[Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia

Tue Oct 4 15:17:50 UTC 2011

On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 5:01 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 10:48 AM, Ilario Valdelli <valdelli at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> The question is that all Internet people in Italy is having strike
>> because the project of law can be stopped if not approved. If it will
>> be approved, it's harder to do something.
>>
>> It means that any action must be done now.
>>
>> Ilario
>>
>
>
> Sure, I understand. My immediate gut reaction was that I'm leery of
> Wikimedia projects, of themselves and independent from the WMF,
> getting involved in political advocacy and protest actions. On second
> thought, though, I suppose if a U.S. law placed an untenable burden on
> the English Wikipedia, we might take some action in our organizational
> self-interest.
>
> I do think the WMF should have a role in this decision; I suppose the
> question of project self-negation hasn't really arisen in the past -
> but I'm not sure that, as a general rule, projects should be able to
> voluntarily make themselves unavailable.
>

The problem is that the current law of privacy in Italy it's
sufficient and can assure to protect any person from calumny.

This law is an additional prevention and it's unbalanced and will not
assure the freedom in Internet because it is applying the same law of
newspapers to Internet (bloggers, private persons and so on).

The main point is that any blog or online newspaper of other website
have 48 hour to make something, if you do nothing you will receive a
penalty of a maximum of 12.500 Euros.

If you do something before the 48 hour you need to put in evidence
(probably in the homepage) that there is a correction.

The question now is complicated and the Italian users are looking to a
scenario of frequent requests and all sysops involved in the block and
obscuration of pages to don't face the penalty and don't involve some
editors in any risk.

In 48 hours it's difficult to check something and probably the
requests will be processed with a preventive block.

It means that the solution that we have is to delete any article about
living people because this will reduce the risk a lot.

Ilario