G'day Matt,
On 5/23/06, David Boothroyd david@election.demon.co.uk wrote:
Unfortunately in English law it is potentially actionable to call someone litigious.
Only editors from England are subject to that restriction. More accurately, given England's ... generous libel laws ... saying ANYTHING about someone they don't like is potentially actionable.
Of course, in the US, you can pretty much sue anyone for anything - whether you can win in court is another matter, of course.
(Disclaimer: IANALBIPOOTV)
On the assumption that Australian defamation law has not become completely divorced from English law (unlikely), defamation is not the bogey man I see a lot of Americans claiming it is.
It's simply an additional test. In America, I'm led to believe, you can say whatever the hell you want so long as you can prove you reasonably believed it to be true. In Commonwealth Countries, what you say *also* has to be in the public's best interest. If your non-notable next door neighbour, Matt Brown, has a homoxeual affair, and you create a website dedicated to revealing that "Matt Brown is a cheating faggot bastard", and you get sued ... a defence of "but he *was* unfaithful!" will not be sufficient.
I submit that this is a good standard for Wikipedia to aim for (even if we don't need to). If something is not true *and* in the public interest to know, we should not be saying it about anyone, in particular living people. That's not a legal decision, it's an editorial (and, if you like, moral) one. We should be displaying more discretion than simply "oh, it's true, chuck it in". Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of facts.