Given that a Wikipedia biography is usually the first google hit to come up for a name, it doesn't actually strike me as *that* ludicrous. What Wikipedia writes about a person reaches more readers today than a New York Times article. As someone else mentioned recently, there is a responsibility that comes with that kind of reach. Saying that "we don't necessarily stand behind what our article says about you the way a newspaper publisher would stand behind an article of theirs" is frankly little consolation to an aggrieved BLP subject.
Moreover, some people in Italy are quite easy in sueing: Wikimedia Italy is still on trial (in the person of her president) beacuse someone wrote something "bad" on the owners of a political newspaper. (and they asked us 20 million dollars...).
Aubrey