Talk:Internet Governance Forum

This article calls for a criticism section. I am happy to contribute, except that as a well-known critic of the IGF and the author of a book on that topic,^[1] my neutrality might be open to question.

Jeremy Malcolm (talk) 03:08, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

I think information on criticisms of the IGF would be a welcome addition to the article. I don't think that having criticisms added by the author of a book on the subject would be a problem as long as the material is "represented fairly, proportionately, and without bias" and is "attributable to a reliable, published source, and [does] not contain any original research". If possible, it would probably be best not to cite your own book as a source. And keep in mind WP:CSECTION, which says in part:

… sections within an article dedicated to negative criticisms are normally also discouraged. Topical or thematic sections are frequently superior to sections devoted to criticism. …, best practice is to incorporate positive and negative material into the same section.

Another option might be to add the critical material to the Internet governance article, rather than to the article on the IGF. That would be a better alternative if the issues are about how the Internet is governed rather than focused specifically on the IGF. The Internet governance article already has a section on Globalization and governance controversy. That section could certainly be improved and has been tagged as "requires expansion" since January 2011. --Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 19:22, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

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This article reads very much like a wiki page for the IGF, instead of a Wikipedia page about the IGF.

The extensive talk page references from back in 2008 to the mailing list for the IGF wiki group and repeatedly to the wiki would possibly qualify under current policies as WP:CANVASSING, even though there was clearly an intent at transparency.

In any case, this article needs a major overhaul by any volunteers willing to invest the time to do that. I've put hatnotes at the top with {{advertising}} as the main overall problem and {{external links}} as specifically against our general policy. There's likely to be a lot of copyright violations that haven't yet been labelled. There's also quite a bit of content that looks like it may be legitimate so WP:TNT is probably not a good idea unless someone is willing to reconstruct the article from scratch. Boud (talk) 13:59, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

@Boud Seems to me like the core content issues are an excessive amount of intricate detail that may only interest a particular audience and relying excessively on primary sources, rather than advertising - I don't think there's much of a commercial motivation to the comprehensiveness. The good thing is that we can chip away at the excessive detail by condensing it, section by section. Dreamyshade (talk) 06:06, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

@Dreamyshade: I agree that {{promotional}} is better than {{advertising}} as a tag. It's only indirectly commercial in the sense that many corporate type organisations are involved, and who/which organisation(s) would be likely to benefit financially is unclear. Condensing section by section seems fine to me - especially if WP:SECONDARY sources can be found to point to what is seen by external critics as notable. For example, maybe a particular discussion in session X in the Yth meeting had a significant role in creating sufficient political support for or the actual content of notable legislation (like the GDPR) or led to notable funding for a particular organisation promoting internet rights. Boud (talk) 17:08, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

The following, together with my reply, was posted to my user talk page earlier today. I wanted to move it here, so other editors might be more likely to see it and take appropriate action. -Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 15:43, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

Hello W163! We welcome and appreciate your contributions, such as Internet Governance Forum, but we regretfully cannot accept copyrighted material from other websites or printed works. This article appears to contain work copied from https://igf.wgig.org/igf/Summary.Final.07.11.2006.htm (Archived 2025-06-24 at the Wayback Machine), and therefore to constitute a violation of Wikipedia's copyright policies. The copyrighted text has been or will soon be deleted. While we appreciate your contributions, copying content from other websites is unlawful and against Wikipedia's copyright policy. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators are likely to lose their editing privileges.

• • •

Thank you, and please feel welcome to continue contributing to Wikipedia. Happy editing! Boud (talk) 12:31, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

Also this edit. Boud (talk) 13:00, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

Reply to Boud: My last change to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) article was made in June 2013, 12 years ago. Since then I've reduced my contributions and editing on Wikipedia substantially. I do not anticipate any additional work by me on the IGF article in the near future. I hope that other editors may be interested in making any changes to the article that may be required to avoid the need to delete information that may still be useful to people who want to understand issues related to Internet Governance. The IGF is an activity sponsored by the United Nations and, while I don't understand much about copyright policy related to the UN, I believe that news-related material can be freely used as long as credit is given. -Jeff Ogden (W163) (talk) 15:18, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

1. The fact that some component of the UN supports a conference does not make the UN the author of all texts published in relation to that conference.

The bottom of the About page of the first case appears to assert standard copyright. The source in the second case states that it consists of Submissions from entities in the United Nations system and elsewhere on their efforts in 2012 to implement the outcome of the WSIS and Submission by Internet Governance Forum and This submission was prepared as an input to the report of the UN Secretary-General ... and its second page states Prepared by the IGF Secretariat. So the copyright question would appear to be common to the two cases; does the IGF Secretariat correctly assert Berne Convention copyright? Per the Commons page on the UN, Under ST/AI/189/Add.9/Rev.2 of 17 September 1987, the United Nations would still not seek copyright for official records, documents and public information material, but did seek protection for all recurrent publications, studies or reports. So do these qualify as "public informational material" or rather "reports"? Recurrent publications, studies and reports of the UN are typically public, so that alone does not make them "public informational material", since the distinction between PD and non-PD materials would not make sense in that case. My guess is that "public informational material" means things that are in press release style that media can copy/paste.

2. Regarding delete information that may still be useful to people who want to understand issues - that's a different issue. The information we need in Wikipedia is brief summaries of key points, preferably based on WP:SECONDARY sources pointing to what is particularly notable information. There's no point copy/pasting or mildly paraphrasing the points of view of key participants and writing that without quotation marks in Wikivoice. Web archivers are available for long-term archiving of the individual IGF meetings. Some summaries of what an organisation thinks about itself are acceptable, but generally as a small proportion of the article overall.

Examples of non-encyclopedic text include in the 04:39, 20 June 2013 edit: The moderator himself recalled ..., recalled the Secretary-General's comment that the IGF entered unchartered waters in fostering a dialogue among all stakeholders as equals. The innovative format but these are opinions of participants, not summaries, and not independent summaries; and therefore we all needed to work on IG issue ... we would have to leave Athens with a clear view are about "we" the participants of IGF, not "we" Wikipedia readers. In the 04:00, 18 June 2013 edit, we have A collective affirmation of the necessity of the multi-stakeholder model in handling Internet governance issues was continually stressed – apart from being a copy/paste, this asserts that the necessity is an objective, uncontested fact, rather than an opinion of the IGF participants.

I came to the article hoping to learn about the IGF, and instead I learnt mostly what the IGF (in its successive iterations) thinks about itself. Boud (talk) 12:07, 25 June 2025 (UTC)