Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-07-03/News and notes
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Foundation and British chapter launch last-ditch attempt to get Wikipedia exempted from the UK's sweeping "Online Safety Bill"
On June 29, Wikimedia UK and the Wikimedia Foundation published an open letter (accompanied by social media campaign) asking the UK government and parliament to exempt "public interest projects" - such as Wikipedia - from the proposed Online Safety Bill. The chapter states in an accompanying Medium post that
"[the OSB's] requirements around content moderation, age-gating, and user verification are incompatible with the way in which information on Wikipedia is created and curated, as well as the website’s commitment to user privacy and freedom of speech. ... As it is currently written, the Online Safety Bill could require the Wikimedia Foundation to collect data about Wikipedia users’ identities, track their actions, intervene in their editing processes, and interfere with their ability to set and enforce rules for what constitutes well-sourced neutral content about a given subject. Such requirements are counter to Wikipedia’s editorial guidelines and policies, as well as its privacy policy."
In a post on the Public Policy mailing list, the WMF's Global Advocacy team put the open letter in context of previous efforts (see our previous reporting) and stressed its timeliness:
"In December 2022, Wikimedia UK and the Wikimedia Foundation began outreach to British regulators to educate them on how our projects work and how the Online Safety Bill would threaten them. Over the last several months, we ramped up our advocacy efforts as the bill was debated in the House of Lords. We successfully convinced key Lords and Baronesses to support our proposed amendments and built public and media attention, but the UK Government has resisted making the necessary changes.
Our best chance of protecting Wikipedia is to persuade the UK Government to exempt public interest projects from the OSB, so we’ve written this open letter and formed a coalition of signatories. The list is a testament to the network of allies that WMUK has established over years of promoting free knowledge in the UK. If the government fails to act, our last chance to push this exemption to protect Wikipedia is with Parliament during the Bill’s “Report Stage” voting, starting on 6 July."
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Brief notes
- Annual reports: Wikimedia Ukraine (in Ukrainian, English-language Diff post with key highlights here. For more on Ukraine see Stories of Ukrainian Wikimedians during the war
- New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee announced the approval of this month's newest Wikimedia movement affiliate, the .
- New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrators,
- Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects reached milestones this week:
- Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is ARTICLE. Please be bold in helping improve this article!
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