14 DAY TRIAL // The Wikimedia Foundation has decided to pull out its guns and fight against the European decision to allow people to ask search engines to remove links they believe to no longer be irrelevant, following the rumor that Google was going to remove a link to Wikipedia.
The Foundation has issued a warning that the entire “right to be forgotten” ruling will have critical repercussions for its online encyclopedia, which in turn will have an impact on the whole Internet.
“In doing so, the European court abandoned its responsibility to protect one of the most important and universal rights: the right to seek, receive, and impart information,” Wikimedia Foundation’s Lila Tretikov wrote.
The result of this controversial decision is a diminishing number of accurate search results which have been vanishing from European pages without any real explanation, proof of the logic, judicial review or appeal process.
The Foundation also revealed that things are far worse than originally thought. In fact, there isn’t just one link that Google or other search engines have removed, but 50. “To date, the notices would affect more than 50 links directing readers to Wikipedia sites,” Tretikov mentions.
Of course, since the decision doesn’t make it mandatory for search engines to disclose when a link is being censored, Wikipedia is thankful for those that do share the information. Of course, Wikimedia Foundation is here referring to Google, who has been notifying webmasters of the links that were getting removed from search results, especially since the Internet giant is the one getting the most requests.
European officials have been rumored to want to make Google stop sending such notifications after media publications have taken on the job of letting the world know that some link or another was removed from search pages as a form of protest.
Wikimedia Foundation wants to take on the same role and to post notices for each indefinite removal of Wikipedia search results from pages.
The topic is quite controversial because it is interesting why a link to Wikipedia would be considered irrelevant. Entries on the encyclopedia can be edited by anyone with an account and they are also quite often updated to match the evolution of one situation or another, or on this occasion, of someone’s life.
Let’s just say that if someone ends up having a Wikipedia page, they’re likely quite well known. Even so, how a page that gets updated often can be irrelevant is mindboggling.