Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-02-13/News and notes

Wikimedia Russia Director Stanislav Kozlovsky was declared to be a foreign agent according to Meduza. In December, Kozlovsky had been forced out of his job as associate professor at Moscow State University in anticipation of the official statement and he had already started the process of closing Wikimedia Russia. See previous Signpost coverage.

Oleg Orlov, the co-founder of Memorial – which was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize – was also named a foreign agent by the Russian government, along with four other individuals:

• Anton Kartavin, an independent Novosibirsk City Council deputy
• Mikhail Chimarov, photographer
• Nikita Sokolov, historian and
• Sergey Stepanov, journalist

In a subsequent interview with Worldcrunch, titled "Is Wikipedia The Last Hope For Free Speech In Putin's Russia?", Kozlovsky stated

– AK, Smallbones, H

In its latest EU Policy Monitoring Report, published on January 30, Wikimedia Europe highlights some "really, really intensive" legislative work ongoing in the European Union (ahead of a de facto February deadline in advance of the upcoming European Parliament elections in June). Some of them raise hopes and concerns regarding their possible impact on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects:

Secondly,

For example, Signpost readers may recall the protestations of the (then still EU-based) British tabloid the Daily Mail against its "ban" by the English Wikipedia in 2017. Will the new law enable such news publications to interfere with their deprecation or blacklisting, or with other community decisions? The authors of the report appear to be optimistic (although not certain) that this won't be the case, thanks to a carveout:

As a third new legislative agreement of relevance to Wikimedia projects, the report names the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), "a law for internet-connected products that is meant to improve the security and software maintenance of your smart toaster and AI-powered fridge (just random examples)." Here, the European Wikimedians "were involved [...] because the newly proposed obligations could have seriously messed up the free & open software ecosystem. In the end the CRA will not harm free software and is unlikely to cause havoc on the open source environment, as long as it is outside a commercial activity," thanks to added exceptions. However, they call it "still a terrible piece of law and we have to be honest, at best it won’t do much harm." – H

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