Okay. I'm not a lawyer so I'll take your word for it, for the moment at least.
However, is it even worth worrying about in the case of only marginally notable subjects? For example, subjects who have been mentioned in newspapers, but do not have biographies about them written in any major reliable source, such as Britannica? (Or random Wikipaedians not mentioned by *any* reliable source....)
If a subject who has not have a full biography on him or her in any major reliable sources wishes to not have a biography on Wikipaedia, why not delete it?
On 21/09/2007, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha no.
Seriously, sneezing at the wrong time can be construed as defamatory. Calling a man "honourable" with intent can be defamatory*. The law - which is orders of magnitude broader than the 1996 Act, incidentally - relies immensely on real or presumed intent, on implications and motives rather than what was actually written. It is a vast seething bog of caselaw, with very little hard and clear statute law; it is conceptually capable of declaring almost anything defamatory, because almost anything - in the right tone - can be. Truth is no absolute defence; nor is prior publication.
If our BLP standards are "much stricter" than the potential edge cases of unusual situations, then it would be impossible to write virtually anything about a person save to note if they were dead.
--
- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
- Well, not quite; legal exceptions kick in in Parliament, but I
recall hearing there was a case back in the forties(?), and it was pretty scandalous...