Wikipedia founder calls “right to be forgotten” law “deeply immoral”

The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, has today branded the EU’s Right to be Forgotten ruling as a “deeply immoral” and dangerous step towards the “sanitisation of human knowledge.” “History is a human right,” Wales warned gravely, “and one of the worst things that a person can do is attempt to use force to silence another.” Addressing a packed room of journalists at the press conference opening Wikipedia’s annual Wikimania conference in London today, Wales sat alongside Geoff Brigham (Wikipedia’s general counsel) and Lila Tretikov (the Wikimedia Foundation’s Chief Executive) in condemning what they describe as unparalleled government “censorship” of human knowledge.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has described the EU’s Right to be Forgotten as “deeply immoral”, as the organisation that operates the online encyclopedia warned the ruling will result in an internet “riddled with memory holes”. Speaking at Wikipedia’s annual Wikimania conference in London today, Wales said: “History is a human right and one of the worst things that a person can do is attempt to use force to silence another. “I’ve been in the public eye for quite some time; some people say good things and some people say bad things. That’s history and I would never ever use any kind of legal process like this to try to suppress the truth. I think that’s deeply immoral.” The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, has received multiple notices of intent to remove certain Wikipedia content from European search results, since the EU’s Right to be Forgotten legislation came into force in May. The legislation allows European citizens to request that links to “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” information be removed from search results. The web pages themselves remain online, but the links from search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing disappear. The Wikimedia Foundation said the notices will affect more than 50 Google links directing readers to Wikipedia sites. Two of these links relate to the English version of Wikipedia. The Wikipedia pages in question include a page on Gerry Hutch, a former Irish convicted criminal alleged to have been one of Ireland’s most successful bank robbers, and an image of musician Tom Carstairs In Concert.