[Advocacy Advisors] meeting with Google on 'right to be forgotten'

[Amgine]

On May 30, 2014, at 6:04, Luis Villa <lvilla at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> ...
> With those reminders aside, I would be interested to hear this group's thoughts on next steps here from a Wikimedian *cultural* perspective. Ignore the legal question for the moment: should editors be handling things differently than they currently do? The same?...?
> 
> Thanks-
> Luis


Many Wikimedians are ideologues[1] when it comes to issues of privacy and freedom of knowledge. This particular issue might have been designed to cause community disruption for Wikipedia as it places those values in conflict.

However, a simplified reading of the Foundation and its projects focuses on making knowledge available freely. So it seems to me the Foundation is doing well in working to allow the communities to be uncensored - not even self-censored where possible. Such a reading would encourage communities to resist calls to omit or remove accurate information, and to also disseminate when such calls are made in the interests of transparency. It would be useful to automate the process of making such requests, publishing the requests, and where appropriate denying them. (This would, handily, also give OTRS folks an easy answer: "Please use our process at [link]")

One important note is that programs such as the one used in Germany, which suppresses reporting of facts under an individual's 'right to be forgotten', removes the ability to find (or in some cases to use) authorities and primary sources as citations. It brings to mind the actions of the Roman Inquisition[2] regarding heliocentrism, banning books which even referenced the concept.

Amgine

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idealogue
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Inquisition
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