Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act verification rules:
Wikipedia has lost a legal challenge to new Online Safety Act rules which it says could threaten the human rights and safety of its volunteer editors.
The Wikimedia Foundation - the non-profit which supports the online encyclopaedia - wanted a judicial review of regulations which could mean Wikipedia has to verify the identities of its users.
But it said despite the loss, the judgement "emphasized the responsibility of Ofcom and the UK government to ensure Wikipedia is protected".
The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing the Online Safety Act to create a safer online world for everyone".
Judicial reviews challenge the lawfulness of the way in which a decision has been made by a public body.
In this case the Wikimedia Foundation and a Wikipedia editor tried to challenge the way in which the government decided to make regulations covering which sites should be classed "Category 1" under the Online Safety Act - the strictest rules sites must follow.
It argued the rules were logically flawed and too broad, meaning a policy intended to impose extra rules on large social media companies would instead apply to Wikipedia.
In particular the foundation is concerned the extra duties required - if Wikipedia was classed as Category 1 - would mean it would have to verify the identity of its contributors, undermining their privacy and safety.
The only way it could avoid being classed as Category 1 would be to cut the number of people in the UK who could access the online encyclopaedia by about three-quarters, or disable key functions on the site.
The government's lawyers argued that ministers had considered whether Wikipedia should be exempt from the regulations but had reasonably rejected the idea.
Wikipedia can challenge Online Safety Act if strictest rules apply to it, says judge:
The operator of Wikipedia has been given permission by a high court judge to challenge the Online Safety Act if it is categorised as a high-risk platform, which would impose the most stringent duties.
The Wikimedia Foundation has said it might be forced to reduce how many people can access the site in order to comply with the regulations if it is classified as a category 1 provider by Ofcom later this summer.
As a non-profit, the site said, it "would face huge challenges to meet the large technological and staffing needs" required to comply with the duties, which include user-verification requirements, stringent protections for users and regular reporting responsibilities to prevent the spread of harmful content.
The Wikimedia Foundation calculated that the number of people in the UK who access Wikipedia would have to be reduced by about three-quarters in order for the site to not qualify as a category 1 service, which is defined as a large user-to-user platform that uses algorithmic contender recommendations.
It said Wikipedia was different to other sites expected to be labelled as category 1 providers, such as Facebook, X and Instagram, because it was run by a charity and its users typically only encountered content that they sought out.
Mr Justice Johnson refused Wikipedia's legal challenge in the high court on several grounds, but he noted that the site "provides significant value for freedom of speech and expression" and added that the outcome did not give Ofcom or the government "a green light to implement a regime that would significantly impede Wikipedia's operations".
Any decision to make Wikipedia a category 1 provider would have to be "justified as proportionate if it were not to amount to a breach of the right to freedom of expression", he said, but he added that it would be "premature" to rule on this since Ofcom had not yet determined that Wikipedia was a category 1 service.
If Ofcom determines that Wikipedia is a category 1 service and this means Wikipedia is unable to operate as at present, Johnson suggested that the technology secretary, Peter Kyle, should "consider whether to amend the regulations or to exempt categories of service from the act" and said Wikipedia could bring a further challenge if he did not.
Phil Bradley-Schmieg, the lead counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation, said: "While the decision does not provide the immediate legal protections for Wikipedia that we hoped for, the court's ruling emphasised the responsibility of Ofcom and the UK government to ensure Wikipedia is protected as the OSA [Online Safety Act] is implemented.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday August 19 2025, @08:37AM (10 children)
Internets today is unsafe, dangerous territory resembling Valley of Vipers. If anything of real value peaks high above everything else, it's Wikipedia.
Seriously, it's not perfect, a battleground of ideologies and political stances, but at least it is exceptionally good concerning math and scientific stuff generally. That alone helps emerging nations to emancipate.
Demolition of Wikipedia will become a deed of epicity that surpasses destruction of all Ancient civilizations together.
Perhaps, that's the intentional original goal of the said Law.
Total loss of knowledge, return to ignorance.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 19 2025, @03:08PM (6 children)
The rich and powerful have always feared an educated hoipilo.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by pTamok on Tuesday August 19 2025, @05:38PM (5 children)
[snark]
The rich and powerful have always feared an educated πολύν.
[/snark]
οἱ πολλοί (hoi polloí) is (ancient) Greek meaning 'the many', so what you wrote was "The rich and powerful have always feared an educated the many". It's a phrase that is often used to mean 'the common people', so what you probably meant was "The rich and powerful have always feared an educated common populace.", so I dropped the definite article, and modified the noun declension ( I hope, correctly, as my knowledge of ancient Greek is vanishingly small) to what I think is the accusative rather than the nominative - hence πολύν [wiktionary.org].
If you are writing English to be understood, it's probably best to use another term, as use of οἱ πολλοί is full of traps for the unwary, and open to debate and criticism.
Elites need educated people because they are useful, but fear them because they can upset things in such a way that the elite's power is reduced.
(Score: 3, Informative) by vux984 on Tuesday August 19, @09:07PM (4 children)
"hoi polloi" isn't being used directly from the ancient greek. It is an english word now, originally borrowed from the ancient greeek, and it means (in English) 'the common people'. I don't know exactly what means in greek, and it doesn't really matter.
"the hoi polloi" maybe technically grammatically incorrect, but its rather like "ATM machine" where although ATM has machine built into the acronym, it is now commonly used both as a noun "an ATM" or as an an adjective - an "ATM machine" (the way we would say "a sewing machine"). Using 'hoi polloi' with the definite article 'the' is pretty widely accepted now.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Tuesday August 19, @09:38PM (3 children)
Well, yes, and no. English appropriates words from other languages and misuses them - that much I agree with. Perfectly good English words like hinterland, kindergarten, strand, maelstrom, doppelganger, panini, opera, candelabra, khaki, alkali, alcohol: the last two, just like 'hoi polloi' having a definite article attached. As for misuse of initialisms, there is ATM machine (as you pointed out), PIN number, LCD display, UPC code, OPEC countries.
On the other hand, if you pretend to be educated, sprinkling your text with foreign terms without knowing how they should be correctly spelled, or declined, or even that they are foreign imports is not a sign of sophistication. For many there is the thorny issue of how to pluralise foreign words: using an 's', or using the foreign method, which requires a knowledge of the grammar of the foreign language from which the word was purloined.
I'm not trying to be prescriptive about how 'hoi polloi' should be used - rather, I'm trying to emphasis that using language well requires a knowledge of where it is from, and making conscious choices. I was convinced of the idiocy of 'requiring' foreign words to be pluralised in the foreign manner, and just stick an 's' on the end: understandable, and easy, if inelegant. 'hoi polloi' as a token, has a specific meaning when used in English, so you are right, but there are many other ways of phrasing things without the seemingly pretentious use of Ancient Greek.
Well written English is a delight to read. Poorly written English, as mine often is, shows the author has not spent the time and trouble to polish it well. If the author cannot be bothered to write well, why should the reader put in the effort to read it?
I'm sure we could have a long conversation on how language changes and evolves over time.Always interesting, rarely productive. Have a fine day.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 21, @01:00AM (2 children)
Presumably the plural of 'data' is 'datata'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 21, @01:57AM
:-) I'm pretty sure the singular of "data" is "datum"
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday August 21, @02:14PM
'Data' is already a plural noun. As an anonymous coward points out, the singular is 'datum'.
The 'standard' English approach would be to add an 's', so the plural would be datas. It might be more comprehensible to write "sets of data". The word 'agenda' has the same problem: it too is plural, the singular being agendum, which is extremely rarely used, with most people referring to an 'agenda item'. Agenda [wiktionary.org] originally is a Latin word, meaning 'things that ought to be done'. Agendum, correspondingly, means 'a thing that ought to be done'. Agendas is in common English use as a plural of agenda.
Trying to follow foreign language pluralisation and declension rules when writing English is difficult, and can require somewhat arcane knowledge. For example, the plural of igloo (originally an Inuktitut word) is igluit. Similarly confusing, the plural of cherub (originally from Hebrew) would be cherubim (it's actually a lot more complicated than that if you look it up). Pluralising foreign loan words in the (original) foreign way leads to nasty complications in writing English, and acts to exclude the general reader. It's a kind of signifier saying 'Look how clever I am!'.
People got away with using Classical Latin and Classical Greek terms in their writing in the past because Latin (and to a lesser extent, Greek) were linguæ francæ [wikipedia.org] (see what I did there) across Europe for the educated elite, so it was reasonable to expect that an educated audience would understand the terms. Classical Latin and Classical Greek are not commonly taught these days. English pluralisation rules are relatively simple, with the exception of singular words that end with 's' or 'se', such as virus, Jesus, goose, and mongoose, and a few other exceptions like fish, sheep, ox, deer. Importing complicated foreign rules just to look clever doesn't strike me as particularly useful.
Don't be impressed by people who use foreign terms: be impressed by people who write plain English understandably and well. It is more difficult than they make it look.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 19 2025, @03:32PM
Fearmonger much?
This is hardly a "Demolition of Wikipedia" -- first, it's just in UK. Second, tfa notes that one court already warned that including Wikipedia in regulation aimed broadly at large websites would be a bad idea. It's back to the drawing board for the regulators to try to write a better rule.
Maybe those regulators can use AI to help them tell the difference between Facebook and Wikipedia?(grin).
(Score: 2, Touché) by tom2tec on Tuesday August 19 2025, @04:44PM
Yet another example of institutionalized book burning and banning.
Words to men as air to birds.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 19 2025, @05:24PM
The brain stem wants what it wants, and will kill anything that gets in its way, including its own cortex