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Online safety laws and Wikipedia

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  • It's interesting that "privacy infringing laws" are considered "a significant issue", as well as "privacy enhancing laws" like Germany's "right to be forgotten." Is it possible that the WMF, Wikimedians at large, and the open knowledge community are seeing the negative impact of various jurisdictions, and not the positive? I would fall out of the clouds if the opposite was the case, as I'm semi-reliably informed the Germans say. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 22:44, 26 September 2024 (UTC).[reply]
    Azerbaijan literally jails people who disagree with the ruling dynasty (sorry, democratically elected president). I've disagreed with solavirum in the past but I hope nothing bad happens to our Azerbaijani editors. (t · c) buidhe 00:43, 27 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

General discussion

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  • What had happened in India and Azerbaijan should concern WMF more than what it is today. With what’s going on around the world today, we could clearly see that government overreach, censorship, and monitoring may tend to increase. Discussions should be clearly be done to balance between security and privacy. At this point Wikipedia tend to be on “security” as we disallow proxies/VPNs and we logged the IPs and the emails of the editors, but what happened if the government demanded Wikipedia to hand over the data of its editors? Most of the Wikipedia editors are living on countries with good record of freedom of speech, but what happened to those that live on countries that have questionable freedom of speech? Like this case in India - would WMF be willing to close up shop in India just for the sake of protecting few of its editors? Hopefully WMF took this issue more seriously. ✠ SunDawn ✠ (contact) 12:37, 27 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • The headline (subheadline?) Bias in Judaism and Zionism related articles is misleading. At a minimum it ought to be something like "Accusations of bias in Judaism and Zionism related articles"; perhaps better would be "some media outlets dislike academic histories of Zionism". As one would be able to tell by going to the Wikipedia article in question, the claims that the cited media outlets dislike are all grounded in top quality sources: academically published books, peer-reviewed journal articles, etc. If there is bias in Judaism and Zionism related articles, it's not there. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 16:40, 28 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Hydrangeans I personally stand by our articles prose, but I also don't see the point in wrapping any criticism we dislike in "alleged/purported/accusation of" type of language. The body of the summary makes it clear, that these publications do not understand nor like our community editorial process. I came up with the suggested titles, because I prefer to be direct with the subject is about, instead of the intentionally more opaque "Bias in religion/ethnicity related articles?" but I take your feedback in good faith. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 10:28, 29 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Criticism of the changes to the article Zionism in the last year wasn't confined to media outlets; the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, in a tweet which included before and after screenshots, wrote the following:

    History needs to be balanced & authoritative, based on facts and knowledge. Its replacement here @wikipedia by prejudiced ideology, distorted facts, and ahistorical fakery is alarming . @wikipedia is (was) respected & important because it presents facts & history without bias. Sometimes there were duels on pages between historical schools of thoughts but ultimately its editors wished to present history based on facts and balance. Has this page been captured by activists? It looks like it has. If so dear @wikipedia come back: You are part of the wider underpinnings of truth, authoritative history and factbased reportage that we desperately need in our society to foster the trust in information, reporting and scholarship, and the respect for learning and evidence that we need for our democracies to work. These principles are under attack in our academies, our media and of course in social media. @wikipedia has with a few exceptions been rare sanctuary of standards. We need you. Plse restore those all important principles

    Admittedly this would not have been a good fit for "In the media" (I proposed on the Suggestions page that it be covered), but as it should be noted in our closest thing to a paper of record I've quoted it in full here. Ham II (talk) 08:20, 2 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    The problem with our coverage of this subject (and several others) is an inevitable result of the following:
    • Many editors view academic sources as automatically reliable and do not apply their usual editorial judgment to them.
    • A number of academic disciplines (e.g. Middle Eastern studies, postcolonial studies) effectively only exist to promote a particular ideology (usually, trying to claim that the Western world and its inhabitants are immoral) with little to no regard for factual accuracy.
    The former seems easier to fix than the latter. Partofthemachine (talk) 00:35, 3 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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