Kudos To Wikimedia Foundation For Resisting All Government Requests To Censor Content

[Mike]

Wikimedia's new Transparency Report has been getting some attention, in part because it brought attention back to the whole monkey selfie copyright debacle. However, the rest of the transparency report itself is rather interesting, starting with the fact that it appears that Wikimedia rejected every request to pull down information (unrelated to copyright, which we'll get to in a second). In most transparency reports, this involves government and law enforcement requests to censor content, along with the occasional claims of defamation and whatnot. Either way, Wikimedia felt a grand total of none of them were legit:

Admittedly, takedown requests to Wikimedia are a bit different than many other sites since anyone can just go in and edit the page themselves, but such changes will often be reverted, so it's less permanent. On the copyright front, Wikimedia did agree to abide by some DMCA requests, but it does seem notable that it's well less than half of all such requests:

These days, with so many sites immediately rolling over when someone complains, it's good to see Wikimedia being willing to stand up against censorship attempts.

Originally Published: Wed, 06 Aug 2014 22:36:32 GMT
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