[Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Politics

[Robin Shannon]

while i fully support all the causes you mentioned, i would hate to
see the foundation become a political body. That having been said, a
group of wikimedians, unattached to wikimedia who campaign in an
organised way for the rights of wikimedians, and for freedom of
information, i would consider joining and supporting.

[[User:The bellman]]
rjs


On 25 Nov 2004 02:16:00 +0100, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I would like to open up the issue of the WMF getting involved in political
> matters, such as copyrights and patents. This has so far been mostly
> theoretical, but the rapid growth of our organization allows us to
> contemplate it, and maybe get our feet wet in a few example cases. I'm
> looking a couple of years into the future here, in part so we can come up
> with a good strategy, but also to open up minds and demolish taboos.
> 
> There are two primary risks I see with any political activity of the WMF:
> 
> 1) The Board may be too small to make representative decisions on its own,
> so we need a validation process to figure out which issues we can and
> which ones we cannot become involved in.
> 
> 2) Advocacy is, by definition, never NPOV, so it cannot happen within the
> context of our content-based projects. A certain extent of alienation is
> inevitable with any position the WMF takes, political or not, but it is of
> key importance that this does not affect the perception or the reality of
> our projects.
> 
> There is one risk which I am sure people will bring up, which is that "We
> don't have the resources to do this! We should stick to what we can do!"
> Without wanting to sound too dismissive, that objection is raised to
> virtually every new activity we define. It is valid in the sense that we
> shouldn't start anything which we cannot properly finish. But as new
> projects and new activities attract people from within the community, they
> also attract newcomers, who can cross over into other projects.
> 
> In cases where there are strong and experienced groups working on an
> issue, such as software patents, it will often be unwise to start a new
> one, though we may often be able to assist in many ways.
> 
> I consider wise political decision-making of key importance for the future
> survival and prosperity of our organization and our projects. We are
> creating a gigantic, global community here, which will increasingly not
> just be Wikipedia, but "the Wikimedia community". This group identity,
> which we will build and strengthen in the coming years, is of immense
> political value, for activism, for its technological superiority to most
> traditional organizations, and for issue-centric fundraising.
> 
> We have a great chance to make a world-wide difference, and to change
> society for the better by engaging in smart advocacy and lobbyism. We need
> to proceed carefully, of course, and we can use a few agreeable test cases
> to do that.
> 
> == What we can do ==
> 
> As I said, any political advocacy has to happen outside the context of our
> individual wiki projects, whose neutrality is inviolable. But there are
> other options:
> - press releases by the Wikimedia Foundation
> - the Wikimedia newsletter
> - the Foundation website
> - a to-be-created email list (wikiaction?)
> - websites which we create for specific campaigns
> - endorsement of a petition or initiative
> - real political lobbyism, AKA "employing professionals to engage in goal-
> oriented discourse with democratically elected representatives"
> - legal action, defense funds
> 
> == Issues which concern us ==
> 
> The WMF should stay out of general political issues, I think - we should
> seek out those which have a demonstrable impact on our work, and which are
> agreeable to the largest number of people. Here are a few examples:
> 
> * Software patents. Various open source leaders have just endorsed the
> www.nosoftwarepatents.com initiative, and I can easily see the WMF being
> one of the supporting organizations. Why does the issue matter so much?
> Because a project like MediaWiki, the software which we use, can be made
> effectively illegal through them. We don't necessarily need to oppose
> patentability of software per se, but we should seek an exemption for open
> source software at the very least. This is one matter where we should
> clearly work with the groups that are there, rather than creating a new
> one.
> 
> * Copyright terms. Pretty much everyone who's not a corporation or works
> for one agrees that our current copyright terms are ridiculous. Hence, it
> would be relatively easy to build an effective movement to reduce them.
> Most works are protected for 70 years after the death of the author, which
> means that if I died tomorrow, anything which I have created which is not
> explicitly licensed will only be available for use by Wikimedia projects
> by 2074. Worse, these terms get extended on a regular basis, because
> there's not yet a strong lobby against them.
> 
> The potential benefits of even a short reduction in terms for Wikimedia
> are enormous. Thousands of works - encyclopedias, photos, non-fiction
> books, and so forth - would suddenly become available to us. A significant
> reduction, say to a fixed 15 years term, could lead to an unprecedented
> cultural renaissance as millions of works become available for free
> sharing by all of humanity. This is absolutely in line with our mission.
> 
> I would estimate the overall cost of an effective global campaign to be
> about $50,000 at least. What we could do fairly soon is endorse existing
> initiatives and groups who are working on this, but unlike for the
> software patent issue, I don't see any single one out there which is doing
> this effectively.
> 
> * Copyrights on government-produced materials. As most of you will be
> aware, content created by employees of the federal government of the
> United States in their official capacity is automatically put in the
> public domain. Few other governments have similar rules - and those which
> do tend to use "non-commercial only" licenses.
> 
> Changing these rules should not be too hard, as there are clear advantages
> for any government which does this. For instance, right now, many of our
> Wikipedia background articles on the political situation in certain
> countries come directly from the US State Department. This is not good in
> terms of NPOV, and other countries have a strategic interest to have their
> positions represented in works like Wikipedia - which can then try to
> build a neutral picture from a large assortment of public domain sources.
> 
> Another example: voanews.com is a US government news site, and thus public
> domain. Wikinews could use its articles, essentially publishing US
> government propaganda (if it is accepted by the community as reasonably
> neutral). If Wikinews becomes important, other countries will have an
> interest in counterbalancing this influence.
> 
> Let me make this crystal clear: It's the current situation - just a
> handful of countries putting their materials into the PD - which leads to
> POV. The more countries put there materials in the public domain or under
> a truly free license, the more neutral material we can create on that
> basis.
> 
> * Specific copyright issues. One example would be the copyrightability of
> reproductions of images which are in the public domain. So far, courts
> have ruled in our favor on this issue, but many corporations are
> interested in changing this. That would allow corporations, in an unholy
> alliance with museums, to effectively put public domain works into a
> proprietary state: Photos have to be licensed, and museums don't allow you
> to take your own unless you comply with some kind of agreement. Some
> museums already try to do that, though they all know that they're
> currently on shaky legal ground.
> 
> Another example is art which is permanently exposed to the public. One
> example would be the wrapping of the Reichstag building in Berlin by the
> Bulgarian artist Christo. A German high court has ruled that, because this
> art installation was temporary, the artist would hold commercial rights on
> photographs of the wrapped Reichstag! Such precedents are very dangerous
> to us, and we should fight them on every level.
> 
> * Censorship. This is of course a very broad issue, but it clearly
> concerns us quite directly. It is also, interestingly enough, an issue
> where we can open up new sources of funding. For example, the United
> States government has funded organizations which fight against censorship
> under totalitarian regimes which it opposes. We should be very careful
> with using the "C-word", and try to be cooperative if at all possible. But
> NPOV is not negotiable, and if a wiki project cannot operate as a neutral
> one, then we should work to change the laws to make that possible.
> 
> * The Digital Divide. There are quite a few things we can do which
> directly relate to our wiki projects in order to bridge the Digital
> Divide. One idea I like is refurbishing used PCs with Linux and putting a
> Wikimedia Content Reader application on them. We could try to create a
> decentralized, voluntary distribution network for such refurbished
> machines. We can also run fundraising campaigns specifically to distribute
> print editions, or to buy and distribute specialized small, cheap devices
> which are likely to become mainstream in the near future. For developing
> countries, solar or curb power would be good.
> 
> == How to proceed ==
> 
> With all this future talk, is there anything we can do right now? I
> believe so. There are existing initiatives working on the issues I just
> mentioned, and on others which concern them. We should catalog them, and
> can support them prominently on the Foundation Website, and we can endorse
> their petitions, campaigns and open letters.
> 
> I think there needs to be a process for political activity of any kind
> which is similar to the procedure for creating new projects:
> proposal => discussion => poll / consensus => board approval => action
> 
> The Board could handle issues which require quick actions: laws which are
> about to be passed, initiatives by other groups, lawsuits, and so forth.
> In such cases, there could be a post-approval process to validate the
> Board's actions, but they should generally only be taken if there's
> precedent.
> 
> Within the next 6 months or so, I would like to start one such initiative
> on the software patent issue, i.e. take an official Foundation position on
> the matter and support the organizations, especially in Europe, working on
> it. We can move forward here one issue at a time, without overstretching
> our energy and resources.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> 


-- 
hit me: robin.shannon.id.au
jab me: saudade at jabber.zim.net.au

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons 
Recombo Plus License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/