We are Wikimedians working on EU policy to foster
free knowledge, access to information and freedom of expression.
Today, the European Commission has leaked its proposal for a “Data Act”, a piece of legislation that is supposed to include a revision of the Database Directive and the sui generis right for the creators of databases (SGR) it establishes.
Read More »Data Act: A small step for databases, an even smaller step for the EU2021 marked the 20th anniversary of Swedish Wikipedia, which we made sure to celebrate on several occasions here in Sweden. Today, almost nine out of ten Swedes regularly use the website, and polls show that it is one of only a very few platforms that Swedes find trustworthy across the political spectrum. More and more institutions and organizations realize the importance and value of working with the Wikimedia platforms. In its 2021 report, the Swedish Museums Association finds that out of the 233 million reported digital views of their members’ works, 185 million originated from Wikipedia. And then only 19 out of their 230 members reported Wikipedia statistics, indicating that the real number could be much higher.
Wikimedians don’t, however, operate in vacuum. In 2021, Wikimedia Sverige saw more and more reasons to intensify our efforts to safeguard the free and open internet, especially when it comes to protecting the rights and freedoms of the users. Pretty much everyone loves Wikipedia, but not everyone understands that Wikipedia can only thrive in a digital sphere where legislation allows for creativity and sharing.
In this text, we will try to outline some of the major battles Wikimedia Sverige fought in 2021, some of the achievements – and some of our hopes for the future. On top of the support that we, as always, give our lobbying team in Brussels.
Read More »Retrospective: A Year of Advocacy at Wikimedia SverigeWikimedia France looks back on 2021, a year of advocacy campaigns at national and European level. Bringing the voice of community-governed platforms such as Wikipedia – besides the commercial ones – is not always easy. And while legislators and policy makers receive our arguments and concerns generally positively, there is still a long way to go before our messages and initiatives claim to be embedded in the texts that shape and frame the digital of tomorrow.
Several bills have, this past year, impacted Wikimedia projects and particularly the collaborative online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Without going into a Prévert-style inventory, Wikimedia France wants to come back to some of its battles that it has carried out relentlessly, in order to defend a vision of a free and open Internet, protecting the rights and freedoms of users.
The bill reinforcing respect for republican principles, originally called “law project against separatism”, was not intended to regulate digital platforms. Indeed, the main objective of this text was to “fight against radical Islam and separatism”. But policy experts ended up qualifying it as a “catch-all”, insofar as a lot of subject matter had been inserted into it, including digital issues.
Read More »Retrospective: a year of advocacy at Wikimedia FranceYesterday the European Parliament adopted its negotiation position on the EU’s new content moderation rules, the so-called Digital Services Act. The version of the text prepared by the Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) was mostly adopted, but a few amendments were added.
Read More »DSA: Parliament adopts position on EU Content Moderation RulesThe EU is working on universal rules on content moderation, the Digital Services Act (DSA). Its co-legislators, the European Parliament (EP) and the Council, have adopted their respective negotiating positions in breakneck time by Brussels standards. Next, they will negotiate a final version with each other.
While the EP’s plenary vote on the DSA is up in January and amendments are still possible, most changes parliamentarians agreed upon will stay. We therefore feel that this is a good moment to look at what both houses are proposing and how it may reflect on community-driven projects like Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.
European Union is dreaming of becoming a global digital powerhouse. This dream is neither unfounded nor silly. On the contrary, we have everything that’s needed to build a resilient European internet. Unfortunately, as our human dreams tend to, the “Path to the Digital Decade” Policy Programme compiles big words with old solutions and seemingly random actions. Does it mean that we will sleep through the opportunities of the decade that, whether we prepare for it or not, is bound to be digital?
FKAGEU feedback on the Policy Programme “Path to the Digital Decade“
With its strong balance between freedom of business and interventionism, founded on long traditions of freedom of expression and access to information paired with functioning political instruments to legislate across national jurisdictions, Europe is uniquely positioned to regulate, shape, invest and inspire the emergence of the European internet. So where are we with that?
To recap: we have the existing framework of the Digital Single Market: “the digital Schengen” aimed at legislating to lift barriers of access to products and services. This framework is embodied through the legislation ranging from the new directive on copyright in DSM, geo-blocking regulation, terrorist content regulation (sic!) as well as the three acts that are now going through the legislative process: Digital Markets, Digital Services and Artificial Intelligence Act.
Read More »Path to the Digital Decade: do EU policy-makers dream of electric sheep?We have it! Both the Council of the European Union and the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee adopted their versions of the Digital Markets Act. After the upcoming EP Plenary vote we will spend a good part of 2022 following the intransparent and unpredictable negotiations between the two bodies. Let’s take a look at what they are bringing to the negotiating table if it comes to big ideas and, above all, new benefits for users.
After the European Commission showed its proposals for the Digital Markets Act, there were different views on how to make it better; the EC proposal lacked teeth, especially regarding any mechanisms that could break the grip that GAFAM has on the internet. For us, at Wikimedia, the most desired approach would have been to address the business model and not merely base the gatekeeper qualification on turnover and market capitalisation.
It turned out very quickly, however, that the legislators are not in a mood to overturn the status quo. That was not exactly the key objective for the IMCO Committee Rapporteur, although Shadow Rapporteurs managed to introduce good ideas, as we will see below. Now we are awaiting the Plenary vote, most likely on December 16th. It remains to be seen whether the IMCO report will be in any way amended. But it doesn’t seem likely that the changes, if any, are substantial and it is unlikely that the file that the need for is so widely understood would be rejected.
Read More »DMA votes: IMCO vs. Council, users vs. Member States
If the EU really wants to revamp the online world, it should start shaping legislation with the platform models in mind it likes to support, instead of just going after the ones it dislikes.
Whistleblowers are important. They often provide evidence and usually carry conversations forward. They might be able to open the debate to new audiences. I am grateful to Frances Haugen for having the courage to speak and the energy to do it over and over again across countries, as the discussion is indeed global.
On the other hand the hearings didn’t reveal anything completely new, we didn’t learn something we didn’t already know. We live in a time where the peer-to-peer internet has essentially been replaced by a network of platforms, which, in their overwhelming majority, are for-profit, data-collecting and indispensable in everyday life.
Read More »Editorial: The DSA debate after Haugen and before the triloguesThe ePrivacy Regulation could potentially make communications better by setting a firm standard on how online tools can and cannot be used in profiling and surveilling individuals. We became directly interested in the proposal for a regulation when we realised that the proposed rules on how our chapters and affiliates can communicate with their supporters are ambiguous. Here is the breakdown of the problems and ways out.
The Regulation concerning the respect for private life and the protection of personal data in electronic communications (a full name of a Regulation on Privacy and Electronic Communications, or ePrivacy Regulation) is now subject to trilogue negotiations. We specifically look into provisions on the scope of direct marketing. As much as we don’t “market” any services or products for sale to individuals, we all want to keep in touch with our supporters. According to the ePrivacy proposal such communication falls under the definition of direct marketing. This concerns organisations in our movement that contact individuals to solicit donations or to encourage them to volunteer in various ways in support of our movement’s mission.
Currently in several Member States, based on the ePrivacy Directive and subsequent national laws, nonprofits have the right to contact individuals who they were in touch with before, on an opt-out basis. It means that while they present a new initiative or a fundraising campaign, they need to provide the contacted people with a possibility to refuse receiving such information in the future.
Read More »e-Privacy: our quick fix to help nonprofits and protect consentThere are many bots on Wikipedia, computer-controlled “user accounts” that perform simple, repetitive, maintenance-related tasks. Most are simple, trained to fix typos or using a list of blacklisted words to determine vandalism. ClueBot NG uses a combination of different detection methods which use machine learning at their core.
A bot (a common nickname for a software robot) is an automated tool that carries out repetitive and mundane tasks. Bots are used to maintain different Wikimedia projects across language versions. Bots are able to make edits very rapidly, but can disrupt Wikipedia if they are incorrectly designed or operated. False positives are an issue as well. For these reasons, a bot policy has been developed.There are currently 2,534 bot tasks approved for use on the English Wikipedia; however, not all approved tasks involve actively carrying out edits. Bots will leave messages on user talk pages if the action that the bot has carried out is of interest to that editor. There are 323 bots flagged with the “bot” flag right now (and over 400 former bots) on English Wikipedia. On Bulgarian Wikipedia, a much smaller language version, there are currently 106 bot accounts, but only a number of them are active. Projects by smaller communities sometimes need to rely more on machines for page maintenance.
Read More »Meet “ClueBot NG”, an AI Tool to tackle Wikipedia vandalism
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