On 12/6/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I certainly would! To be more specific, his call for us to make it easier to trace Wikipedia contributors, and therefore to enable people to sue them, is *directly* contrary to a lot of our goals. If we make it so that nobody can be anonymous enough to avoid U.S. libel lawsuits, it also means nobody is anonymous enough to avoid getting hauled before courts authoritarian countries who might want to trace who wrote an article they disapprove of.
-Mark
If you post something libilus under US law (which is the only law that matters) and the person finds it fast enough they can get a court order and get the relivant server logs from wikipedia. If you don't log in then I'm afaraid we can't protect you from being stupid. You can't expect the foundation not to respect a US court order. As a result the fact is that under certian conditions posting something false on wikipedia could get you into legal trouble. It is important people understand this.
The reference to authoritarian countries is a red herring. Assumeing you avoid local monitoring it is only US law you have to worry about because only US law affects the foundation.
-- geni