As COVID-19 spread rapidly around the world in 2020, people wanted reliable information. A global network of volunteers took up the challenge, consolidating information from scientists, journalists, and medical professionals, and making it accessible to everyone.
Two of them live almost 3.200 kilometers from each other: Dr. ala najjar is a Wikipedia volunteer and doctor who takes breaks during his ER shift to address COVID-19 misinformation on the Arabic version of the site. The doctor Netha Hussein, a clinical and medical neuroscientist, spent her downtime editing COVID-19 articles in English and Malayalam (a language of Southwest India), and then focused her efforts on improving Wikipedia articles on COVID-19 vaccines.
Thanks to Najjar, Hussain, and more than 280.000 additional volunteers, Wikipedia has emerged as one of the most trusted sources for up-to-date, comprehensive knowledge about COVID-19, spanning nearly 7.000 articles in 188 languages. Wikipedia's reach and ability to support knowledge sharing on a global scale, from informing the public about a major disease to helping students study for exams, is only possible thanks to laws that allow its collaborative model to flourish. run by volunteers.
As the European Parliament considers new regulations aimed at holding Big Tech platforms accountable for illegal content amplified on their websites and apps through packages such as the Digital Services Act (DSA), must protect the ability of citizens to collaborate in services of public interest.
Legislators do this by trying to stop the spread of content that causes physical or psychological harm, including content that is illegal in many jurisdictions. As they consider a variety of provisions for the comprehensive DSA, some of the proposed elements are welcome, including requirements for more transparency about how platforms' content moderation works.
But the current draft also includes prescriptive requirements for how the terms of service must be enforced. At first glance, these measures may seem necessary to curb the growing power of social media, prevent the spread of illegal content, and ensure the safety of online spaces. But what about projects like Wikipedia? Some of the proposed requirements could shift power away from people to platform providers, stifling digital platforms that operate differently from large commercial platforms.
Big Tech platforms work in fundamentally different ways than non-profit collaborative websites like Wikipedia. All articles created by volunteers are available for free, without ads and without tracking the browsing habits of readers. Commerce platform incentive structures maximize revenue and time on site, using algorithms that take advantage of detailed user profiles to target people with content that is most likely to influence them into a purchase or toward a particular service. They implement more algorithms to automatically moderate content, resulting in over- or under-application errors. For example, computer programs often confuse work of art y satire with illegal content, without understanding the human nuances and context required to enforce the actual rules of the platforms.
that Wikimedia Foundation and its affiliates based in specific countries, such as Wikimedia Germany, support Wikipedia volunteers and their autonomy in making decisions about what information should exist on Wikipedia and what should not. The open edition model of the online encyclopedia is based on the belief that people You must decide what information remains on Wikipedia, taking advantage of established rules developed by volunteers for neutrality and reliable sources.
This model ensures that for any Wikipedia article on any topic, people who know and care about a topic enforce the rules about what content is allowed on the page. Additionally, content moderation is transparent and accountable: all conversations between publishers on the platform are publicly accessible. It is not a perfect system, but it has a large number of practices developed to make Wikipedia a global source of neutral and verified information.
Forcing Wikipedia to operate more like a commercial platform with a top-down power structure, unaccountable to readers and publishers, could subvert the real public interest intentions of the DSA by leaving our communities out of important decisions. about the content.
The Internet is at a turning point. Democracy and civic space are under attack in Europe and around the world. Now, more than ever, careful thought must be given to how the new rules will foster, not hinder, an online environment that enables new forms of culture, science, participation and knowledge.
Policymakers can engage with communities of public interest to develop standards and principles that are more inclusive, more enforceable, and more effective. But they should not impose rules that are aimed only at the most powerful Internet trading platforms.
The world deserves a better and safer Internet.
