Access To Italian Wikipedia Blocked In Protest Of Wiretapping Bill In Italy [Updated]

from the who-needs-encyclopedias-anyway? dept

If you go to the Italian version of Wikipedia, you will not find a gateway to 847,000 articles in that language, but (at the time of writing, at least) an unusual letter to the reader:

the Italian language Wikipedia may be no longer able to continue providing the service that over the years was useful to you, and that you expected to have right now. As things stand, the page you want still exists and is only hidden, but the risk is that soon we will be forced to actually delete it.

This action has been taken by the Italian Wikipedia editors to draw attention to an Italian bill that is being discussed by the Italian Parliament at the moment:

Today, unfortunately, the very pillars on which Wikipedia has been built - neutrality, freedom, and verifiability of its contents - are likely to be heavily compromised by paragraph 29 of a law proposal, also known as "DDL intercettazioni" (Wiretapping Act).

This proposal, which the Italian Parliament is currently debating, provides, among other things, a requirement to all websites to publish, within 48 hours of the request and without any comment, a correction of any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image.

Unfortunately, the law does not require an evaluation of the claim by an impartial third judge - the opinion of the person allegedly injured is all that is required, in order to impose such correction to any website.

Hence, anyone who feels offended by any content published on a blog, an online newspaper and, most likely, even on Wikipedia can directly request to publish a "corrected" version, aimed to contradict and disprove the allegedly harmful contents, regardless of the truthfulness of the information deemed as offensive, and its sources.

There's been some lively discussion on the Wikimedia mailing list about this move. Some, for example, thought that the Italian community had overstepped the mark by blacking-out the site in this way, but the main Wikimedia Foundation has now issued this message of support:

The Wikimedia Foundation stands with our volunteers in Italy who are challenging the recently drafted "DDL intercettazioni" (or Wiretapping Bill) bill in Italy. This bill would hinder the work of projects like Wikipedia: open, volunteer-driven, and collaborative spaces dedicated to sharing high-quality knowledge, not to mention the ability for all users of the internet to engage in democratic, free speech opportunities.

Wikipedians the world over pride themselves on their ability to rapidly remove false information from their project. Wikipedia has established methods to receive complaints or concerns from individuals or organizations and a strong system exists to remove incorrect or false information, and if necessary to remove complete articles in an effort to prevent vandalism. For Wikipedians, there is no value nor need for this proposed legislation.

The other issue raised on the mailing list discussion is to what extent the Italian law, if passed, would apply to Wikipedia, since it is not an Italian organization, and the servers are in the US and the Netherlands. Italian editors are nonetheless worried they would be on the receiving end of legal threats anyway, and would rather not find out the hard way whether their work on the Italian Wikipedia were subject to the new legislation.

Then there's also the little matter of the Italian Constitution, part of which says:

Article 21 [Freedom of Communication]

(1) Everyone has the right to freely express thoughts in speech, writing, and by other communication. (2) The press may not be controlled by authorization or submitted to censorship.

All-in-all, the Italian politicians behind this proposed legislation emerge with little honor; at the very least, the new law will cast a chill over freedom of expression online in Italy, and at worst could see the Italian Wikipedia shut down permanently – a huge loss for its users and Italian culture.

Update: Via Carl Levinson, Roberta Ranzani and Jillian C. York on Google+, we've learned that the controversial paragraph 29 of the Wiretapping bill has been dropped (details in Italian). It's not clear exactly why, but the action by the Italian Wikipedia must surely have concentrated people's minds. However, it's important to note that the rest of the bill is still going forward - and has plenty of other changes that will harm freedom of speech in Italy if enacted.

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Filed Under: censorship, free speech, italy, wikipedia
Companies: wikipedia

DailyDirt: Biological Taxonomy 2.0

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Classifying every kind of life form isn't an easy task. Technology helps a little bit, but there's no really quick way to scan for lifeforms just yet. Still, there are a bunch of folks out there who are obsessed with tracking and categorizing various animals and plants (and fungi and bacteria and...). Here are some cool projects that are working on identifying biodiversity from all over the world.

• The International Barcode of Life (iBOL) project aims to create a DNA-based reference library for all multi-cellular life on Earth. It's a fairly ambitious project, but at least they're not trying to look for extra-terrestrial life, too... [url]
• The Encyclopedia of Life project is like a Wikipedia just for biological organisms. A web page for every species, and a car in every garage? [url]
• A barcode-like system called Stripespotter is cataloging zebra stripes so that field researchers can track the zebras they've already photographed. The system could also potentially be used for other animals with unique fur patterns -- like tigers, giraffes or your pets. [url]
• Endangered sharks are being tracked by their DNA -- which can be used to tell where these sharks grew up geographically due to their mating behavior. Sharks don't need iPhones in order for people to track them, but they do need freakin' lasers on their heads already. [url]
• To discover more interesting biology-related stuff, check out what's currently running around on StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: biodiversity, dna barcode, shark, stripespotter, zebra
Companies: encyclopedia of life, international barcode of life, wikipedia

Does The NY Times Donate To Wikipedia For Being A Massive Source Of Information?

from the questions,-questions dept

Glyn Moody points us to an interesting analysis, by David Gerard, of yet another problem with the NY Times' moronic paywall: that it means the NY Times will be cited a lot less on Wikipedia, thereby handing over the "first draft of history" to other publications like The Guardian and the BBC.

But the even more interesting point comes after that:

Every journalist I've spoken to since 2006 uses Wikipedia as their handy universal backgrounder. Funnily enough, there's a distinct lack of donations to the Wikimedia Foundation from newspapers and media organisations. How much did the New York Times donate in the fundraiser?

We do this stuff for everyone to use and reuse. Journalists taking full advantage of this is absolutely fine. But claiming we should then pay the papers for the privilege is just a little odious.

Marcus Carab, who works in a newsroom, made a similar point in response to that article a few weeks ago when the NYTime's Bill Keller claimed that the Huffington Post was a "pirate site," in that newspaper reporters rely on tons of other sources that never get any credit, let alone payment (excuse Marcus' Canadianisms, he can't help it):

Forget the fact that pavement-pounding reporting is a form of aggregation from the public - newspapers actively aggregate from tonnes of published sources too. Every newsroom has a table covered in copies of every other newspaper in town - in case you missed something, or they got an angle you didn't, or you think one of the stories can be taken further. In addition to reporting, all journalists do research: they look up other articles on the topic, find past magazine interviews and pull data from published reports. Many science articles in newspapers are just summaries of journal articles.

And that's just what went on and still goes on in the traditional media ecosystem, amongst the old players. Newspapers actively aggregate from blogs too. Every journalist in entertainment or technology starts his morning looking for leads on blogs, and the first thing any reporter does when they get an assignment on a topic they aren't familiar with is look it up on Wikipedia.

So this raises a really good point about the silly claims from the NY Times and others about how they need to get paid, since they believe that they're the "originators" of the news. I do wonder how many of the people at the NY Times did contribute to Wikipedia? I would bet many of the folks who insist that their own work needs to be paid for by users, have in turn never once contributed to Wikipedia.

Information comes in all sorts of forms from all sorts of places. The NY Times is good at what it does. No one is denying that. But it's delusional in its thinking that it somehow is the piece of the puzzle that is worth the most here.

Filed Under: donations, journalism, paywall, sources
Companies: ny times, wikipedia

A Look Back On Andrew Keen's Failed Predictions

from the oh-look-at-that... dept

In writing my recent post about the failure of Google's Knol, I went back to look at what I had written previously about it and I dug up a post from October of 2008, in which I discussed a series of predictions from Andrew Keen that struck me as particularly shortsighted and wrong. It was right after the latest economic crisis had shifted into overdrive and Keen had predicted that this economic change would lead to the end of "open source" and "free" business models because people would have to actually start making money. He also predicted that things like Facebook and Twitter would collapse in the economic realities of 2009:

The altruistic ideal of giving away one's labor for free appeared credible in the fat summer of the Web 2.0 boom when social-media startups hung from trees, Facebook was valued at $15 billion, and VCs queued up to fund revenue-less "businesses" like Twitter. But as we contemplate the world post-bailout, when economic reality once again bites, only Silicon Valley's wealthiest technologists can even consider the luxury of donating their labor to the latest fashionable, online, open-source project.

How's that prediction looking today? Right. (Update: For those who missed it, there's a sarcmark around that "Right")

In that article, he predicted the success of a bunch of websites and how they'd beat the "free" or "open" competitors. I picked out a series of those that I thought were particularly unlikely to happen and asked Andrew if he'd like to put some money behind his predictions -- with the bet being decided by who was right in October 2010 (I didn't choose all of Keen's predictions, because some of them were nonsensical and did not involve actual competitors). Here's what I wrote:

I'd like to make a bet. While there are different estimates as to how long any recession might be, the general consensus is that we should hopefully start pulling out by the end of 2009 or early 2010. So, let's pick a few of these that we can measure, and I'll bet Andrew Keen $100 (really money, Andrew) that in two years, on October 22, 2010, Wikipedia still gets more traffic than Knol, that Google is still much, much, much bigger than Mahalo (if they're even considered competitors any more), and that YouTube gets more traffic than Hulu.

If any one of those is untrue, I'll write him a check.

Tragically, when October 22, 2010 came around, I had forgotten about this original post. Also, Keen never responded to the bet, either because he was unaware of it or because he didn't really believe his own predictions. Either way, it looks like he made the right decision, whether on purpose or not, because every one of the predictions I made were correct compared to his predictions. Knol didn't beat Wikipedia. Mahalo did not beat Google. Hulu did not beat YouTube (though, Hulu is doing well for now).

I had never met Keen when I wrote that original article, though I have had some fun conversations with him in the past year, so I'm interested to see if he's willing to revisit his original predictions and to admit that perhaps he was wrong with his analysis of how "free" and "open source" would be knocked out by the economic crisis.

Filed Under: andrew keen, predictions
Companies: google, hulu, knol, mahalo, wikipedia, youtube

Wikia Owned Wikileaks.com Domain; Assange Ignored Attempts To Hand It Over

from the domain-oddities dept

I had seen the BBC article from a week or so ago about Jimmy Wales talking about the complexity of Wikipedia and how it needs to improve, but hadn't read all the way to the end where there was a rather interesting tidbit. Copycense however alerted us to this little bit of trivia at the end about how Wikipedia's sorta sister company Wikia owns some Wikileaks domain names... including Wikileaks.com:

Technically, the Wikia company has until this week legally owned domain names including wikileaks.net, wikileaks.com and wikileaks.us.

"We transferred the domains to them but they never completed the technical part," said Mr Wales. "All they needed to do was sign in and complete the transfer but they have never done it."

He said the domains had been registered "defensively" when Wikileaks launched in 2006.

"When they first launched they put out a press release that said the 'Wikipedia of secrets', which would have been a trademark violation.

"So someone in the office registered two or three domains."

He said that he regularly tries to prompt Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange to complete the transaction, to no avail.

"I saw someone else say that he's prone to saying 'I'm busy fighting superpowers' and that's exactly what he said to me."

Mr Wales said the domains would expire "this week".

"I'm not renewing them," said Mr Wales.

"We may ping them and say they are loose."

Of course, I just checked the whois on the .com and the .net, and both say they're registered until 2012... so someone renewed the domains, but it's not clear who.

Filed Under: domains
Companies: wikia, wikileaks, wikipedia

The Failure Of Knol Shows, Again, That The Big Company With All The Money Doesn't Always Win

from the it-ain't-so-easy dept

Ross Pruden's recent article highlighted numerous cases where the conventional wisdom, that "the big company always wins" when it goes up against an upstart, is quite frequently wrong. Big companies with lots of money often don't understand the "real" reasons behind successful upstarts and so they end up doing cargo cult copying, where they copy some superficial elements without really understanding the underlying reason for why things succeed.

It looks like we have yet another example of that, with the failure of Google Knol. I have to be honest: I had almost completely forgotten about Knol's existence. When it launched, the press lauded it as a "Wikipedia-killer." Looking back, when it launched I at least expressed some skepticism about the project, noting its similarity to other projects that had failed to gain serious traction. I did give Google the benefit of the doubt in that, if anyone could make such a project work, perhaps it would be Google. However, the fact that it fell off the face of the earth so quickly and is now almost totally abandoned suggests I should have listened to my original skepticism.

Still, it's natural for people to assume that a big company with tons of money entering a space formerly defined by an upstart means that the giant company will come to dominate that space. And it does happen... sometimes. But less frequently than people realize. Google recognized the importance of creating more online knowledge, but didn't quite understand the important community aspects of Wikipedia. In many ways, it's the same issue we recently discussed about Paul Ford's concept of "why wasn't I consulted?" driving successful web community projects. Very little in Knol was about solving the WWIC issue. Instead, it was blank slate knowledge spewing, with little community aspects. In fact, I'd argue that what Quora is doing today is a lot more of what Knol really wanted to be early on but failed. While I'm not as sold on Quora as others have been, there's no denying that it's been growing and getting tremendous usage and has some valuable information. And a large part of that is because it built on that WWIC concept much better than a project like Google Knol.

Filed Under: big companies, competition, knol, wikipedia
Companies: google, wikipedia

Guy Sues Both Wikipedia & Wikileaks To Get 'His Side Of The Story' Told

from the unclear-on-the-concept dept

Ah, the ridiculous and silly pro se lawsuits... Eric Goldman points us to one of these crazy lawsuits that will be dismissed quite quickly, from a guy suing both Wikipedia and Wikileaks, demanding that both companies tell his side of "the story." The guy claims that false information has been distributed concerning his own responsibility in someone else's death, and he hopes to set the record straight. Within the lawsuit, the guy claims that:

"The real story is a such a hoot it someday will be told."

That may be true, but it won't be told due to Wikipedia and/or Wikileaks being forced to tell it via this lawsuit. The guy doesn't even seem to attempt to explain what either Wikipedia or Wikileaks have to do with his side of the story or under what claims he's suing. He just wants his story told. Perhaps someone should let him know he can just set up his own website.

Filed Under: lawsuits, pro se
Companies: wikileaks, wikipedia

Guy Sues Wikipedia & Craigslist For $1 Billion Because (He Claims) He Found Nudity On Both

from the pro-se-me dept

Admittedly, most pro se lawsuits (filed by an individual, without a lawyer) are complete junk -- and on any given day you can find some really silly lawsuits. But sometimes they're worth highlighting anyway, just for how amusing they can be. Eric Goldman alerts us to the following lawsuit, filed by one Russell Dan Smith, arguing that both Craigslist and Wikipedia should be barred from being available in the state of South Carolina, and that each should be forced to pay $500 million, with half going to the state of South Carolina (might help with the budget) and half going to Russell Dan Smith (might help with the monthly payments he has to make on his $10,000 Puma camper).

What, you might ask, should force both sites to be blocked in the great state of South Carolina, as well pay up a billion dollars, combined? According to Mr. Smith, both sites "have been and still do openly promote child prostitution and the distribution of child pornography." Also, "both defendants also promote adult prostitution and nudity designed to excite prurient interests in the people viewing it." How does Mr. Smith know this? Because, he notes, he discovered such things on both sites, but "not intentionally." You see, "the pictures came to him by way of his surfing defendants' websites for valid non-pornographic purposes." You see, "plaintiff does not and does not want to view such nudity as heretofore described." Understood, of course. And "for allowing such nudity of children and adults to be seen by those who do not want to see it, both defendants are liable of attempting to lure other persons to share in this crime."

Mr. Smith also highlights the fact that Craigslist sued South Carolian Attorney General Henry McMaster -- a lawsuit that was tossed out, but is being appealed. He claims that "there is a probability shown by the preponderance of the evidence that defendant Craigslist was a criminal organization suing the Attorney General of the State of South Carolina for no other reason than that the State had been investigating the organization and intended therefore to paralyze by fear of further action." Of course, as covered in detail at the time, McMaster had been threatening to put Craigslist execs in jail, for actions of its users -- actions clearly protected under Section 230 of the CDA, which other courts have highlighted. Craigslist's offensive lawsuit was not to "sue McMaster," so much as to get a declaratory judgment that it had done nothing wrong, so as to stop McMaster from continued grandstanding.

As one final point, it does seem worth pointing out that, on the documents filed, there is a note reading that "frivolous civil proceedings may be subject to sanctions...." Seems worth pointing out...

Filed Under: lawsuits, porn, pro se, south carolina
Companies: craigslist, wikipedia

Canadian Supreme Court To Hear Case Over Liability For Linking To Defamatory Information

from the linkety-link dept

You may recall that a few years back, Canadian politician Wayne Crookes started suing a whole bunch of sites, including Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo and MySpace, just because of postings on those sites that Crookes felt were libelous. Whether or not the comments actually were defamatory was a big open question, but a bigger issue was why he was suing the service providers, rather than those actually responsible for the comments. Some of those lawsuits got tossed out on a jurisdictional technicality, but Crookes then also sued some others, claiming libel for just linking to a site that was potentially libelous as well. One of those sued was Jon Newton, the operator of P2Pnet.net, a site that many of you read. Newton had linked to the stories in question, but did not repeat was written in them or offer any commentary -- and yet Crookes claimed that just the links were defamatory.

Thankfully, both the district court and the appeals court said that just linking was not defamatory, but the reasoning was a bit odd, and left some potential issue open. Now, as a bunch of folks have submitted, the Canadian Supreme Court is gearing up to take on the issue. There are really two questions here: whether or not the initial link is defamation, and secondarily, whether or not it becomes defamation if you refuse to take down the link after being alerted to it being defamatory.

In the US, Section 230 of the CDA protects website publishers in both cases. In Canada, the law is not at all clear on this issue, and there's a very real threat of a pretty massive chilling effect if the Supreme Court decides that linking (or even refusing to take down a link) can constitute defamation. Hopefully, the Supreme Court agrees that merely linking should never be seen as defamation -- and preferably, the Canadian Parliament makes this doubly clear by putting in place some basic safe harbors as well.

Filed Under: canada, wayne crookes
Companies: google, myspace, wikipedia, yahoo

Jurors Cause Trouble By Friending Each Other On Facebook, Using Wikipedia For Research

from the no-friending-allowed dept

We've discussed numerous court cases where modern technology has caused significant procedural problems from "the old ways" of doing things. CitMediaLaw points us to a story that includes two more cases, both in Maryland. In one, lawyers are seeking a new trial because some of the jurors became Facebook "friends" during the trial. This follows on the news that Florida is forbidding judges from friending lawyers on social networking sites, but is it reasonable to prevent jurors from friending each other? For many Facebook users, "friending" people you meet is quite natural and something you do almost immediately upon meeting someone new. So it should be no surprise that some jurors would choose to quickly friend each other. It's hard to see how that would make the results of the jury verdict suspect, however.

The second case involved jurors using Wikipedia to look up some terms. This is hardly a new concept. Some judges these days are specifically warning jurors not to use the internet to look up anything related to a case, but for a generation of folks who consider internet research to be an adjunct part of the thinking process, it's not hard to recognize why many would ignore this, and not think they're doing anything wrong (and they might have a good argument). The real question is whether or not there are reasonable ways to change the way the jury system works to allow for what many people consider perfectly natural: doing additional research on their own. For those who are comfortable with the old system, this may seem like a horrific idea (and yes, we all understand the reasons why the current system wants to limit things to just what's said in the courtroom). However, at some point the system may need to recognize that an artificial constraint on learning about the details of the case may not actually be the best system.

Filed Under: friending, jurors, jury, research, social networks
Companies: facebook, wikipedia