Yes, no action from ArbCom or however, followed by a criminal conviction. Quotes from the judge in the criminal trial appearing in the media alongside quotes from those on-wiki who just said, "Closing this... no action... trivial... this isn't a matter for administrators..." etc.
Perhaps even a judge who expresses surprise and/or disappointment at a lack of action from Wikipedia, a headline along the lines of: "Judge accuses Wikipedia for failing to support victim of hate speech."
There is also the crime of defamation which is also a more serious offence under UK law than it is under US law. US - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law#Criminal_defamati... UK - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation_Act_2013
Marie
From: dancase@frontiernet.net To: gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2015 12:55:30 -0500 Subject: Re: [Gendergap] press coverage of Gamergate arbcom case
The
litmus test is whether what they have said is not only 'offensive' but, 'grossly offensive'. Wikipedia's internal >systems and thresholds would make no difference to the authorities in the UK. It would be interesting to see what the
public fall-out would be if Wikipedia decided that no action should be taken
against X whilst the UK jailed him / her.
Well, there’s this page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Threats_of_violence
which never became policy (probably because, it seems, people discussed it more in light of threats of suicide rather than threats to others). But it may be time to revisit that.
I assume, in the hypothetical you’re talking about, the question would be whether someone was punished in real life for threats made on-wiki that resulted in no action from the ArbCom? Or from anyone? In the former, yes, the public fallout would be interesting; in the latter, it would depend on whether anyone with the power to take action knew.
I do recall some past cases, once described on the now-deleted “List of banned users”, where the trigger for the formal ban (as opposed to the never-lifted indefinite block) was a user threatening violence against someone (usually via their latest sock).
Of course, if someone were to be incarcerated in real life as a result of their on-wiki threats, any action after that other than blocking the account to prevent some hacker from making use of it would really be superfluous.
Daniel Case
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