William Pietri wrote:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Thu, 15 Nov 2007 15:22:44 +1100, "private musings" wrote:
The implication of recent editing there is that we can no longer mention or refer to sources like The Times, or The Guardian even on talk pages, if they may lead readers who click on them to think worse of the article subject.
Are you willing to foot the legal bills? I have seen the emails to OTRS from di Stefano. He is a lawyer. A wealthy lawyer who is prepared to defend people like Milosevic and Noye.
And for those wondering, I believe the official Wikimedia Foundation position is that editors are indeed on their own when it comes to the legal consequences of any edits they make. Even if those edits are obviously what we'd consider good edits.
That seems sound.
There's some sound legal reasoning behind this, and I think they've made the right choice, but it was still a surprise to me when I learned it.
The myth still lives on the net that people can act with impunity. WMF is not in a position to act as an arbiter of whether what someone says is libelous or not, especially when the truth of the statement is in question. It can remove the obviously scurrilous name-calling if it is first brought to its attention, but that only deals with a small part of the problem. If The Times says that someone was convicted of fraud there is nothing wrong with saying that The Times reported this.
My guess is that if there were a reasonably good test case, there would be a fair bit of public support and possibly donations and/or pro bono legal assistance. But even with that a lawsuit like this would still be a substantial burden, probably a multi-year one, for the editor involved.
Probably so. It's something that every editor needs to keep in mind before he posts anything on _any_ site, not just this one.
This does leave us with the risk of having articles that have been whitewashed due to legal threats. That worries me, so I've proposed a warning template for articles in that condition:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri/Legaldispute
But I don't think anybody has used it yet.
With due respect, not even you? But seeing that it is on a personal sub-page, it's most likely that no-one knows about it even if it has been there for more than a year.
The template does ask for the matter to be discussed on the relevant talk page, but part of the current discussion involves material deleted from a talk page. There still needs to be a place for the meta-discussion of such information.
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