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."
The public statements of both organizations are (perhaps understandably) short on concrete examples of how the new law might require WMF to "intervene in [the community's] editing processes, and interfere with their ability to set and enforce rules for what constitutes well-sourced neutral content about a given subject". But it is not hard to imagine that it might become difficult to maintain the "Wikipedia is not censored" principle in its current form, were Wikipedia and its sister projects to continue to remain accessible in the UK in non-age-gated form. The current situation - where the Foundation largely relies on the volunteer editing community to set and enforce content rules on potentially offensive or sexual content - is informed by extensive controversies over a decade ago. See the Signpost's previous reporting: "Foundation commissions external recommendations about objectionable material " (2010), "2010 in review", "'Personal image filter' to offer the ability to hide sexual or violent media" (2011), "News and notes", July 16, 2012 ("At Wikimania the board formally acknowledged the divisiveness of the filter, rescinding its request for the development of the filter mechanism while reaffirming the general principles it had espoused concerning controversial content").
What's more, Wikimedia UK's FAQ argues that one major problem of the bill is its vagueness, giving broad powers to regulators and the executive to decide on concrete requirements and update them in the future:
"As the Bill stands, PIPs [public interest projects, such as Wikipedia] will be required to understand and apply this new 260-page law, which imposes at least 29(3) new and often onerous legal duties. Worse still, as a “skeleton” (or “future proofed framework” law), the Bill’s full impact on PIPs will only become clear to them once they have also mastered dozens of additional “implementation” rules, guidelines and Codes of Practice that will be issued by Ofcom and the Secretary of State."
Furthermore,
The Bill’s clearest requirements are often the most problematic for PIPs: for example, even “citizen history” and “open science” projects will be required to perform statutory assessments of their impact on (i) illegal immigration; (ii) operation of unlicensed crossbow rental businesses; (iii) selling stolen goods; (iv) controlling prostitutes; (v) and displaying words contrary to the Public Order Act 1986 (among many other “Priority offences”) (clause 8(5), read with Schedule 7).
The Bill may even subject the more widely-used PIPs to a new duty to submit annual earnings and userbase statistics to Ofcom, so that Ofcom can, if it sees fit to do so, charge that PIP a new “fee” — in essence, a tax to operate in the UK (Clauses 74-77). Ofcom is also given the power to force PIPs to use content filtering and user blocking technologies, without a judge. Those same “proactive technology requirement” powers have already attracted widespread criticism for threatening the privacy and confidentiality of WhatsApp and Signal conversations.
Noncompliance exposes PIPs to serious fines, UK blocking orders, and even staff imprisonment.
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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 and Diff post on Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine); Wikimedia Colombia.
- 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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