The Electronic Frontier Foundation are defending a wiki editor’s right to link to an external site. This is the EFF’s first wiki case according to Larry Lessig.
Fred von Lohmann, Senior Intellectual Property Attorney of the EFF, is defending the rights of an anonymous citizen-journalist to link from the public Zyprexa PBWiki to copies of leaked Eli Lilly documents. The documents are related to the controversial prescription drug Zyprexa and, according to the New York Times, show that the company intentionally downplayed the drug’s side effects.
Related links:
Update: 13 February: “Eli Lilly Loses Effort to Censor Zyprexa Documents Off the Internet” - the judge rescinded the injunction against the wiki.
Comments
It looks like Wikipedia is yet again blocked in China. :(
Andrew Lih had some ideas of why the unblock happened, but whatever the reason, the decision seems to have been reversed. See Andrew’s blog for updates and theories on why this happened.
Related posts:
See also:
1 Comment
Good news for Wikipedia and China - Andrew Lih reports that the partial unblock of Wikipedia in China is now a full unblock and Wikipedia is accessible from everywhere in China. He also has graphs showing a surge of new users. Over 1000 new users are signing up for the Chinese Wikipedia per day since the block was lifted! This makes it the second fastest growing Wikipedia in terms of user registrations. Article growth is also up, and they celebrated reaching 100,000 articles this week. It’s almost four years since the English Wikipedia hit the same milestone.
3 Comments
I’ve gotten completely behind on Wikimedia news over the last week, and I’ve not had time to read Andrew Lih’s blog posts about the partial unblock of Wikipedia in China, nor time to listen to the first episode of the newly launched Wikipedia Weekly which apparently includes a discussion about the unblocking. Wikipedia has an article on this, as will this week’s Wikipedia Signpost.
Tim, on the other hand, has been following the developments of this since the first blocks occured in mid-2004, so I was very happy to hand over my interview requests to him this week. He gave a great interview for ABC’s Connect Asia. You can download the MP3 to listen to it. It lasts 3 minutes and starts about 3 minutes into the recording of the 2nd half of the show.
Here’s a rough transcript…
Read the rest of this entry »
3 Comments
An almost inactive Wikia had a revivial today. In reaction to reports about the Indian government’s blocks of various blog hosting sites, a Bloggers Against Censorship campaign has started on Wikia’s censorship wiki, launched by members of the BloggersCollective group. In the last few hours, content has been added to the wiki on the list of ISPs blocking Blogger, ways to bypass the ban, press coverage of the ban, a listing of blog posts about the ban, and more. If you have more information, you are welcome to edit the wiki at censorship.wikia.com and help to document this issue.
Comments
Wikipedia’s “Neutral Point of View” policy, known as NPOV, states that “all articles must be written from a neutral point of view, representing views fairly and without bias… Where there are or have been conflicting views, these should be presented fairly, but not asserted. All significant points of view are presented, not just the most popular one. It should not be asserted that the most popular view or some sort of intermediate view among the different views is the correct one. Readers are left to form their own opinions. As the name suggests, the neutral point of view is a point of view, not the absence or elimination of viewpoints. It is a point of view that is neutral - that is neither sympathetic nor in opposition to its subject.”
I’m giving a talk today for the Students of Sustainability conference at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. The conference website includes this extract from freepress.net:
“when viewpoints are cut off and ideas cannot find an outlet, our democracy suffers.â€Â
When votes come up on the site, a common opposition to those votes is that Wikipedia is not a democracy. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not important to democracy, and the inclusion of viewpoints that the NPOV policy tries to ensure may be helpful to this.
Comments
The new Campaigns Wikia is off to an amazing start!
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a wiki gain so much interest in under two days. 248 registered users have edited the site and 452 people have subscribed to the mailing list. There was so much traffic on the list, we had to make a separate announcements-only list.
The project has already been written about on Slashdot (and survived). It is mentioned on hundreds of blogs and is on all sorts of sites, from LinuxWorld and ZDNet to The Seattle Times.
What the wiki really needs now is some experienced wiki users to bring it some structure (it’s a scary tangle of discussion mixed with everything at the moment), and more ideas to feed into the ongoing discussion about what this wiki is for.
Comments
Jimmy Wales has just launched the Campaigns Wikia as a central meeting ground for everyone who believes it is time for politics to become more participatory. We’re at the start of an era of net-driven participatory politics and you can become involved by joining the mailing list and editing the wiki. Please read Jimmy’s Mission Statement, an open letter to the political blogosphere, and then get involved by editing or by blogging about the wiki. You are welcome to add yourself to the list of participating bloggers.
From the Mission Statement:
“It’s time for politics to become more intelligent, and for democracy to really involve the people. Broadcast media tells you what to think and doesn’t let you get involved. It’s time to focus on what you need, what you care about, and the messages you want to get out.”
1 Comment
Wikia
WikiChix
Freedom defined
