New subject: Category: French Jews on en.wp / GPDR

26 May 2018

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with on a case by case basis until national laws have been superseded by 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=rechExpCnil&id=C…)

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).

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