Our policy is NPOV, not "Caution and kindness." If we do NPOV correctly, then it shouldn't be a problem -- nobody will blame Wikipedia itself for what it says, they'll blame the Usenet forum or academic book or whatever.
The lack-of-lawyers is actually a serious concern which I suspect will become a major problem at some point in the future if Wikipedia continues to become larger and larger. The structure of many laws relevant to what we do here is such that Wikipedia can be up shit creek pretty quickly if somebody with money and influence wanted us to be. For example, "fair use" is only a *defensive* clause in the USA -- you can only really claim it if you are sued for copyright violation. It is not an offensive statement -- we cannot tell people they are "violating our fair use." What this means is that, even if we are in the right, it would be extremely easy for a company like Disney to grind us to a halt through a lawsuit -- the lawyer's fees alone would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. "We removed them immediately after you sent us a letter," WP plead to Walt. "Well, that's too bad -- I want back-royalties," he replies. And so in the best of situations, WP hires lawyers, they plead fair use and win, and then WP just owes the lawyers hundreds of thousands of dollars. Worst of situations, WP owes both Disney AND the lawyers money, who knows how much.
I don't see any good way around this. It is less a problem of Wikipedia itself (though I'd be very careful of "fair use" because of the way it is structured in US law), as it is with the ability of the big and powerful to wage legal war even on principles they are in the wrong on. It's more of a maddening thought than it is a sobering one.
FF
On 5/5/05, slimvirgin@gmail.com slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia has become an incredibly powerful medium but we don't have any kind of an ethical code for cases like this. We have no lawyers, no heirarchy of editors, no fact-checking procedures: none of the infrastructure of large, powerful news organizations, and yet we have arguably as much power as some of them. It's a sobering thought. All I'm arguing is that we should take that power seriously, and never abuse it; and if a private person complains that we have, where there's no public-interest issue involved, we should err on the side of caution and kindness, because we lose nothing by doing that, but the person being criticized might lose a lot if we don't (regardless of the details of this particular case: I'm talking generally).
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