Late last week, Google responded to the concerns raised by some EU regulators regarding how it is implementing the new "right to be forgotten" rules. Google's full response is well worth reading going into a fair bit of detail, highlighting how there are a lot of non-trivial decisions to be made in this process -- brought on by a ridiculous European Court of Justice ruling. As part of it, Google notes that the process is entirely one-sided and they only get information from the person wishing to delete information from search engines:

We generally have to rely on the requester for information, without assurance beyond the requester’s own assertions as to its accuracy. Some requests turn out to have been made with false and inaccurate information. Even if requesters provide us with accurate information, they understandably may avoid presenting facts that are not in their favour. As such, we may not become aware of relevant context that would speak in favour of preserving the accessibility of a search result. An example would be a request to remove an old article about a person being convicted of a number of crimes in their teenage years, which omits that the old article has its relevance renewed due to a recent article about that person being convicted for similar crimes as an adult. Or a requester may not disclose a role they play in public life, for which their previous reported activities or political positions are highly relevant. We have also seen examples of data subjects who indiscriminately submit many URLs that are displayed as search results for their name, even though some URLs are actually about another person with the same name.

As if to highlight the difficulty, Google is apparently now set to disappear a Wikipedia page from its index due to a right to be forgotten request. But, of course, Wikipedia pages are open and constantly editable, so it seems weird to order that the page be removed entirely from the search engine when someone could just edit it instead. And, if the edit gets reverted, well, perhaps it's because it's factual information that is perfectly fine to include in Wikipedia and in Google.

The article does not reveal the particular Wikipedia page or any further information, but highlights just what a ridiculous ruling the original ECJ ruling was. Google is a search engine. Its entire purpose is to help people find what they're looking for -- not to judge whether or not it's appropriate for someone to be seeking that information in the first place. And then, once you include the editable nature of Wikipedia to the mix, you're creating a situation that is doubly ridiculous, since there are so many other options for how to deal with the issue.

There's always been an air of distrust when it comes to how public relations firms deal with Wikipedia pages for their clients, especially when it comes to making edits. I'd guess this general feeling has likely come about due to equal parts a misunderstanding about how most PR groups operate and a few bad actors spoiling everyone's opinion. Contrary to what some might believe, there is a place for representative requests to edit out incorrect material on Wikipedia, so long as the ultimate goal is to serve public the most accurate information. That someone is on the payroll of the subject of an article sounds like it should be a conflict of interest, but that's simply not always the case. Good PR firms are less about spin and more about managing the communication channels and getting the public accurate information about their clients. Still, the distrust persists -- in part because there are plenty of PR firms that aren't so "good."

Now a group of the larger public relations firms are coming out with a pledge to deal fairly and accurately when it comes to Wikipedia edits and to route them through the proper channels.

In the statement, 11 PR agencies "publicly state and commit" to abide by five principles that would prevent them from editing a client's Wikipedia entry without first going through proper channels. It also makes overtures toward repairing the tenuous relationship between the PR industry and Wikipedia.

"On behalf of our firms, we recognize Wikipedia's unique and important role as a public knowledge resource," the statement begins. "We also acknowledge that the prior actions of some in our industry have led to a challenging relationship with the community of Wikipedia editors. Our firms believe that it is in the best interest of our industry, and Wikipedia users at large, that Wikipedia fulfill its mission of developing an accurate and objective online encyclopedia. Therefore, it is wise for communications professionals to follow Wikipedia policies as part of ethical engagement practices."

The companies signing onto the statement include Edelman, Ogilvy and Mather, Fleishman Hillard, Burson-Marsteller, Ketchum, Porter Novelli, Peppercomm, MDC Partners, Voce Communications, Allison and Partners, and Beutler Ink. Those are some impressive names in the industry and the statement they released represents a serious step forward both for how the industry interacts with the Wikipedia community and for affirming Wikipedia's stature as a whole. You have to understand that in PR-land, you don't make this kind of promise unless you have every intention of keeping it. PR is all about managing expectations, but this statement sets the reader's expectations quite high. The statement essentially promises to refrain from creating so-called sock-puppet Wikipedia accounts used to edit articles on which there is a conflict of interest. Even the management for the firms appear to be on board with playing by the ethical rules.

"If you are a paid advocate, then you should refrain from editing articles directly," said Mr. Beutler. "But PR people can contribute by making sure correct information is made correct." And what happens when an unhappy client calls its agency asking them to remove or edit something on its Wikipedia page? According to Mr. Beutler, these agencies should go to Wikipedia's "talk" areas and make their case about why an article should be edited. "This works," he said. "But it doesn't work terribly efficiently," he added.

Even as this pledge is being made, Wikipedia itself is making some significant modifications to their ToS to codify this sort of thing and attempt to increase the transparency on edits made by paid actors. Volunteer editors and those working with libraries and museums will continue to operate as they always have, but those receiving any kind of pay for editing articles are required to make disclosures as such.

If you are paid to edit, other rules beyond the Terms of Use may also apply. Specific policies on individual Wikimedia projects, or relevant laws in your country (such as those prohibiting fraudulent advertising), may require further disclosure or prohibit paid advocacy editing altogether. Details on the legal issues and risk associated with undisclosed paid advocacy editing may be found in this FAQ.

That seems to line up everyone's goal at promoting good behavior nicely. Except, that is, for all those PR firms and agencies that didn't sign on to this pledge. Wikipedia's changes put them on notice that it is going to take this kind of thing seriously and the proactive pledge from the other PR firms makes non-signees look late to the game. If this works, it will hopefully only amplify the status of Wikipedia as an open and trusted source for reliable information.

The Scientific Method is often taught as a linear process that proceeds from hypothesis to theory. In practice, science -- like any other human endeavor -- can be much more haphazard. Science isn't perfect, but it has some built in processes for error correction to help weed out mistakes and outright fraud. There are some well-known issues with the traditional peer review mechanism, but science is adapting and coming up with new ways to improve its results and conclusions. Here are just a few links on judging the quality of science.

• The Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford is planning to develop a meta-research institution to research... research. The new lab will be called METRICS for short, and it'll study factors like irreproducibility and publication bias. [url]
• Jimmy Wales has decided that no pseudo-science will be accepted for publication on Wikipedia. Wales says, "If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals -- that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately." [url]
• As more scientific research is done more globally, is the diversity of the researchers influencing the quality of the results? Some analysis suggests that papers with geographically diverse authors are better, in the metric of getting more citations. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

More and more digital media is being edited and prioritized in datacenters by intangible algorithms. As usual, this can be good and bad, depending on how the technology is used. On the one hand, algorithms can do laborious tasks that humans don't want to do. But at the same time, algorithms might introduce all kinds of errors or inadvertent biases on a scale that no group of humans could ever accomplish without automation. Here are just a few links on bots tinkering with online content.

• The Los Angeles Times reported on an earthquake in about 3 minutes -- thanks to an algorithm that collected data from the US Geological Survey and automagically created an article about the seismic event. This robotic reporting isn't exactly a new thing, but the robotic "scoop" can't be matched by human writers. [url]
• About half of all the edits on Wikipedia are made by bots. Algorithms keep spam links from flooding the site, and they also create whole entries based on online data, as well as perform tedious tasks such as grammar and spelling corrections. Not surprisingly, the biggest bot job on Wikipedia is detecting vandalism. [url]
• Algorithms aren't free of bias; they can actually amplify biases. Humans can also trick algorithms by gaming their inputs and biasing results, so computer-produced content isn't necessarily more objective than the writings of humans (not that anyone here would have assumed that). [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

For those of us that tend to take Wikipedia and the way it works for granted, it comes as something of a shock to encounter someone who clearly doesn't understand it at all. That seems to be the case in a lawsuit brought by the Greek politician and academic Theodore Katsanevas against the Greek Wikipedia user and administrator Dimitris Liourdis, also known as "Diu". A post on the Wikimedia blog explains the situation:

Mr. Katsanevas complains that the Greek-language Wikipedia article about him contains some unflattering statements. Instead of addressing his concerns with the Greek-language Wikipedia community through the appropriate processes, Mr. Katsanevas chose to file a lawsuit against Diu.

The controversial statements in question reference the will of Andreas Papandreou, former Prime Minister of Greece and father-in-law of Mr. Katsanevas. The will allegedly characterized Mr. Katsanevas as a "disgrace" to the family and reportedly accused Mr. Katsanevas of "attempting to politically exploit George Papandreou", also a former Prime Minister of Greece. The statements were properly sourced and in accordance with Wikipedia policies.

It's not clear why Katsanevas thinks Diu had anything to do with the passage in question or, indeed, how he found out Diu's name, as this detailed article about the case on The Press Project points out:

An interesting question is how Mr Katsanevas identified the particular administrator. The latter has not made his personal information public. Despite this, the administrator told us in a telephone telephone interview that Mr Katsanevas had located him in 2009 at which point he had sent him notice demanding parts of the wikipedia entry be deleted.

Fortunately -- and wisely, given the broader implications of this attack on Wikipedia's editorial independence -- the Wikimedia Foundation is standing behind Liourdis:

Diu faces serious monetary and criminal penalties as a result of Mr. Katsanevas’s lawsuit. We have offered -- and Diu has accepted -- assistance through our Legal Fees Assistance Program.

The case won't reach the courts until 2016, but in a preliminary hearing the Greek judge too seemed not to grasp how Wikipedia functioned :

In an e-mail interview with Ars [Technica], Liourdis described the situation in the courtroom last week. The hearing lasted just a few minutes, he wrote, and only the lawyers were allowed to speak. "My lawyer tried to explain [to the] judge how Wikipedia works and that I couldn't effectively remove the text," he wrote. "Anybody who knows how Wikipedia works knows that if he removes ... a text, which is verified by reliable sources, finally he will [be] banned from the project. We pointed that [out], but unfortunately she didn't understand."

Liourdis followed the judge's instructions to delete the text, but sure enough, it was quickly replaced.

Techdirt readers will not be surprised to learn that this attempt to gag Wikipedia not only failed, but also provoked a familiar online response from the Wikipedia community:

The administrator noted that the lawsuit and publicity had produced a Streisand effect and that the original Greek article was now hosted in translation on multiple Wikipedias in English, Catalan, Polish, Yakut, French, German, Dutch, Spanish and Italian.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

I've spent a bit of time in Germany over the past few years, and the entrepreneurial community there is really interesting. It's become a hot place for emerging startups and there's a lot of excitement, especially in Berlin. Similarly, it appears that a number of internet activists have been flocking to Berlin. So it's become a really vibrant community of folks trying to make the internet better.

But the one thing that worries me quite a bit about the German internet scene is its very dangerous view of secondary liability -- in that German law and courts tend to lean towards blaming the intermediary for the actions of their users. I learned this the frightening way on stage at conference in Germany, under some very hot lights (in a decommissioned airport) where a somewhat angry questioner in the audience insisted that some comments written on Techdirt by some of our users were "illegal in Germany" and that, under German law, I was liable for them. He stood at the microphone with a laptop reading the comments and demanding I answer for them, despite never having even read those comments, let alone created them. I suddenly started mentally counting down the time until my flight home. I defended secondary liability (and basic free speech concepts) and was able to leave the country without problem (and have been back a couple times since then). However, as a few people explained to me on that trip, a real hindrance to innovation in Germany is this antiquated view of secondary liability whereby sites can almost always be declared liable for actions of their users.

It appears that this tragic view has struck again -- this time against the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia. The Higher Regional Court of Stuttgart, has found that the Foundation can be held liable for content on Wikipedia. In this specific case, someone argued that some Wikipedia content was libelous. While the court says that the organization doesn't need to proactively police its content, it does say that if anything has received any sort of complaint, suddenly the Foundation can be held liable.

Of course, this is a recipe for easy censorship. If you don't like something in Wikipedia, just file a complaint, and to avoid liability, the Wikimedia Foundation will have strong incentive to delete the contested language. Of course, this goes against nearly everything that Wikipedia stands for in terms of how content gets edited on the site. Even if legally required to, it's ridiculous for a German court to basically tell the Foundation that it needs to effectively delete passages of Wikipedia editors and then block that content from being put back. Rulings like this make true user-supported media operations legally difficult to maintain, and will increasingly scare top internet companies out of Germany.

If someone posted libelous information, go after them. Putting the blame on an intermediary isn't just misguided, but it also creates a strong chilling effect on innovation.

The idea that Wikipedia is dying has become one of the Internet's recurrent stories. Because something used by so many people every day is completely free and dependent on the selfless dedication of relatively few individuals, there is perhaps an underlying fear that it will disappear, and it will be our fault for not supporting it better. However, alongside major issues like the need for an influx of new contributors from more diverse backgrounds, one of the lesser-known challenges Wikipedia faces is the rise of "socking", or sock puppetry. Here's how Wikipedia defines the term:

The use of multiple Wikipedia user accounts for an improper purpose is called sock puppetry (often abbreviated in discussion as socking). Improper purposes include attempts to deceive or mislead other editors, disrupt discussions, distort consensus, avoid sanctions, or otherwise violate community standards and policies. The term comes from sock puppet, an object shaped roughly like a sock and used on the hand to create a character to entertain or inform. In Internet terminology it is an online identity used for deception.

One of the most frowned-upon forms of socking involves payments. A fascinating article in The Daily Dot reveals a company called Wiki-PR that offers exactly that:

Wiki-PR is no secret. Wikipedia admins have been aware of the company for some time. It openly boasts of its service on its website. Wiki-PR claims to have a "staff of 45 Wikipedia editors and admins helps you build a page that stands up to the scrutiny of Wikipedia's community rules and guidelines."

It claims a roster of 12,000 clients and offers them this ironic warning: "Don't get caught in a PR debacle editing your own page."

It's ironic, because a PR debacle is what Wiki-PR seems to be experiencing thanks to a major Wikipedia clampdown on socking, announced in this post by the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Sue Gardner:

Editors on the English Wikipedia are currently investigating allegations of suspicious edits and sockpuppetry (i.e. using online identities for purposes of deception). At this point, as reported, it looks like a number of user accounts -- perhaps as many as several hundred -- may have been paid to write articles on Wikipedia promoting organizations or products, and have been violating numerous site policies and guidelines, including prohibitions against sockpuppetry and undisclosed conflicts of interest. As a result, Wikipedians aiming to protect the projects against non-neutral editing have blocked or banned more than 250 user accounts.

She goes on to explain why paid advocacy is a problem:

Editing-for-pay has been a divisive topic inside Wikipedia for many years, particularly when the edits to articles are promotional in nature. Unlike a university professor editing Wikipedia articles in their area of expertise, paid editing for promotional purposes, or paid advocacy editing as we call it, is extremely problematic. We consider it a "black hat" practice. Paid advocacy editing violates the core principles that have made Wikipedia so valuable for so many people.

What is clear to everyone is that all material on Wikipedia needs to adhere to Wikipedia’s editorial policies, including those on neutrality and verifiability. It is also clear that companies that engage in unethical practices on Wikipedia risk seriously damaging their own reputations. In general, companies engaging in self-promotional activities on Wikipedia have come under heavy criticism from the press and the general public, with their actions widely viewed as inconsistent with Wikipedia's educational mission.

What's interesting about this episode -- aside from all the details revealed by The Daily Dot investigation -- is that it raises some key questions about what Wikipedia is and what it is trying to do. For example, when does an article about a company become promotional material? What if a PR person is genuinely correcting incorrect info? Can they do so ethically? More generally, what kind of subjects should be included? Wikipedia uses the idea of "notability", but what does that mean? Would paying Wikipedia contributors help to bring in the much-needed new blood to re-invigorate the project, or would it simply lead to yet more socking? Those are questions worth pondering and answering because, for all the concerns about Wikipedia's future, few have any doubts about its value and importance -- both to the Internet, and indeed to modern society.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

It would be something of an understatement to say that encryption is a hot topic at the moment. But leaving aside deeper issues like the extent to which the Internet's cryptographic systems are compromised, there is a more general question about whether Web sites should be pushing users to connect using HTTPS in the hope that this might improve their security. That might seem a no-brainer, but for the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the organization that runs Wikipedia and related projects, it's a more complex issue.

The problem is that HTTPS access is disabled in some countries precisely to prevent users from being able to access sites securely. So when Wikimedia introduced its HTTPS-by-default policy on August 28, it made a couple of exceptions:

Some users live in areas where HTTPS is not an easy option, most times because of explicit blocking by a government. At the request of these communities, we have made an explicit exclusion for users from those affected countries. Simply put, users from China and Iran will not be required to use HTTPS for logging in, nor for viewing any Wikimedia project site.

An interesting post by Erik Möller, the WMF's Deputy Director, raises the question whether such exceptions help or hinder freedom in those countries:

In the long term, the Wikimedia movement is faced with a choice, which is inherently political: Should we indefinitely sustain security exceptions for regions that prevent the use of encryption, or should we shift to an alternative strategy?

Here are some of the considerations he mentions:

If we accommodate [China]'s or Iran's censorship practices, we are complicit in their attempts to monitor and control their citizenry. If a privileged user's credentials (e.g. Checkuser) are misused by the government through monitoring of unencrypted traffic, for example, this is an action that would not have been possible without our exemption. This could potentially expose even users not in the affected country to risks.

Möller goes on to suggest the following:

It could be argued that it's time to draw a line in the sand -- if you're prohibiting the use of encryption, you're effectively not part of the web. You're subverting basic web technologies.

Drawing this hard line clearly has negative near term effects on the citizenry of affected countries. But the more the rest of the world comes together in saying "What you are doing is wrong. Stop it." -- the harder it will be for outlier countries to continue doing it.

That may have been a defensible position last week, when he wrote those words, but it certainly isn't now. Snowden's information about efforts by the NSA and GCHQ to undermine every form of online encryption shows how they are "subverting basic web technologies" in a profound way; it is therefore no longer possible for the West to wag a finger at countries like China that are doing the same. However, Möller also points out:

There _are_ effective tools that can be used to circumvent attempts to censor and control the Internet. Perhaps it is time for WMF to ally with the organizations that develop and promote such tools, rather than looking for ways to guarantee basic site operation in hostile environments even at the expense of user privacy.

This is surely a better strategy. It would allow Wikimedia users in countries where HTTPS is blocked to access Wikipedia and related projects in a discreet way. Such circumvention tools could also be useful for many other sites that face the same problem, and so would be a force for combating censorship and control in general. Finally, if the privacy situation in the West continues to deteriorate, the software might even come in handy there, too.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

A post on Examiner.com points out that Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder, is interested in Edward Snowden:

I'm sure this has been discussed somewhere. In the media there have been reports of user accounts used on various tech discussion sites by Edward Snowden. He was apparently quite an active person online, particularly a few years back when he was younger. It seems highly likely to me that he would have edited Wikipedia -- most people who fit his profile (tech savvy, internet activist types) will have done so. Do we have any evidence of that, or suspicions about that?

As Wales says, it certainly seems possible that Snowden might have fiddled with a bit or two on Wikipedia, as one does, so it's a reasonable question to pose. But there's a complication, also pointed out in the Examiner.com story:

However, a key problem for Mr. Wales is that Wikipedians aren't allowed to snoop into the identity of other other Wikipedia editors who have not disclosed their real name on Wikipedia.

This tension between wanting to know if Snowden was a Wikipedia editor, and rules that say the identity of editors should not be revealed unilaterally, is explored in a fascinating -- and lively -- discussion underneath Wales's original post that's well-worth reading. His position on the matter is the following:

It is not 'outing' when the user ids in question are already published widely in the media in reliable sources. I looked for a couple of variant spellings and found nothing, so I asked to see if others could find anything. I think it is not only acceptable but highly desirable for people to openly discuss such matters. If someone discovers or knows something that they feel would be inappropriate to post publicly, then they should send it to me privately.

Snowden's relationship with Wikipedia remains a mystery; Wales's views on Snowden, by contrast, are pretty clear:

I personally think in general Snowden is an "innocent party" -- a hero, in fact.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

The thing about this damned internet is you just can't get stuff to disappear, you know? Whether it's automakers trying to disappear offensive advertising, bus companies apparently run by Mr. Burns trying to get negative reviews to go away, or that embarrassing home video my mother put up of me performing the lead role in my grade school's rendition of Hairspray (seriously, why would a K-12 school even do that?!?), the internet never forgets. More importantly, it vehemently punishes those that try to force amnesia upon it, via the Streisand Effect.

Reader dennis deems writes in about the latest such example in which someone keeps trying to delete 3-year-old controversial information out of Texas Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson's Wikipedia page only to find that controversy being resurrected in the news yet again.

The deleted entry, which has since been restored, concerned a 2010 scandal in which Johnson was found to have "awarded 23 scholarships over five years to two of her grandsons, two sons of her nephew and the children of her top congressional aide in Dallas." It was a clear violation of the scholarship fund's anti-nepotism and residency rules. Johnson eventually repaid the foundation more than $31,000 for the misappropriated scholarships, but has been hammered over the issue by rivals during her two most recent campaigns.

And now it will be an issue in any subsequent campaigns as well, and fresh in the media's bloodstream too, all thanks to whoever is trying to disappear the entry about Johnson's apparent corruption. For her part, the Congresswoman insists that it isn't she who is attempting these changes and she has no idea who is. Whether you believe that or not, even supporters of Johnson who might try this have to be punching themselves over how this is all working out. The report suggests a link to Johnson's campaign manager which, if it is indeed him, simply indicates that the Congresswoman needs a new campaign manager.

After all, as we continue to learn, no matter how bad the transgression of a public figure, the coverup is always worse. As one Wikipedia editor told the culprit:

By removing information about Johnson's nepotistic scholarship awards, you served only to bring this scandal back to the attention of The Dallas Morning News. If that was your intention, then you succeeded - as the material is now back in the article and Bernice's name is once again being smeared in Dallas. If it wasn't your intention, then you really screwed the pooch. At any rate, if you persist in removing content from this encyclopedia, regardless of your motives, your account will be disabled.

So take heed, public figures. There is simply no percentage in fudging your Wikipedia entries. It won't actually work, it will Streisand-rocket whatever information you're trying to suppress, and you'll end up with media egg all over your face.