Pestinfo-Wiki:Terms of Use

Legal notice: This website is part of the Biowikifarm with the Plazi Association in Bern, Schwitzerland as the legal operator. Plazi and the Biowikifarm operate under Swiss law. The statements on this page are English translations and partly abbreviations of the official German text valid for the Biowikifarm, for legal purposes see the German version of this text. For further information please see the EU General Data Protection Regulation (EU-GDPR) or contact us.

The present site is an on-line open-content collaborative knowledge base, created by a voluntary association of individuals and groups working to develop a common resource of human knowledge. The responsibility for this project is independent of the organisation providing the technical hosting services.

The structure of the project allows many contributors to alter its content. While all participants exercise great care, we cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here. Using this website is at your own risk.

No contract

Please make sure that you understand that the information provided here is being provided freely, and that no kind of agreement or contract is created between you and the owners or users of this site, the owners of the servers upon which it is housed, the individual contributors, any project administrators, system operators or anyone else who is in any way connected with this project or sister projects subject to your claims against them directly. None of the contributors, service sponsors, administrators, or anyone else connected with the project in any way whatsoever can be responsible for the appearance of any inaccurate or libelous information or for your use of the information contained in or linked from these web pages, other than the contributor who made the contribution. There is no central control, only an interactive control between individual participants. The views and opinions expressed here are strictly those of the page authors, not the views of the technical hosting services. Every participant is always responsible only for his/her own infringements of the law.

No professional advice

The information provided on this site should not be seen as professional advice. If you need specific advice (for example, medical, legal, financial, or risk management) please seek a professional who is licensed or knowledgeable in that area.

Convention on Biological Diversity and CITES

The content of the pages should comply with the terms and spirit of the Convention on Biological Diversity. No information should be disclosed which may threaten wild populations of organisms protected under CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species).

Limited license

You are being granted a limited license to copy anything from this site, see the Copyright and License conditions. This does not create or imply any contractual or extra-contractual liability on the part of this project or any of its agents, members, organizers or other users. There is no agreement or understanding between you and this project regarding your use or modification of this information beyond this license.

Trademarks

Any of the trademarks, service marks, collective marks, design rights or similar rights that are mentioned, used or cited in the articles are the property of their respective owners. Their use here does not imply that you may use them for any other purpose other than for the same or a similar informational use as contemplated by the original authors of these articles under the Creative Commons licensing scheme. Unless otherwise stated the project is neither endorsed by nor affiliated with any of the holders of any such rights and as such cannot grant any rights to use any otherwise protected materials. Your use of any such or similar incorporeal property is at your own risk.

Personality rights and protection of minors

The project may contain material which may portray an identifiable person who is alive or recently deceased. Authors should follow the legal requirements for protecting the privacy of these persons and avoid personal data. In cases where it is scientific practice to cite people who have published scientific work, the same rules apply as for the original scientific publication. This is specially relevant to information which has been provided by authors about themselves.

The protection of minors is guaranteed. We ask users to report unwanted content that is unsuitable for minors to the contact address so that it can be removed as soon as possible.

The use of any contact data or other information about users (persons or organisations) for commercial advertisments are expressly unwanted. Any commercial use and distribution of personal data is not allowed, unless this has been permitted in writing by the concerned party.

External links

Links or references pointing to documents outside of this area are for the convenience and information of visitors only. The providers and authors of such linked or referenced documents are responsible for the content. The authors of the “Pest Information Wiki” should check, when establishing such links, whether there are obvious violations of the law on the linked pages. The responsibility for this lies with the author of the content. Since the authors have no influence over any future changes in the linked pages, the existence of an external link does not mean that the author agrees with the content of the linked pages. Once violations of the law on linked pages become known, the links will be deleted as soon as possible.

Jurisdiction and legality of content

The “Pest Information Wiki” is part of the Biowikifarm with the Plazi Association in Bern, Schwitzerland as the legal operator. The Biowikifarm is operated under Swiss law and by using this website you accept Bern as place of jurisdiction.

Publication of information found on pages of this project may be in violation of the laws of the country or jurisdiction from where you are viewing this information. The project database is stored on specific servers noted in About and is maintained in reference to the protections afforded under this jurisdiction. Laws in your country or jurisdiction may not protect or allow the same kinds of speech or distribution. The project does not encourage the violation of any laws; and cannot be responsible for any violations of such laws, should you link to this domain or use, reproduce, or republish the information contained herein.

The server providing this information is situated in Germany and under German jurisdiction. Information found here may be in violation of the laws of the jurisdiction from where you are viewing this information. We do not encourage the violation of laws and cannot be responsible for such violations.

If individual terms or sections of this statement are not legal or correct, the validity and content of the other parts remain uninfluenced by this fact.

Changes

The current legal situation and the technical services can change. Therefore, it may become necessary to change these guidelines. Please consult the current version for legal questions. If you use this site after such modifications, we assume you agree with the current version of these terms of use.

Hosting

The hosting server is currently located in Germany. The following section contains information about data protection aspects and privacy policies.

Privacy policies and data protection

The responsibility for aspects of data protection and privacy lies with the International Society for Pest Information and the technical hosting service, the Biowikifarm.

Rights of concerned persons: If data and information concerning your person on this website are incorrect or incomplete, you have the right to ask that these data are corrected. You also have the right to request information on how such information is being processed. You further have the right to request that such data are being deleted, this right may however be restricted as explained below.

Right of withdrawal: You have the right to withdraw from your agreement to store data and information about your person on this website. However, this withdrawal right does not apply to content published under a Creative Commons license.

Right of objection: At any time, you can object to the processing of data concerning you.

Contact: When contacting us (e.g. through a contact form, email or telephone), the data of the user are processed as part of the contact operation and may be stored together with other inquiries.

Type of data used and purposes: The following data are used by us or our partners: - contact data (e.g. names, email addresses, addresses and telephone numbers); - content (e.g. texts, photos, videos and other files); - data on usage (e.g. pages visited, access time); - communication data (e.g. browser and system information, IP addresses). These data are used for the following purposes: ensuring the functionality of the website and its content, communicating with users, security of communication and the ICT systems, internet audience measurements.

Collaboration with third parties: We only pass on data to third parties or allow these parties access to the data, if this is based on legal permission, agreement of the users, legal requirements, or in case this is needed by us for operating the website (e.g. by delegating certain aspects to third parties).

Transfer of data outside the EU: In case data are transferred to countries outside the EU, it would by part of contract agreements, based on permission by the users, on legal requirements, or based on our legitimate interests. Such transfer would be only under special conditions and subject to special guarantees, like an officially recognised security system (e.g. the "Privacy Shield" framework of the U.S.A.).

Hosting: The hosting service used by us includes the following components for operating this website: infrastructure and platform services, computing capacity, computer memory, data backup services and technical maintenance services. User data are being processed as part of the website operation.

Security measures: Appropriate technical and organisational measures are taken to ensure the security of the data. These measures take into account the nature, scope, context and purposes of the processing and the risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons. Unfortunately we have to point out that in general data transfer through the internet (e.g. communication through email) can encounter security gaps and cannot be completely protected from being accessed by third parties.

Server Log Files: When reading information or entering information to perform queries to access information, your web browser will automatically transmit some information to the server (date, time, operating system, browser type and version, referrer, page viewed, and your IP address). Except for the IP address, this information cannot be traced to a person. The server will store this information for some time and subsequently delete it. The data are needed for tracing errors or problems with the service and are used for statistical purposes. The data will not be merged with other data sources and will not be shared with other parties, except as required by law.

Cookies: Your browser will furthermore temporarily store on your system "cookies", small text files that are transmitted to the server. The information will be used only for normal operation, e.g. to recognize signed-in users and user preferences. It will not be shared with others or otherwise used to infringe on your privacy. Cookies will not harm your system and contain no viruses. Some cookies will be deleted when the user leaves the website, others are stored more permanently.

Right to disallow cookies: You can prevent the installation of cookies by adjusting the settings of your browser. However, you would not be able to use use some of the functions and services of the website. Already stored cookies can be also deleted on the browser.

Deleting data: The stored data will be deleted when they are no longer needed, except for cases when it is specified in these "terms of use" or when it is required by law. In case the data are not deleted, their use will be restricted as much as possible.

Contributions and modifications: If users register in this collaborative platform and contribute works (text, images, other resources), they are performing a publishing act. These contributions, the authorship, and the time of publication will be recorded and made publicly available. This is necessary for purposes of copyright and licensing. Authorship will be stored under the user name provided by the contributor.

Users can subsequently modify and delete parts of their contributions. However, it may not be possible to delete all parts, especially if this would conflict with the contributions of other users or would violate copyrights. This is comparable to writing articles or letters to the editor in a scientific journal. The publication of these works cannot simply be reversed. System administrators will, however, try to resolve reasonable requests to hide public access to sensitive information in consultation with the authors.

When users register and contribute, we also store their IP address, name and the time of each contribution. This information is not passed on to third parties, unless it is required by law. As a rule, user name and time of contribution will be published. This is necessary for purposes of copyright and for documenting which user is responsible for which contribution. Please note that images, videos or other media may contain hidden information like GPS location for an image. Users should check if media contain such unintended information before contributing them. We will also help users to remove unwanted contributions.

Spam detection: For the purpose of spam detection, data provided by users may be processed.

Web site analysis (statistics on visitors): This website uses web analysis services to distinguish between new and returning visitors, e.g. through cookies. Such statistics record for example the number of visitors for a specific page, their geographic origin, used operating system, browser version, or screen resolution. This information normally does not allow conclusions about which user has visited which page. Rare exceptions being cases when there is only one visitor from a given country.

We are currently using “Google Analytics” for such analyses. Information transmitted to Google about users are being anonymised by the function “_anonymizeIp”. Google itself will use the data exclusively for statistical purposes. Google will transfer the data to a third party only if legally obliged to do so, or if the third party is performing work for Google. Google is certified under the Privacy-Shield agreement (https://www.privacyshield.gov/participant?id=a2zt000000001L5AAI&status=Active) which guarantees that European data protection rules are followed. The state-appointed data privacy agency of Hamburg, Germany, has analyzed the use of Google Analytics and agreed to the type of data analysis used on this site. In case you still have reservations about this type of analysis you can install a browser plugin to completely disable Google Analytics in your browser. Otherwise we assume that you agree with this analysis of the user data. For more information see the Google Analytics Terms of Service.

Social networks: Some wikis may use social network plugin buttons provided by Facebook, Google, or Twitter. You can recognize these buttons by the following characteristics: The Facebook-button contains a white “f” on blue background and is accompanied by the text “Like”, “Recommend” or respective translations into other languages; the Google-Plus-button contains a blue “+1” on gray background and a red-green-yellow colored bar on top; the Twitter-button contain a light blue bird silhouette on blue background. When you open a page with these buttons your browser will open additional connections to the social networks. The content of the plugins will be delivered directly from the social networks and is not under the control of the “Pest Information Wiki”. It is possible to block unwanted information transfer to social networks, for example using a “Facebook Blocker”.

Services by third parties: In order to optimise our website and for analyses we may use components offered by third parties like videos, graphics, maps, or fonts. Please note that such third parties may have their own privacy policies and may use web-analysis tools like Google Analytics. For details see the privacy policies of Vimeo, Google, and Wikimedia.

Creation of user accounts

In order to make you own contributions to the wiki like texts, media or comments, it is necessary to first create a user account. Such user accounts are normally valid for the whole biowikifarm, unless stated otherwise. Data like name, password and email address are processed as part of creating a user account and for monitoring edit activities of the users. When users cancel their user account, these data are deleted, unless a legal period for storing the data applies, and with the exception that authorship of your contributions will be permanently preserved for copyright purposes. It is up to the user to make copies of these data prior to cancelling an account. In any case you have the right to request that all stored data concerning you account are permanently deleted.

The following points apply to the creation of user accounts:

• Entering personal or business data is voluntarily. Such information may be used exclusively for educational and scientific purposes. Commercial use is not permitted.
• Name: Because of the importance of authorship to assess quality and validity of scientific contributions, we normally create only accounts under your real name. Only under special circumstances a pseudonym may be considered.
• Password: Users are encouraged to select strong passwords (more than 8 characters, words not found in dictionaries, ideally containing digits and/or punctuation). Do not share your password or publish it. We cannot guarantee that your password is safe against break-in with hacker tools, but we promise to make every effort to protect your password. Note that passwords are not protected against hackers listening on your local network if you use http instead of https.
• Address: Parts of your address such as country and city may be publicly visible, especially if this is necessary to distinguish multiple persons of the same name.
  • If your personal information contains an affiliation with an organization, the organization name and address will be published.
  • We try to keep your private address confidential, except for the country and city you live in. However, other users of this collaboration platform, after authentication (= login), may be able to read such information to contact you directly. By submitting the information, you agree with this practice.
• Once created, user accounts are used to document the history of the contributed content.
• In some cases you may be able to update erroneous information yourself, in other cases a server administrator may have to do this for you.

---

See also:

• copyright and licensing conditions
• Contact