Stories – Wikimedia Foundation

The Distance Between Two Points

A manufacturing company sent the Foundation a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) request, demanding the removal of its logo from Wikipedia articles about the company.

After reviewing the request, the Foundation determined that the use of the logos in Wikipedia articles about the company or its products was allowed by law, under the fair use doctrine. This doctrine allows anyone to use copyrighted material without permission for limited purposes, such as news reporting, teaching, research, or encyclopedic content.

The Foundation also sent the request to the volunteer community on Wikimedia Commons for their evaluation. The community chose not to start a deletion discussion for the images, mainly because they evaluated the logos in question did not meet the creativity requirement to be copyrighted as an “artistic work.” The community also determined that one of the uploaded logos was created from an edited photo taken by a user; as a result, it was not copyrightable by the company.

In accordance with best practices, the Foundation encouraged the company to work with the community on any further issues it may have with the use of their logo on Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects.

For more information about DMCA notices, please check the Foundation’s DMCA Policy.

Nothing to Hide

The Foundation’s press inbox received an email from a person claiming to be a world famous superstar. In the email, the supposed superstar asked us to remove the address of their childhood home from a Wikipedia article about the building, claiming security concerns.

In these situations, the Foundation works with the volunteer community to balance the quality and availability of public information and the rights of Wikipedia users – including administrators, editors, and readers – with applicable legal requirements and people’s personal safety. In this case, a Wikipedia volunteer confirmed that the address and building information was already publicly available elsewhere online (all information on Wikipedia must be based on reliable external sources). Thus, the Foundation deferred to the community’s decision to leave the address on Wikipedia.

GOAT

Michael Jordan or LeBron James? Lionel Messi or Diego Maradona? Babe Ruth or Willie Mays? Perhaps you have had the experience of debating with family or friends the Greatest of All Time (or “GOAT”) for a particular sport. Debating the strengths and weaknesses of athletes can help us understand their careers and sport much better.

One area where designating an athlete the “GOAT” doesn’t make sense is an encyclopedia. One Wikipedia editor, however, disagreed. They wrote to the Foundation to complain that edits to the page of a certain male tennis player continued to be reverted. In particular, a line stating that the player was the “greatest male tennis player of all time” was removed every time the editor added it. The editor insisted they had used reliable sources to back up the claim that the player was indisputably the greatest of all time.

Encyclopedias generally, and Wikipedia specifically, don’t make qualitative statements about public figures and avoid attempting to predict the future, including who might be the greatest player twenty years from now. The Foundation decided to take no action, as community-governed content moderation practices on WIkipedia were working well.

Conflicted Interests

It is not uncommon for Wikipedia editors to reach out to fellow volunteers and/or the Foundation when Wikipedia administrators (trusted Wikipedia volunteers with advanced permissions to protect Wikipedia) take action on edits or pages they have made. During this transparency reporting period, one such volunteer wrote to us to complain that their account had been deleted.

The Foundation investigated and found that the user’s account had not been deleted. Instead, the user created an article about a certain company, and the Wikimedia community had nominated that article for deletion. As volunteers reviewed the article, they discovered that it was made with the help of a marketing firm to boost the online presence of the company.

Contributing to Wikipedia about one’s self, family, friends, clients, or employers creates a Conflict of Interest, and the Wikipedia rules are crystal clear: no self-promotion or marketing on the projects. The Foundation advised the user to take on the feedback given by the administrators and Wikipedia community.

Copyright Robuttal

A European non-profit wrote to Wikipedia volunteers with a copyright concern about a landmark film, a unique story about society and robots, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. When the request reached the Foundation, we found that the original 1927 film was in the public domain in the U.S. and its copyright had expired.

In addition, the film’s 2010 restored version – released by the non-profit in the U.S. – is still protected in other countries where copyrights last for 70 years after the creator’s death. We took a closer look and found that the 2010 version simply aimed to restore the film to look as close to the original as possible and add subtitles, making it unlikely to qualify for any additional copyright protection in the U.S.

The volunteer community checked both the film and the subtitles and, ultimately, concluded that the film was available for use in the U.S. (with credit given to the restoration non-profit), but the subtitles may have still been copyrighted, and were removed. The Wikimedia Foundation followed community guidance that works across countries and legal systems, prioritizing the public domain and everyone’s access to free knowledge.

You Gotta Be Kitten

During this transparency period, the Foundation received perhaps our cutest takedown request to date. A Wikipedia user asked that a photo of a bright-eyed kitten with its mother be taken down. Why? The user wasn’t a cat-hating dog-fan. Instead, they believed that the photo’s caption was incorrect — it was labeled as a newborn kitten with its mother, but the kitten had a healthy coat and wide open eyes, indicating that it wasn’t newborn at all. The user explained that the kitten in the photo was likely already a few weeks old.

After clarifying what the user was actually requesting, we declined to take down the photo. But of course, Wikipedia content is editable by Wikipedia users. Therefore, we informed the user that they could edit the caption to make it more accurate.