2008/6/23 Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca:
Ian Woollard wrote:
I'm not sure it would apply to the Star Wars Boy, but the libel laws in Britain are quite interesting though, with truth not necessarily being a perfect defence. 'Mere' reporting *has* been construed as libel. And there's privacy laws in other countries, I think France also. The servers are in the US, but not necessarily all assets are.
And in certain countries "defaming Islam" or "defaming the Communist Party" and so forth are against the law, too. Attempting to make Wikipedia compliant with every legal regime on Earth would be impossible, and quite counterproductive.
Right, but there's a world of difference between making good-faith efforts at accuracy and so forth and simply not caring at all, and judges and people usually respect that to some degree. In the UK, reporting that 'such and such' said X has resulted in damages being assigned even if there was no implication that it was necessarily true (this would be in the context of a newspaper article, where the newspaper was making money from repeating false rumours).
I'm particularly tired of the appeal to British libel law.
Oh dear.
The bottom line is that anybody who thinks that this guys name needs to go in the article for 'NPOV' reasons needs to look at why that is. Ultimately it's similar logic to a lynching- if everybody else is punching the guy, is the neutral point of view necessarily more punching?
This is a silly analogy, and makes rather nasty implications about the motives of those who are arguing to include the name.
Yes, it does, doesn't it.
But NPOV doesn't have much to counterbalance POVs that are in the ascendency. Sometimes you find that most of the expressed POVs are one thing, but a cool look at the situation gives another POV. This Star Wars guy *was* put in hospital over this, and in that sense, I'm not so sure that it is such a poor analogy.
Do you really think we want to "punch" this guy? Why?
Not necessarily, but, well, you haven't argued to the contrary yet.