I wish I could agree with Jimbo's summary of this unfortunate account, but
he is wrong on one vital topic: It took several days for an explanation to
be provided, & only after the matter was raised at WP:AN/I. According to
the page history, the article was protected 18 June 17:33, then blanked
sixteen minutes later. No explanation appeared until 21 June at 02:28 when
a thread had been running for a few hours. Admittedly, based on the
datestamp of a question left on the talk page, apparently no one noticed
this action until a few hours before the WP:AN/I thread started, but I
would have expected a notice on the Talk page shortly after the action had
been taken.
I still don't understand the reasoning that justified blanking the page as
"the best solution". Wikipedia has a number of articles on subjects with
trademarked names -- I assume that names like "Ford Mustang", "Microsoft
Windows", "Spam", etc. are tradmarked & the ownership rights adequately
protected. If Wikipedia received a letter from a corporate lawyer at Ford
Motors about the Mustang article & their trademark, would the appropriate
action in that case be to blank *that* article?
And maybe it's because I happen to have a couple of lawyers in my family,
I don't find them all that scary. This email (who serves legal notices by
email, except shady lawyers on the payroll of criminal organizations?)
should have been replied to with a request that he deliver in hard copy
proof of the ownership of the trademark & proof that ownership of this
trademark has been adequately protected. Only after that had been
delivered would I have considered blanking the page. And maybe not even
then.
The point is that this entire incident made Wikipedia look foolish. We
didn't need anyone's help to do that -- be they a scurrilous website or a
news organization known for its quality around the world.
Geoff