Jimmy Wales wrote:
The course of action I recommend to everyone is to leave a crystal clean paper trail so that the arbitration committee can ban this guy with a clean conscience if he misbehaves.
His "lawyer" contacted me (from France, so I'm not really worried about it), but made no specific legal threats other than the typical lawyerly hints and tone.
It's very important, as a matter of justice and transparency, that we not ban Irismeister for behavior that others commit against him. This is one of the biggest reasons why Usenet-style flaming is so bad around here -- it deprives us of one of the cleanest reasons we have for getting rid of bad apples.
In a real anarchy like Usenet, where getting someone else kicked out is impossible, the only known solution to jerks is to yell at them in the hopes that they get some sense. (This solution doesn't work at all, but that doesn't keep people from trying it.) Around here, the solution is to greet them with respect, love, and sincere attempts to help them achieve whatever rational goals they may have. And this leaves us a nice clean and simple paper trail for banning if they just can't behave.
While it's not the approach I advocate, from a purely legal standpoint I don't see how he has a leg to stand on. The Wikimedia Foundation has no legal obligation to let all viewpoints be heard, and is permitted to be explicitly anti-iridology if it so desired. We ought not to be biased on any particular matter (as far as being unbiased is possible), but we're *legally permitted* to be. We can even ban people because we don't like the word "iridology", because it makes my head hurt trying to pronounce it. Or we can ban people because having a name ending in "idology" irritates us. Simply put, we don't *need* a clean paper-trail to ban anyone, legally speaking. "The Wikimedia Foundation does not like User:Iridology, and no longer chooses to permit him to publish his material on our website" is a good enough reason.
All, again, legally speaking. Obviously we want a much different process for our own satisfaction. But not because it's required by any law.
-Mark