The Wikimedia Foundation Releases First Annual Transparency Report
From the Wikimedia Blog:
Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization, receives requests from governments, individuals, and organizations to disclose information about our users or to change content on the Wikimedia projects. This transparency report is the amalgamation of two years of data — it details the number of requests we received, where these requests came from, and how we responded to them.
Among the wealth of information furnished in the report, we provide details about:
Content alteration and takedown requests. Of the 304 general content removal requests, zero (0) were granted.
The Wikimedia Foundation is deeply committed to supporting an open and neutral space, where the users themselves decide what belongs on the Wikimedia projects., many of whom are creators and copyright holders themselves, and who work hard to ensure that our projects adhere to copyright laws. The Digital Copyright takedown requests. Credit for the notably low number of these requests goes to our community of users Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides for a legal notice and takedown process, and we do adhere to that law. When we do receive the infrequent DMCA notice, however, we thoroughly evaluate it and only remove infringing content if the request is valid.
Requests for user data. We do all we can to protect our users’ rights and privacy. Only 14.3% of requests for user data were granted because many requests were found to be illegal or not up to our standards. And often, we did not have any information to give. As part of our commitment to user privacy, Wikimedia collects little nonpublic user information, and retains that information for a short amount of time.
Direct to Full Text Report
See Also: Just another monkey-copyright story (via The Washington Post)
Filed under: Associations and Organizations, Data Files, News, Patrons and Users
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.