Ray Saintonge wrote:
But is that the point? If a credible legal threat it made, we might as well just delete the thing first and ask questions later. No single article is worth getting sued over - whether the Foundation would win the case or not.
This all depends on what you mean by a "credible" legal threat. Bauer has gone beyond the threat stage, but was her threat credible in the first place? There comes a point where a person has to take a stand or be forever backpeddling. Litigious people are well aware that most of the population is deatly afraid of being sued, and have no compunctions about taking advantage of the fact.
This is regrettably true. I know some folks who ran an early web community site. They received something like a legal threat a week for a period of years. Nothing ever with merit; just people unhappy with something someone else said on the web. The site was polite but unyielding. Nothing other came of the threats, not one. But from the polish on some of them, it was clear that making hollow but plausible-sounding legal threats were a standard maneuver for some bottom-feeders.
I'd be very uncomfortable with a delete-first-and-wait-for-the-lawyers approach to articles under threat. Assuming we feel the content meets appropriate standards like BLP, then I'd prefer we just carry on. If that makes some people too nervous or there's a legitimate content dispute, I'd rather someone trimmed the contentious text and put something like [[User:William_Pietri/Legaldispute]] at the top of the article so that people know they are not getting the whole story.
William