On Sun, 5 Oct 2003, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Alex R. wrote:
[snip]
The reality is that reasonable people do disagree and it is not bad that they do come to different decisions. In such cases their decisions can be reviewed and confirmed or overturned.
The idea of the panel's decisions being overthrown by an outside court is unrealistic. Such litigation is bound to be expensive, with little chance of recovering costs. Add to this the difficulties involving jurisdiction or bringing witnesses from around the world, and you have an effective deterrent against starting any such suit.
IANAL, & this is a US-centric view, but I'd go further & say that the possibility that a court would even hear a case like this is unrealistic. As I understand what we are talking about concerns simple banning -- whether or not someone could contribute to Wikipedia for a definite or indefinite period of time. And I doubt that as long as Wikipedia is a volunteer activity -- where no one is making any money from contributing -- any court would find merit in hearing the case.
And if there was some conceivable tangible advantage to being a contributor or editor (e.g., a clear pattern of contributors to Wikipedia being hired to, say, a publishing job), by that point I'd expect we have hammered out some kind of predictable pattern for how people get banned -- other than the vague "this contributor does not play nice with others."
Geoff