say beyond this. But I do ask that you not assume anything about the takedowns without looking at them yourself. And I'll respond privately to any queries about how we proceeded, if I can.
--Mike _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Hi Noein,
With no comment on the issue you were interested in, you raise good questions about internal communication, which has indeed been chaotic for as long as I've been around, but is -- if you can imagine -- better than it used to be!
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 4:23 PM, Noein pronoein@gmail.com wrote:
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I've been watching the dialogues between the WMF and this mailing list for a while now and most of the conflicts are the same: bad communication. This is apparently not due to individuals but institutional.
I'm still ignorant of many aspects of the internal mechanisms and interactions of the WMF, its projects, chapters, communities, sites, tools, pages, agendas and mailing lists and to be honest I think it's a maze. One has to invest months, maybe years of investigation to really know where he should be communicating, searching or waiting for certain kind of information. Maybe these very considerations should be put instead on the meta, on the strategic, on the village pump, on another mailing list, or on several lists, or directed to the WMF, globally or to certain dedicated persons only?
There should be a how-to-communicate-internally guide, no doubt. The problems are a) there are no easy answers (a lot of where to ask questions is contextual, it depends on the question); b) often there is no single point of contact -- to raise a discussion or ask a question of the community means putting it out there for whoever has time and inclination to answer. This is the way that many, many aspects of the projects work, which can be frustrating.
So let me ask some genuinely ignorant questions:
- are there somewhere an organizational map and schematics of the
overall components of the Wikimedia institutions, projects, foundations, chapters and communities, their governance, roles, duties and interactions, synthesized in one main page instead of dozens, each one in a different part?
Not that I'm aware of, though there has been recent talk of trying to define this and there are probably attempts somewhere. The Meta-wiki is where such things would be found if they existed. Again, there is an issue in that these relations are not static, fixed, or typically well defined. In general:
* everything having to do with project (e.g. wikipedia, wikiversity, etc) content & policies is defined by the editor communities on those projects, that is, the people who show up and do stuff on the wiki over the long-term. Very, very little is done by the Foundation etc. in this regard, nor has the Foundation ever historically had this role.
* The Wikimedia Foundation, specifically meaning the 30-odd people employed in San Francisco, have historically run the servers that host the projects, issued press releases, done fundraising, managed legal threats (against the WMF itself), and a few other administrative tasks. This is slowly changing as the WMF gets more in the business of supporting outreach and editor activity, but in general it is still true that the projects are autonomous and editors have little to do with the WMF itself as far as day-to-day interaction.
* The Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation provide guidance to the WMF, generally concerning themselves with big-picture issues.
* The Chapters are organizations in their respective geographic locations that do outreach, events, etc as independent charitable organizations. They are hooked to the WMF through name and mission, and a few shared activities, but stand apart in their day-to-day activities.
It's important to realize that there are large volunteer communities surrounding *all* of these institutions, including technical development, and community members do a lot of work in all areas. This work is not necessarily (in fact usually is not) directly managed by the WMF or another formal group.
So you can see that defining precise relationships is hard.
- is there one main page instead of dozens for announcements and news,
with a RSS feed system, with selectable categories to choose what kind of information one wants to follow ?
Nope. That's a fantastic idea though. It's related to the idea that was recently re-raised on the English Wikipedia Signpost talkpage about having a centralized community newsletter for everyone on Meta.
- why, simply, the activity of the WMF is not published each day or
week? For example why the Gallimard letter and negociations were not made public? why the confidentiality instead of a transparency policy? why the causes, debates and decisions of Jimmy and the board in the recent censorship controversy were not published in time? I sincerely don't understand.
To answer the general question: you would not believe how much news there is on a daily basis from 11 projects in 250 languages with an additional 29 chapters, active Foundation, and enthusiastic volunteer community! You'd be doing nothing but reading news all day. Maybe it still should be aggregated somewhere...
If you are asking about just the news of the WMF, e.g. the activities of the Foundation that is based in San Francisco, that is easier and should be done better; though the announcements list is a pretty good way to keep up with major announcements, and most news does come through Foundation-l. I didn't pay attention to the letter you're concerned about, but the debate over censorship is a community-wide issue -- not WMF specific -- that *was* debated on this very list immediately and rapidly, pretty much as it happened. I don't know what you mean by not being published in time.
- how a newbie could understand the current activities and projects?
where to start? who to contact?
Start with: wikimedia-announce-l. Check out: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Goings-on. Consider reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:POST and, if it's ever revived, http://www.wikizine.org/. Beyond that, you might specify the *kinds* of projects you're interested in -- outreach is one thing, tech issues another.
- in case of emergency like the Fox News attack, is there a plan?
protocols? a priority channel? plannified meetings and groups of reflexion/discussion? plannified ways of updating the situation, of sharing official declarations and resources?
Sort of. For instance, press inquiries go to Jay Walsh at the Foundation and his team; in turn he works closely with a community committee called the Communications Committee (ComCom). That's where press releases come from. There is no regularized public forum for reflection on every issue that comes up; Foundation-l is as good a place as any. Announcements go out the normal ways. In other words... re the Fox News story, if you read the threads on commons, and read the many emails on this list, and participated in giving your views, you were as much a part of the debate as any other community member.
- are there ways to delegate, federate, synthesize, communicate opinions
and information between each community, chapter, board members?
I don't know. Are there? Everyone that I know involved with any kind of Wikimedia governance and decision making struggles with this, in large part because of the complexity and amount of information involved, and because it's not so simple as getting a "community" opinion -- we are both a part of the Wikimedia community, but we may well disagree.
This is a fundamental and important question though and one a lot of people care about.
I don't mean to force a type of governance or another, but simply to organize the information so it's easier for everybody to know what's happening.
Everything seems so fuzzy and chaotic currently. It seems that it all depends of the charism of hyperactive community members and the good will of board trustees. Please enlighten me.
Yes, but also the long-term perseverance and work of many community members (which designation includes staff and board, by the way) -- not just the hyperactive ones! Things are chaotic but they are not as fragile as they seem, either -- just very, very complex.
-- phoebe
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Thank you Phoebe, you've been of a great help. I'll ponder your answers for a while.
On 03/06/2010 07:21, phoebe ayers wrote:
Hi Noein,
With no comment on the issue you were interested in, you raise good questions about internal communication, which has indeed been chaotic for as long as I've been around, but is -- if you can imagine -- better than it used to be!
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 4:23 PM, Noein pronoein@gmail.com wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
I've been watching the dialogues between the WMF and this mailing list for a while now and most of the conflicts are the same: bad communication. This is apparently not due to individuals but institutional.
I'm still ignorant of many aspects of the internal mechanisms and interactions of the WMF, its projects, chapters, communities, sites, tools, pages, agendas and mailing lists and to be honest I think it's a maze. One has to invest months, maybe years of investigation to really know where he should be communicating, searching or waiting for certain kind of information. Maybe these very considerations should be put instead on the meta, on the strategic, on the village pump, on another mailing list, or on several lists, or directed to the WMF, globally or to certain dedicated persons only?
There should be a how-to-communicate-internally guide, no doubt. The problems are a) there are no easy answers (a lot of where to ask questions is contextual, it depends on the question); b) often there is no single point of contact -- to raise a discussion or ask a question of the community means putting it out there for whoever has time and inclination to answer. This is the way that many, many aspects of the projects work, which can be frustrating.
So let me ask some genuinely ignorant questions:
- are there somewhere an organizational map and schematics of the
overall components of the Wikimedia institutions, projects, foundations, chapters and communities, their governance, roles, duties and interactions, synthesized in one main page instead of dozens, each one in a different part?
Not that I'm aware of, though there has been recent talk of trying to define this and there are probably attempts somewhere. The Meta-wiki is where such things would be found if they existed. Again, there is an issue in that these relations are not static, fixed, or typically well defined. In general:
- everything having to do with project (e.g. wikipedia, wikiversity,
etc) content & policies is defined by the editor communities on those projects, that is, the people who show up and do stuff on the wiki over the long-term. Very, very little is done by the Foundation etc. in this regard, nor has the Foundation ever historically had this role.
- The Wikimedia Foundation, specifically meaning the 30-odd people
employed in San Francisco, have historically run the servers that host the projects, issued press releases, done fundraising, managed legal threats (against the WMF itself), and a few other administrative tasks. This is slowly changing as the WMF gets more in the business of supporting outreach and editor activity, but in general it is still true that the projects are autonomous and editors have little to do with the WMF itself as far as day-to-day interaction.
- The Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation provide guidance
to the WMF, generally concerning themselves with big-picture issues.
- The Chapters are organizations in their respective geographic
locations that do outreach, events, etc as independent charitable organizations. They are hooked to the WMF through name and mission, and a few shared activities, but stand apart in their day-to-day activities.
It's important to realize that there are large volunteer communities surrounding *all* of these institutions, including technical development, and community members do a lot of work in all areas. This work is not necessarily (in fact usually is not) directly managed by the WMF or another formal group.
So you can see that defining precise relationships is hard.
- is there one main page instead of dozens for announcements and news,
with a RSS feed system, with selectable categories to choose what kind of information one wants to follow ?
Nope. That's a fantastic idea though. It's related to the idea that was recently re-raised on the English Wikipedia Signpost talkpage about having a centralized community newsletter for everyone on Meta.
- why, simply, the activity of the WMF is not published each day or
week? For example why the Gallimard letter and negociations were not made public? why the confidentiality instead of a transparency policy? why the causes, debates and decisions of Jimmy and the board in the recent censorship controversy were not published in time? I sincerely don't understand.
To answer the general question: you would not believe how much news there is on a daily basis from 11 projects in 250 languages with an additional 29 chapters, active Foundation, and enthusiastic volunteer community! You'd be doing nothing but reading news all day. Maybe it still should be aggregated somewhere...
If you are asking about just the news of the WMF, e.g. the activities of the Foundation that is based in San Francisco, that is easier and should be done better; though the announcements list is a pretty good way to keep up with major announcements, and most news does come through Foundation-l. I didn't pay attention to the letter you're concerned about, but the debate over censorship is a community-wide issue -- not WMF specific -- that *was* debated on this very list immediately and rapidly, pretty much as it happened. I don't know what you mean by not being published in time.
- how a newbie could understand the current activities and projects?
where to start? who to contact?
Start with: wikimedia-announce-l. Check out: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Goings-on. Consider reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:POST and, if it's ever revived, http://www.wikizine.org/. Beyond that, you might specify the *kinds* of projects you're interested in -- outreach is one thing, tech issues another.
- in case of emergency like the Fox News attack, is there a plan?
protocols? a priority channel? plannified meetings and groups of reflexion/discussion? plannified ways of updating the situation, of sharing official declarations and resources?
Sort of. For instance, press inquiries go to Jay Walsh at the Foundation and his team; in turn he works closely with a community committee called the Communications Committee (ComCom). That's where press releases come from. There is no regularized public forum for reflection on every issue that comes up; Foundation-l is as good a place as any. Announcements go out the normal ways. In other words... re the Fox News story, if you read the threads on commons, and read the many emails on this list, and participated in giving your views, you were as much a part of the debate as any other community member.
- are there ways to delegate, federate, synthesize, communicate opinions
and information between each community, chapter, board members?
I don't know. Are there? Everyone that I know involved with any kind of Wikimedia governance and decision making struggles with this, in large part because of the complexity and amount of information involved, and because it's not so simple as getting a "community" opinion -- we are both a part of the Wikimedia community, but we may well disagree.
This is a fundamental and important question though and one a lot of people care about.
I don't mean to force a type of governance or another, but simply to organize the information so it's easier for everybody to know what's happening.
Everything seems so fuzzy and chaotic currently. It seems that it all depends of the charism of hyperactive community members and the good will of board trustees. Please enlighten me.
Yes, but also the long-term perseverance and work of many community members (which designation includes staff and board, by the way) -- not just the hyperactive ones! Things are chaotic but they are not as fragile as they seem, either -- just very, very complex.
-- phoebe
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On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 12:23 AM, Noein pronoein@gmail.com wrote:
I've been watching the dialogues between the WMF and this mailing list for a while now and most of the conflicts are the same: bad communication. This is apparently not due to individuals but institutional.
I think you're wrong.
Try to get any sense out of the upper echelons of your phone company, your gas providers, whoever gives you your electricity.
The Wikimedia community is huge. The staff relatively small. It's unthinkable you'd write to AT&T and get a response from the CEO. Looked at in that light, the WMF is very transparent. The WMF office would be incapable of turning over every query the wider public has. We're a community and we should be supporting the office folk in their roles. They do not have a call centre and nor should they.
However, should you have a question that needs to be looked at by someone high up, my best recommendation is to be a good community member. If you have a rep for doing lots of good work on the projects you will come to the attention of WMF staff and they will communicate with you because they have to come to know and respect you.
To illustrate; I worked on the Wikimedia Strategy website for two or three months. During that time I had a few exchanges with Philippe who is now full-time (he was a contractor, I believe, when I was interacting with him)... and I just know that if I have any deep-seated problem, something I think is important *that the community can't answer for* I can go to him. And I can say to him "Hey, here's this thing. Who would you recommend I contact on this issue?"
However, that's on the trust that I won't pester him on any old thing that crosses my mind. It would have to be something big. And for the most part I would go to the community first, and if I felt there were a groundswell of opinion behind me I'd write to someone in the WMF and say "hey, look, there's a couple hundred people here taking one side on this issue and I think someone at WMF should take a look".
We cannot expect such a tiny staff to be open to all of us. You have to build out from your own opinion/idea, nurture and grow it and if it gains ground then go to the WMF.
User:Bodnotbod
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:11 PM, Bod Notbod bodnotbod@gmail.com wrote:
I think you're wrong.
Try to get any sense out of the upper echelons of your phone company, your gas providers, whoever gives you your electricity.
The Wikimedia community is huge. The staff relatively small. It's unthinkable you'd write to AT&T and get a response from the CEO. Looked at in that light, the WMF is very transparent. The WMF office would be incapable of turning over every query the wider public has. We're a community and we should be supporting the office folk in their roles. They do not have a call centre and nor should they.
However, should you have a question that needs to be looked at by someone high up, my best recommendation is to be a good community member. If you have a rep for doing lots of good work on the projects you will come to the attention of WMF staff and they will communicate with you because they have to come to know and respect you.
To illustrate; I worked on the Wikimedia Strategy website for two or three months. During that time I had a few exchanges with Philippe who is now full-time (he was a contractor, I believe, when I was interacting with him)... and I just know that if I have any deep-seated problem, something I think is important *that the community can't answer for* I can go to him. And I can say to him "Hey, here's this thing. Who would you recommend I contact on this issue?"
However, that's on the trust that I won't pester him on any old thing that crosses my mind. It would have to be something big. And for the most part I would go to the community first, and if I felt there were a groundswell of opinion behind me I'd write to someone in the WMF and say "hey, look, there's a couple hundred people here taking one side on this issue and I think someone at WMF should take a look".
We cannot expect such a tiny staff to be open to all of us. You have to build out from your own opinion/idea, nurture and grow it and if it gains ground then go to the WMF.
User:Bodnotbod
It doesn't make sense to compare the WMF to AT&T. I agree that compared with large corporations nationwide, the WMF is enormously communicative and transparent. On the other hand, it is after all a corporation designed to promote and preserve a set of community developed projects; the community in this case is not a group of passive consumers, but the most essential element of the entire corporate mission. More importantly, criticism of communication is not generalized pissyness - it is prompted by specific actions of the WMF or its staff / board on the projects, and applies to imperfect or incomplete communication around those actions. When the WMF makes a decision to intervene in the projects, full and informative communication isn't just a nice-if-you-can-get-it side benefit of dealing with a small company - it's essential to maintaining the fabric of a massively participatory and cooperative endeavor.
Nathan
Bod Notbod wrote:
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 12:23 AM, Noein pronoein@gmail.com wrote:
I've been watching the dialogues between the WMF and this mailing list for a while now and most of the conflicts are the same: bad communication. This is apparently not due to individuals but institutional.
I think you're wrong.
To paraphrase a common bromide in Finnish, I think he is right, wrong, and grand-daddys long-johns.
Try to get any sense out of the upper echelons of your phone company, your gas providers, whoever gives you your electricity.
The Wikimedia community is huge. The staff relatively small. It's unthinkable you'd write to AT&T and get a response from the CEO. Looked at in that light, the WMF is very transparent. The WMF office would be incapable of turning over every query the wider public has. We're a community and we should be supporting the office folk in their roles. They do not have a call centre and nor should they.
I think the big issue is that communication goes upwards, downwards, and laterally, and those are three issues that correctly shouldn't be mixed up, when examining how well we as a whole are doing in the field of internal communication.
However, should you have a question that needs to be looked at by someone high up, my best recommendation is to be a good community member. If you have a rep for doing lots of good work on the projects you will come to the attention of WMF staff and they will communicate with you because they have to come to know and respect you.
Absolutely true, but when the information is going downstream, there have been instances where there hasn't been a clear presumption that people in the various communities themselves know what they are doing, as a default, taken as a whole.
I genuinely think this is just a learning curve people who have come from more traditional top-down organizations have to pass through; and I have seen very encouraging signs that the staff can learn new tricks, and are gradually "getting it".
The big unadressed problem is lateral communication between particular organs. Top-down and bottom-up communication are things that generally tend to have a dynamic that is self-correcting (though sometimes drama-filled). But communication between parts that are nominally on the same level, is not so easily fixed.
Chapters are organizing as a conduit for such communication between languages -- though it has to be said at a snails pace, and in fits and starts.
On the foundation top level we all know that there is on-going work on how to optimize the advisory committees usefulness.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Sorry for not saving the previous text, formatting was getting to be a bit of a mess.
I do see that the page Yann linked to was created around the same time action was taken, by Cary, and lists the reason for the deletions and the content deleted. I'll assume this page was linked in several other places on fr.wikisource and didn't go unnoticed. It does seem to be that Yann is objecting to the enforcement of the demand, and perhaps the communication issue is less one between WMF and community and more (if anything) between WMF and the poster of content subject to a takedown.
I'm curious why the Foundation doesn't take direct action when it is responding to a takedown notice - is it not relevant to these notices whether the recipient or someone else takes the action requested?
While Yann did mention you and Cary by name, he did not accuse either of you of intentionally omitting or misleadingly characterizing facts. This isn't a court, perhaps it would be better to assume (or at least pretend to assume) good faith error on his part.
Nathan
Hello,
2010/6/3 Mike Godwin mnemonic@gmail.com:
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:15 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
Yann suggests that he (and the Wikisource community) did not know about the takedown in a timely manner; anyone not watching the files or the deletion logs might have missed it if the only note was in the deletion log.
But of course, the deletion log was not the only notice. And Yann Forget knew about the deletions at the time they occurred.
If you can't communicate certain facts during negotiations, why not do so afterwards?
Sometimes you can. I just did. But of course sometimes you can't, for reasons I've already outlined. (There's nothing magical about the passage of time that eliminates the disincentive effect of disclosing negotiations.)
There is some tension built into this general issue, though; Cary advises that the fr.wikisource project needs to make its own decisions about what content to allow, based on a local interpretation of applicable law -- and then the Foundation deletes content without (a) providing advice on what is acceptable and what isn't and (b) without referring to the local decisions the project was advised to take.
I'm not sure what advice you think it is even theoretically possible that the Foundation could have offered. Are you suggesting that the Foundation is acting as the lawyer for everyone who posts content to Wikisource? There are obvious reasons that is not a sustainable or feasible model.
You seem to have the impression that the Foundation staff directly deleted the content. Actually, I shared the list with Cary, who shared the list with community members who implemented the takedown. (I deleted no content myself.) So you can see why the whole notion that the takedown wasn't shared with the community seems flatly wrong to me. We absolutely engaged community members in implementing the takedown.
That's not exactly true. The deletions were done by a steward which is not a contributor to French Wikisource.
Yann seems to suggest that our actions have been some kind of big secret. The reality, however, is that we did nothing in secret, and that Yann in fact has known what we did for quite a while now. We even made it trivially easy to contact Gallimard and complain about the takedown. But I do understand that it is easier to complain about WMF than it is to pursue Gallimard directly, even though doing the latter might be a more effective choice.
I'll note also that the real complaint, as I perceive it, isn't really that we didn't communicate what we were doing. The real complaint is that we actually complied with a formally correct takedown notice, consistent with longstanding policy.
I don't know where you got that, but I have never said such a thing. Yes, what I am complaining about is merely communication.
The only notice was the following, which I find a bit short and dry.
"The Wikimedia Foundation received a request from Editions Gallimard to takedown content from the French Wikisource. This request is based on Editions Gallimard's claim that Wikisource content in the French language targets the French public, and therefore, under French conflict of laws principles, the copyright law of France applies to this content."
A short phrase mentioning that might be a temporary deletion done according to the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act might be enough for us to find what is going on. If you cannot, or do not want explain yourself this process, you could have ask someone else to do it. I can't accept your assertion that every contributor has to be an expert on US copyright law.
There are two other assertions which are false: 1. That I didn't inform the Wikisource community about Gallimard demand. I have always informed the community about the information I got, either from Gallimard, or from you. 2. That I try to avoid litigation. In fact I make a point not to hide behind a pseudonym, and I would send them my address to Gallimard if they ask for it. And they probably target me only because I am the only contributor which they were able to find the real identity.
Now I have a few questions which you should be able to answer: 1. Did Gallimard send a lawsuit? If yes, the Wikisource community, and probably many other contributors might be interested to know about it. If not, how long do we have to wait before restoring the deleted works?
2. Is there on-going negotiations with Gallimard?
3. I am not sure I understand the process you mention in another mail about reposting the content, compliant with applicable notice-and-takedown law. Someone else might also be able to explain that.
--Mike
Regards,
Yann
2010/6/3 Yann Forget yannfo@gmail.com:
- Is there on-going negotiations with Gallimard?
Forget about that. I just read your mail after sending mine.
Regards,
Yann
Obligatory: I'm not a lawyer (or an expert) but did try to poke around a bit for you.
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 12:18 AM, Yann Forget yannfo@gmail.com wrote:
1. Did Gallimard send a lawsuit? If yes, the Wikisource community, and
probably many other contributors might be interested to know about it. If not, how long do we have to wait before restoring the deleted works?
From what I understand they only sent the Cease and Desist letter. My
understanding of the law and Mike is that by following through with that letter they greatly protect themselves from any future lawsuit because they did so (even if you file a counter-notice and reupload, and they don't re-delete it).
2. Is there on-going negotiations with Gallimard?
There were some but not anymore according to him in another email (I assume you'll probably see that before I send this...) I think the problem now is that by releasing the content of those you can make it less likely future groups will negotiate because they know you may release it.
- I am not sure I understand the process you mention in another mail
about reposting the content, compliant with applicable notice-and-takedown law. Someone else might also be able to explain that.
After poking around a bit both
http://www.chillingeffects.org/keyword.cgi?KeywordID=88 (which has some nice examples) and http://www.newmediarights.org/guide/legal/copyright/dmca/Step_4_assessing_th... may be good places to start. Actually that is the last part in a for part article that actually looks like it would be very helpful reading on the topic (I haven't read it all yet but looks good so far).
Basically the idea is that if you send a letter to the WMF saying that you do indeed have the right to upload "such and such" and the company was mistaken in requesting it's removal (I believe you have to copy in the sender of the take down notice as well but I don't see it in every example I've seen). Once the WMF receives that they are under no obligation to remove the content anymore (again, I think).
James Alexander james.alexander@rochester.edu jamesofur@gmail.com
Ahh this is what I was looking for http://www.chillingeffects.org/responses/notice.cgi?NoticeID=1048#QID132 (at least us legal requirements for a counter notice) and their counter-notice generator http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca/counter512.pdf that may help you at least start
James Alexander james.alexander@rochester.edu jamesofur@gmail.com
Hello,
2010/6/3 James Alexander jamesofur@gmail.com:
Ahh this is what I was looking for http://www.chillingeffects.org/responses/notice.cgi?NoticeID=1048#QID132 (at least us legal requirements for a counter notice) and their counter-notice generator http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca/counter512.pdf that may help you at least start
James Alexander james.alexander@rochester.edu jamesofur@gmail.com
Thank you James. That's the information we just need.
I think a great deal of misunderstanding would be avoided if this information was provided to Wikisource contributors at the time of the deletion (I don't mean that Mike has to do this himself, but we need a way to make contributors aware of this process.).
Regards,
Yann
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 6:00 AM, Mike Godwin mnemonic@gmail.com wrote:
We cannot inform you about all the details communicated in an ongoing negotiation with parties threatening us with litigation. Apart from whether doing so would be consistent with legal ethics, it would also provide a disincentive for complaining parties to negotiate with us at all.
It sounds like you are suggesting that there is ongoing dialog between WMF and Gallimard.. ?
Official legal policy is to comply with properly crafted takedown notices. This has been our policy since long before I arrived at WMF. I'm surprised that you didn't know this before now.
And what is the process _after_ the takedown?
Did the National Portrait Gallery not provide a properly crafted take down notice?
-- John Vandenberg
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 8:08 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
It sounds like you are suggesting that there is ongoing dialog between WMF and Gallimard.. ?
There is not.
And what is the process _after_ the takedown?
The takedown is normally the end of the process. Unless you are asking something else. Please be aware that I cannot offer you legal advice about how to respond to a takedown. There are a number of resources online, including I believe on Wikipedia (or linked from there), that may give you pointers. One of the few put-up notices I have received was perfectly executed by a non-lawyer Wikipedian.
Did the National Portrait Gallery not provide a properly crafted take down notice?
That's correct.
--Mike
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