
A German court forced the removal of a Wikipedia article’s history - bonyt
https://wikimediafoundation.org/2019/04/11/a-german-court-forced-us-to-remove-part-of-a-wikipedia-articles-history-heres-what-that-means/
======
dmurray
>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 some other court, perhaps in a less
popular jurisdiction like China or North Korea.

Perhaps they mean that this is not a notable change in the law because Germany
is not a common law jurisdiction, and changes to the law happen only through
the legislature and not through the judicial system. But in that case the
claim is trivial, and still equally irrelevant now that _Wikimedia_ have set
the precedent that they will obey courts in these cases.

~~~
eugeniub
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 Wikimedia will have to worry
about a North Korean court decision, because they are not in North Korea.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CFRD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CFRD)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_gu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_guide/Deleting#Deleting_a_revision)

~~~
tomrod
We should put up a page highlighting controversial, publicized wiki pages as
they are historically significant.

------
philwelch
How does Wikimedia determine which country’s laws it will comply with? Unless
they have some physical presence in Germany, why wouldn’t they just tell the
Germans to go pound sand instead?

~~~
incompatible
I don't believe they comply with every edict from the likes of Turkey or
China. Perhaps it's related to taking donations from Germany, or perhaps they
want to be able to lobby its government and the EU without appearing to be a
criminal organization.

~~~
bscphil
> perhaps they want to be able to lobby its government and the EU without
> appearing to be a criminal organization.

It's interesting because they would only appear that way to the EU itself. For
ordinary people, especially in the United States (though I suspect elsewhere),
Wikipedia is far more of a respected organization than the European Union.

(To be clear, I mean that if Wikipedia says "what we're doing is okay" and the
EU says "what you're doing is illegal", I think more people are going to
believe Wikipedia. That's an interesting position to be in, whether it's
ultimately useful to you or not.)

~~~
incompatible
I think all governments would like to be able to enforce their laws on the
Internet. The EU just has a bit more success than most due to the collective
size and wealth of its member states. I don't know how to judge what ordinary
people want. They seem generally happy to elect politicians who restrict free
speech.

------
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&...](https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alexander_Waibel&action=history)

~~~
jpatokal
If all of somebody's contributions are removed, there's nothing to attribute
to them.

~~~
incompatible
They didn't just take away the infringing contribution, but everything prior
to 2018-09-28.

------
phy6
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?

~~~
vesinisa
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...](https://blog.archive.org/2018/10/01/more-than-9-million-broken-links-
on-wikipedia-are-now-rescued/)

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.

~~~
vonmoltke
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?

~~~
kobieyc
GDPR applies to EU-citizens, so I think if the Internet Archive contains
material referencing an EU citizen they would need to comply.

~~~
Googler1234
How does the EU can enforce anything over an organization that does not have a
legal presence in the EU? At best they can force their ISPs to block the
website in their countries, but I can't see how much more they can do.

~~~
soneil
I believe archive.org does have a physical presence in Amsterdam, which may
not help in this context.

------
_cs2017_
Background:

[https://thewikicabal.com/2019/01/20/waibel-v-
wikimedia/](https://thewikicabal.com/2019/01/20/waibel-v-wikimedia/)

~~~
bscphil
Thank you for this: I was able to learn from this article that a good bit of
the now-censored history is, ironically, revealed in public court documents.
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Urtei...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Urteil_im_Fall_Waibel.pdf)

There's also an archive.org page from late 2015 which contains the word
"PRISM" among other stuff.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20150908002221/https://de.wikipe...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150908002221/https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Waibel)

This article from Heise is still up as well, and it makes claims about Dr.
Waibel's purported ties to the NSA.
[https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/NSA-Abhoerskandal-
De...](https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/NSA-Abhoerskandal-Deutsche-
Forschung-fuer-die-NSA-1948555.html)

Personally I think attacking Wikipedia ought to have severe Streisand-ing
consequences.

------
ratsmack
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.

~~~
vbezhenar
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.

~~~
philwelch
I would prefer them to force Germany’s hand and make _them_ build a China-
style firewall.

------
purpleidea
What would have happened if the information was in an append only log like git
history (where a rebase would be inappropriate) or a blockchain (where it
can't occur)?

~~~
cesarb
For efficiency reasons, the append-only part of both git and blockchains does
not contain the content, but instead a hash of the content. Furthermore, they
always use cryptographic hashes with strong preimage resistance
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preimage_resistance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preimage_resistance)),
so just knowing the hash does not allow one to obtain the content (other than
through brute force).

Therefore, they might not be able to remove "746308829575e17c3331bbcb00c0898b"
from the append-only log, but they might be able to remove the mapping
"746308829575e17c3331bbcb00c0898b -> Hello, world!" from the repository,
without breaking the chain of the append-only log.

~~~
gruez
This doesn't really answer the parent's question though. In a blockchain with
a client doing full validation, removing/altering the data would cause the
that block to be invalid. You'd need to hardfork the network to accept the
altered history. I suspect git also checks the integrity of each commit, at
least when pulling/cloning, so that would probably cause git to think the
objects/packfiles are corrupt.

------
jocoda
At least Wikipedia content is still accessible in Germany.

Because of a German court order to regarding some of their items[0] Project
Gutenberg blocks German access to _all_ of their books. Now for more than a
year.

I sympathize with them but a total block seems a bit heavy handed, punishing
all of Germany for a maybe poor decision. Guess this was the simplest way to
respond given the resources they have.

Curious to see how this is going to play out in the end.

Back to Wikepedia

> Because of the very short deadline from the legal proceeding—we were given
> less than one day to take action

What I don't understand in the Wikipedia case is why the deadline was so
tight. Seems unreasonable.

[0].
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16511038](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16511038)

------
justtopost
Brexit is seeming smarter every day. What started as knee jerk reaction to
immigration seems more sensible than ever, for myrid reasons.

~~~
CM30
At the current rate, it wouldn't be too implausible to see leave win by more
votes in the case of a second referendum.

Still, it also provides an interesting opportunity for political parties if
they have the guts to follow through, do something pro consumer/voter and
stick to their guns. Think about it. A pro Brexit party who said outright that
they were not going to be for internet censorship or privacy violations and
pushed their views as a counter to the likes of Article 13 could win a lot of
support in the tech industry/with younger demographics, and they'd probably
reap a fair few financial benefits for themselves and the country too.

And given its the US that's raking in the money with the likes of
Google/Facebook/Amazon/whatever rather than the EU, it could make economic
sense to work more closely with them than Europe too.

------
HarryHirsch
Is there any reason that Wikimedia does not mention the name of the person in
question? Historically, Wikimedia has been in favour of free speech to the
detriment of all else, so it can't be out of consideration to the article's
subject.

~~~
cooper12
Probably to discourage a witch hunt. The ire here shouldn't be directed
towards the individual, who operated within the German legal system, but the
courts themselves. Also I'm not sure what you're basing the latter part of
your comment on. It doesn't really seem to match my understanding of the
history of the project.

------
amatecha
> "the content was in fact defamatory, largely because the source in question
> had been taken offline"

Is there not an archive.org link for the source? Or some other archive? Or
maybe it was taken down from archival sites similarly?

------
ikeboy
>Three months ago

Why did it take three months to write this blog post?

~~~
The_ed17
[https://wikimediafoundation.org/2019/03/26/european-
parliame...](https://wikimediafoundation.org/2019/03/26/european-parliament-
limits-internet-freedom-in-controversial-copyright-vote/)

~~~
ikeboy
What does that have to do with anything? OP isn't about copyright.

------
gumby
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.

~~~
fxbl0i
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...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190410/14580641973/eu-tells-
internet-archive-that-much-site-is-terrorist-content.shtml)

~~~
tropo
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.

~~~
vonmoltke
They are not exempt in the sense that the EU (or individual member states)
will start blocking the Internet Archive if they don't comply.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Is there any precedent for EU countries blocking websites due to libel claims?
I don't think what you're describing has ever happened.

------
chupa-chups
Statement from the law firm:

[https://raue.com/en/news/industries/media-and-
telecommunicat...](https://raue.com/en/news/industries/media-and-
telecommunications/media/raue-llp-successful-against-wikipedia/)

------
oh_sigh
What was the supposedly defamatory content?

------
ezoe
Remove the server located at EU and denying the access from EU, problem
solved.

~~~
thepangolino
Why would they need to deny EU access? Let the EU implement its own fascist
firewall.

------
hndamien
Is it time to decentralise Wikipedia...?

~~~
el_dev_hell
Decentralization has been thrown around as a buzzword for the past year.

I can see a strong case for decentralizing Wikipedia. Or a comparable
offering.

~~~
throwawaa743892
People say it to seem smart. And then you start asking questions and they look
foolish indeed.

For example, decentralize how? At what level? Article? Storage? Editorial?
Might as well say all you need to build a car is 4 wheels and some power.

------
ilovetux
Germany censoring things makes me nervous. I think they tried something like
this before.

