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A German court forced the removal of a Wikipedia article’s history

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Re: A German court forced the removal of a Wikipedia article’s history

#11

Post by justinjlynn »

eugeniub wrote: post #4
dmurray wrote: post #3

>This result is disappointing for us, but it is not a notable change in the law Bullshit. This is a big precedent where Wikimedia will now remove material from Wikipedia if a court orders them to. They even acknowledge that the material in this case was, if not unambiguously true, at least well sourced. That's a huge precedent. It only remains to be seen whether Wikimedia decide to fight a similar decision made by so…

Wikipedia has already been removing material from revision histories for years for many reasons,[1] including legal reasons such as copyright infringement and libel.[2] This is not exactly new terrain for Wikipedia. I would also say that I think Wikimedia decides strategically which countries to have a physical presence in, and therefore follow the laws of that country, and which ones to stay out of. I don't think Wi…

Indeed. They even have a verb for it: oversighted.

Re: A German court forced the removal of a Wikipedia article’s history

#12

Post by [deleted] »

phy6 wrote: post #9

If I were running Wikipedia, I would make some effort to programmatically archive online citations, like archive.org does. Imagine some government persona mis-tweets something that leads to article-worthy historical consequences; if twitter deletes the tweet, can that person sue to have it removed from wikipedia because it made her/him look bad, on the basis that the original citation link doesn't work?

[deleted]

Re: A German court forced the removal of a Wikipedia article’s history

#13

Post by scribu »

phy6 wrote: post #9

If I were running Wikipedia, I would make some effort to programmatically archive online citations, like archive.org does. Imagine some government persona mis-tweets something that leads to article-worthy historical consequences; if twitter deletes the tweet, can that person sue to have it removed from wikipedia because it made her/him look bad, on the basis that the original citation link doesn't work?

They already programatically replace reference URLs with links to archive.org for those URLs.

Re: A German court forced the removal of a Wikipedia article’s history

#14

Post by vbezhenar »

ratsmack wrote: post #5

I would think the Wikimedia would stand on principle and refuse to remove items that are factually true. This capitulation to the whims of globally driven censorship needs to come to an end, and will only happen with an organization with a strong backbone and a commitment to freedom of speech and/or press.

I would prefer them to keep a separate version for Germany which will have additional indication that this page was censored by German government. People coming from other IP addresses should view original page. Surely Germany can't forbid people from the other countries to get some information from servers located outside of Germany.

Re: A German court forced the removal of a Wikipedia article’s history

#15

Post by incompatible »

I thought that the history is supposed to be available for legal reasons. It's the only way that contributors to the article are attributed, as required by the Creative Commons licensing.

Edit: quite a bit of the history is unavailable, but the names of the contributors can still be seen. Perhaps that's sufficient. https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alexander_Waibel&...

Re: A German court forced the removal of a Wikipedia article’s history

#16

Post by vesinisa »

phy6 wrote: post #9

If I were running Wikipedia, I would make some effort to programmatically archive online citations, like archive.org does. Imagine some government persona mis-tweets something that leads to article-worthy historical consequences; if twitter deletes the tweet, can that person sue to have it removed from wikipedia because it made her/him look bad, on the basis that the original citation link doesn't work?

There is actually already an ongoing collaboration between Wikipedia and Internet Archive to snapshot almost every single web page to Wayback Machine as soon as they are referenced on any Wikipedia site:

https://blog.archive.org/2018/10/01/more-than-9-million-brok...

The pages are being archived at a rate of 20 million URLs/week.

PS. This is not free. Internet Archive is one of those great online institutions that needs a steady stream of donations to buy the hardware that keeps the project going.

Re: A German court forced the removal of a Wikipedia article’s history

#18

Post by tropo »

fxbl0i wrote: post #8
gumby wrote: post #2

The way I read this article in English, were the original article still online, or had it been archived by archive.org and the Wikipedia link changed, then it could stay up. Does that make sense? The article doesn't link to German coverage so it's hard to learn about the underlying matter.

Well, it depends. The EU doesn't like free speech; archive.org is not exempt (April 10th): https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190410/14580641973/eu-te...

How is archive.org not exempt? They are outside of EU jurisdiction unless they made the mistake of opening an office over there, which would be trivially fixable by shutting it down.

Re: A German court forced the removal of a Wikipedia article’s history

#20

Post by vonmoltke »

vesinisa wrote: post #16
phy6 wrote: post #9

If I were running Wikipedia, I would make some effort to programmatically archive online citations, like archive.org does. Imagine some government persona mis-tweets something that leads to article-worthy historical consequences; if twitter deletes the tweet, can that person sue to have it removed from wikipedia because it made her/him look bad, on the basis that the original citation link doesn't work?

There is actually already an ongoing collaboration between Wikipedia and Internet Archive to snapshot almost every single web page to Wayback Machine as soon as they are referenced on any Wikipedia site: https://blog.archive.org/2018/10/01/more-than-9-million-brok... The pages are being archived at a rate of 20 million URLs/week. PS. This is not free. Internet Archive is one of those great online institutions that ne…

What's going to happen when someone like this professor decides to swing the GDPR hammer at Internet Archive to get the rotted page purged first?
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