On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 5:33 PM, Romaine Wiki <romaine.w...@gmail.com> wrote: > Today I was reading in the (international) news about websites with > knowledge on the topic of climate change disappear from the internet as > result of the Trump administration. ... > Luckily there are many scientists working on getting all the data abroad, > out of the US to ensure the research data is saved, including on servers in > the Netherlands where Trump (hopefully) has no reach.
Yes: there are several projects in the scientific community and universities in the US as well right now (I'm involved in some library efforts) to back up US government datasets, especially complex or dynamic datasets that are not easily scraped. It's unfortunate that this is ad-hoc emergency work. There is a lot of important data that is at risk of being taken offline (or simply not maintained), or has already been taken down; this is fragmented across US government agencies and pages and represents a great deal of the world's climate, oceanic, and other scientific data. > In the past week I was reading about the Internet Archive organisation, who > is making a back up in Canada because of the Trump administration. I did > not understood this, you may call me naive, but now I do understand, > apparently they have some visionary people at the Internet Archive. Yes, I agree with your point about backups, but also: Internet Archive's work is crucial to our work in lots of ways, and one thing we can do is support and partner with them even more. (IA just gave a nice presentation about some of our collaborations and future work at the WikiConference North America: https://wikiconference.org/wiki/Submissions:2016/Internet_Archive_and_Wikipedia_collaboration:_Link_rot,_multimedia_and_more) > Trump is now promoting harassment and disrespect, already for some time, > > What signal is given to the rest of the world if an America based > organisation is spreading the thought of a harassment free Wikipedia and > the free word, while the president of the US is promoting harassment, > disrespect and censorship on a massive scale. As an American, I agree. I hope that being US-based does not mean people think that all US people or organizations agree with the current government. As an organization with strong and long-held values, I think Wikimedia must state our disagreement with policies of censorship and xenophobia (from the US administration, or from any government), which so profoundly differ from our own values of internationalism, cooperation, respect and accurate information. A statement of clearly articulated organizational values is important for every organization, and especially important for US-based organizations now. This is distinct from (also) lobbying about the copyright and internet law issues that affect our work. Organizations similar to us are also reacting to this weekend's news about immigration restrictions; for instance Mozilla just posted a note: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/01/28/us-immigration-ban/. ... > To come to a conclusion, I think WMF and the Wikimedia movement should > think about a back-up plan if it actually goes wrong. The discussion of backing up data elsewhere is a good one. We should think about other specifics as well. I don't know if we have Wikimedians affected by the current US immigration rulings, but we must think ahead even if we do not. The new privacy orders are confusing and unclear, but certainly affect us. I'm sure there are other dimensions: let's discuss it and figure out the steps we should take as an organization to support our values and preemptively deal with government threats. How should we organize? Phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers <at> gmail.com * _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
