Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-08-06/News and notes

Discuss this story

The heading of this page says 'news and notes', but the story is really an editorial. News items should reflect both sides. To give the article more balance I'd like to add that the European Union's Data Protection Directive, which is the basis for the European court's decision, is considered a important law that protects the individual's right to privacy. It's up to the individual to decide which information about them they want publicly accessible. Censorship is one side of the problem, but privacy is also important. The Wikipedia policy Biographies of living people (if in doubt act in favor of privacy) reflects some of that. --Melody Lavender (talk) 14:34, 9 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Where would Wikimedia officials draw the line between the fidelity of history and removing home addresses of stalking victims or social security numbers of identity theft victims? EllenCT (talk) 20:12, 9 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- Your argument is asinine. When did Wikipedia start publishing "home addresses of stalking victims" and "social security numbers of identity theft victims?" Please read WP:NOT to learn something about what constitutes encyclopedic content. Edison (talk) 20:41, 9 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Are you assuming that the right to be forgotten only applies to Wikipedia articles? Is there some reason you think that the officials speaking out on the law have asked for exceptions to be exclusive to encyclopedia content? EllenCT (talk) 00:05, 10 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for mentioning the relaunch of the Wikimedia blog! Just a small correction: The blog's new design is actually not by Automattic, but by our own Heather Walls, and was implemented on the technical side (i.e. coded as a WordPress theme) by Exygy, a small software company based in San Francisco. Automattic is our partner for hosting the new blog. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 01:34, 10 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- Thank you for the information; I've corrected this in the article. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 01:43, 10 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I have followed the link to the “report”. There is one mini-page. Oh, there are figures, and diagrams with colours representing these figures. But all of this is meaningless. What about the nature of the requests ? What info was requested ? In what cases did Wikimedia obey the request ? Why ? In what cases did Wikimedia deny the request ? Why ? We have no info at all. And you talk of transparency ? It is a joke. --Nnemo (talk) 18:34, 10 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I am afraid that the luminaries above misrepresent the European directive in question. There are circumstances where it is unethical to link to information about people, and the directive is specifically limited to these three:
1. Outdated
2. Inaccurate
3. Irrelevant
I see no appetite in the MediaWiki projects to link to or host any of these three types of content. Nor should we be announcing in a forum such as Signpost any specific examples of such linking. Instead we, the community, should be working with Google and the legal team so that the community can ensure that BLP is being met in our pages, then the legal team can issue the appropriate takedown notices to our contacts at the search engine providers.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 20:02, 11 August 2014 (UTC).