Hello
Yes, he can obviously go to the police as the person making the threats
is publicly identified. I have no idea if he is plans doing it, if he
has contacted Wikimedia France to get legal advice on this. I hope he
did. Because the whole situation is smelling bad.
Several media reactions to the Letter today :
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_Wikipédia:Lettre_ouverte_:_non_à_l%27intimidation_des_contributeurs_bénévoles
and one in particular of note... the answer coming the Journal itself.
https://www.lepoint.fr/societe/wikipedia-contre-le-point-comment-l-encyclopedie-libre-est-devenue-une-machine-a-calomnier-18-02-2025-2582717_23.php
And for those interested, I advise reading :
https://next.ink/171340/le-point-menace-wikipedia-dune-action-en-justice-les-contributeurs-denoncent-un-doxing/
I will not attempt to summarize those posts, because yeah... the
chilling affect goes a lonnnnng way.
But super super super short summary. The Journal has announced that
their legal team was on our case for some time and that a lawsuit is
coming in our general direction.
It is not clear to me in the Journal statement whether the lawsuit will
be directed to Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia France or a bunch of
specific editors that the Journal is angry with. It looks like other
parties, whose publications were used as sources of information by
wikipedians would logically be part of it.
I strongly advise to read the Journal "answer" for more insights. It is
very rich.
Flo
Le 18/02/2025 à 13:38, Yaroslav Blanter a écrit :
Hi Romaine,
thanks for bringing our attention to this. I obviously fully agree
that this behavior is unacceptable, but is it actually legal under
French laws? Assuming the editors reside in France, can just they go
to the police and file a case? When I was under attack a few years
back for my Wikipedia activities, I went to the police office, and my
case was not accepted only because the identity of the attacker was
not known (and, in particular, it was not known whether they reside in
the Netherlands), but I guess this situation must be clear?
Best
Yaroslav
On Tue, Feb 18, 2025 at 12:37 AM Romaine Wiki <romaine.w...@gmail.com>
wrote:
In Januari 2025 The Signpost wrote about an American organisations
who attempts to identify and target Wikipedia contributors for
their contributions to Wikipedia, by exposing identity and other
threats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2025-01-15/In_the_media
Unrelated to the organisation mentioned in The Signpost, this is
already happing at this moment towards users of the French
Wikipedia. In the past days the French Wikipedia community got
allarmed that one of its contributors was the victim of such an
attack, and became the victim of threats and intimidation by a
journalist from the weekly magazine Le Point
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Point>, Erwan Seznec. This
journalist tried to make his profession and identity publicly
available as revenge for his contributions to the encyclopedia.
The French community has reacted quickly by writing an open
letter, published this morning, in what hundreds of volunteers
have shown their support to this (and other user(s) who got
attacked by this magazine.
I believe strongly that within Wikimedia we need to be open about
such events and support the ones who have become victim. For that
purpose I translated the open letter
<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Lettre_ouverte_:_non_%C3%A0_l%27intimidation_des_contributeurs_b%C3%A9n%C3%A9voles>
from French to English, so that anyone can read it. See below.
Romaine
We, volunteers contributing to Wikipedia in French, give our full
support to our peer who become the target of intimidating emails
by a journalist from /Le Point
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Point>/ magazine, threatening to
reveal his identity and profession. In this text, we wish to
recall the importance of *respecting the pseudonymity of Wikipedia
volunteers* as well as the operating principles of the
collaborative encyclopedia.
On Saturday, February 15, after contributing to the Wikipedia
article dedicated to the newspaper /Le Point
<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Point>/, the volunteer
contributor to Wikipedia for 18 years, author of more than 30,000
modifications, had the very unpleasant surprise of receiving an
email sent from the professional address of Erwan Seznec, a
journalist at /Le Point/, which included the following comments:
"We are going to write an article about you, on our site, giving
your identity, your position, and requesting an official reaction
from [his supposed employer]. » The same journalist also obtained
the user's personal telephone number and contacted him through
this means.
*The comments made in these emails are explicitly threatening and
are, as such, completely unacceptable.* Editorial disagreements,
which are quite common on Wikipedia, are settled by debates on the
discussion page of the article in question, in accordance with the
rules of etiquette.
These threatening comments come after the dissemination of
supposed personal information about several other volunteer
contributors in an article in /Le Point/ dated December 13, 2024
<https://www.lepoint.fr/societe/wikipedia-plongee-dans-la-fabrique-d-une-manipulation-13-12-2024-2577881_23.php>,
already signed by Erwan Seznec.
These procedures, unprecedented in the mainstream French press, do
not fall within the scope of free criticism, to which Wikipedia is
regularly subjected — which is perfectly legitimate. They do not
seem to us to respect the ethics of journalism or to be part of a
journalistic approach for the citizens' right to information, but
rather to fall within the scope of score-settling or intimidation.
They pose a problem for several reasons:
* A practice like Seznec's exposes volunteers to intimidation –
which we regularly encounter – and can even endanger Internet
users who contribute to the encyclopedia;
* The threat of disclosure of personal information is likely to
intimidate and cause self-censorship of other volunteers on
the articles that this journalist from /Le Point/ has
targeted, first and foremost the article "/Le Point
<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Point>/", but also on other
articles previously called into question by Erwan Seznec
("Eugénie Bastié
<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A9nie_Basti%C3%A9>",
"Sylvie Brunel <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvie_Brunel>",
etc.);
* They circumvent Wikipedia's editorial processes, which allow
anyone to participate in developing consensus on the writing
of articles and to resolve editorial disagreements, which are
part of the normal functioning of the encyclopedia.
For the record, Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia with a
horizontal, non-profit operation. It is based on five founding
principles <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars>,
including the encyclopedic aim, neutral of point of view (which
consists of mentioning points of view according to their place in
the field of knowledge, that is to say, quality sources) and
respect for rules of etiquette. Decisions are made by consensus.
Volunteer contributors, with varied profiles and political
opinions, mostly intervene under pseudonyms, in accordance with
what the platform recommends
<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Nom_d%27utilisateur#Vrai_nom_ou_pseudonyme_?>
to avoid harassment (they are not anonymous and can be identified
by the courts upon request to the host).
The encyclopedia is not perfect — for example, discussions
regularly animate the community on how to improve biographies of
living people
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons>
and the treatment of recent events or media controversies. But its
operation and its rules guarantee its independence from all powers.
*We, volunteer contributors to Wikipedia, assure our attacked user
of our support and denounce any attempt, from whatever source, to
intimidate volunteer contributors to Wikipedia, including by
threatening to contact their employer, and to disseminate personal
information about them.*
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