Comment by cormorant
15 days ago
Can anyone explain how Wikipedia supposedly is in Category 1? [1]
And if it marginally is, how come they cannot just turn off their "content recommender system"? Perhaps an example is the auto-generated "Related articles" that appear in the footer on mobile only?
[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2025/226/regulation/3/ma...
The definition is:
> In paragraph (1), a “content recommender system” means a system, used by the provider of a regulated user-to-user service in respect of the user-to-user part of that service, that uses algorithms which by means of machine learning or other techniques determines, or otherwise affects, the way in which regulated user-generated content of a user, whether alone or with other content, may be encountered by other users of the service.
Speculating wildly, I think a bunch of the moderation / patroller tools might count. They help to find revisions ("user-generated content") that need further review from other editors ("other users").
There's not much machine learning happening (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ORES), but "other techniques" seems like it'd cover basically-anything up to and including "here's the list of revisions that have violated user-provided rules recently" (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AbuseFilter).
(Disclaimer: I work for the WMF. I know literally nothing about this court case or how this law applies.)
Perhaps they genuinely believe the mission of collecting all the world’s knowledge is more important than complying with the draconian moral panic of a likely short lived government in an increasingly irrelevant former great power.
Are you saying an algorithmic content recommendation system is an important part of "collecting all the world's knowledge"?