Policy

The newswire

Newswire is the mixed blessing of Indymedia, and most of the problems have been generated by posts published. But the newswire is, in a sense, the heart of the project and then a very important aspect of the way of making indymedia is related to how the newswire itself is managed and how it works.

Choosing the open publishing philosophy, entails the possibility to have a newswire in which everyone can freely write, getting a later, i.e. that a post can be hidden, edited or deleted only after having been published.

There's a techincal way of facing newswire problems, based on the way in which the useres benefite the site. Knowing that there are standard way of accessing to web pages, it's possible to implement solutions to highligth some things instead of others.

We have decided to divide the newswire in more than one "section", according to the kind of post published, highlighting those that the managing lists considers more useful for the project of independent information.

With "policy" we mean the criterias we use to "hide", "edit" and "delete" a post published on the newswire:

- "to hide" means to move a post among the hidden posts;

- "to edit" means to change the text of the published post;

- "to delete" means to erase the post from the database.

Everyone who can work on the newswire can "hide", "edit" and "delete" a published post. They just have to follow some rules before doing this:

a) respect the policy; b) discuss with the others when in doubt on what to do.

Hidden posts are, in the opinion of the newswire admins, those that violate the policy of toscana.indymedia.org. Hidden posts will remain available to read (even if not immediately visible). This allows everyone to point out any error that can be, in this way, corrected.

In some cases it's possible to edit the text of published posts: - when there are "sensitive" data such family names, addresses, telephone numbers or any other private information relating to persons who don't hold offices or who aren't involved in show business. - when editing is required by the author of the post, i.e when we can be quite sure that the request comes from the author. - when some "legal backing" suggests to edit a post that could demage persons or the site itself.

There are three kinds of "deleted" posts: - double posts; - "deleted" posts for extraordinary reasons concerning legal or security problems; - multimedia files out fo policy. We won't save any backup copy of these posts.

We consider the policy criteria not such as the "Tables of Law", but more like a kind of filter that could have some leaks. In other words, policy should be used with cleverness and may, during times, undergo some necessary changes.

these are the criteria according to which a post is considered out of policy: - fascist posts - sexist posts - posts about party and istitutional canvass - religious canvass posts - posts with photos in which people are identifiable - posts unuseful for the porject (no info) - double posts

Despite of this, we are consciuos that there aren't (and there never would be)objective criteria to decide what is in and what is out of policy. This means that "critical" posts should be discussed, case by case, even without caring to much about policy, that, we repeat, is not a law!