[Foundation-l] Italian Wikipedia protest - retrospective legislation?

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

WereSpielChequers, 05/10/2011 13:51:
> Webpages are only permanent if someone keeps hosting them. I can see that
> if the Italian Wikipedia was back up  someone in Italy might send a note to
> the WMF asking them to comply with this Italian law. But if an editor is no
> longer active on the site it would be retrospective legislation to oblige
> them to return to a site in 2012 and publish a rebuttal note to something
> they wrote in 2006.
>
> If it is retrospective legislation then there may an opportunity for the
> opposition to appeal to the European Court.

You seem to confuse this proposed law with the Barberini vs. Galilei 
issue: it's not about rebuttals, it's about publishing of corrections 
and statements. There's no need to ask the original author, everyone 
could be asked to.

> If this legislation is passed then one option would be for the Italian
> Wikipedia to be restored, but with a site notice explaining that "This site
> is hosted n the USA and operates under US law rather than Italian law, click
> here if you are in Italy and need to see rebuttals posted under Italian law"
> . Then you could have a rebuttal namespace transcluded onto the article for
> those who have said they are in Italy and therefore need to see the
> rebuttals.

I don't think we should solicit such requests, but perhaps it's too soon 
to discuss such implementation details as the specific namespace and so on.
Besides, the existence of a sensible process to respect the law wouldn't 
prevent people from following different ones, under the crazy original 
paragraph 29. Again, think of the 20 M€ trial against WM-IT president...

> This blackout is bound to lead to more Italians reading and perhaps editing
> other language versions of Wikipedia instead. It would be interesting to
> hear from the WMF what their policy would be on IP requests from the Italian
> Police, particularly if any were made re Italian editors editing other
> language versions of Wikipedia.

I'm not sure the police can ask IPs here. Not that the police respects 
the law.

> In the meantime there may be an unusual number of  Italian editors seeking
> renames from named accounts to pseudonymous ones. Would it be possible to
> upgrade that process so that mailing list archives, former signatures on
> talkpages and other uses of an editor's name were also amended?

That wouldn't be effective. Alternative identities should be created and 
then privately communicate through clandestine means... :-/

Nemo