--- On Wed, 5/10/11, Andrea Zanni zanni.andrea84@gmail.com wrote:
From: Andrea Zanni zanni.andrea84@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia - What exactly does the proposed law say? To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Wednesday, 5 October, 2011, 22:44
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...).
Well, that *is* nuts. Moreover, the 48-hour time period and potential €12,000 fine in the proposed law are nuts (pity the blogger who has gone on a 2-week holiday). Yet that €12,000 fine is not mentioned in the it:WP statement. Being forced to include a statement in an article is less of an issue to me than the prospect of being fined €12,000 if it isn't done in time. *That* is where the chilling effect comes from, yet the it:WP statement doesn't mention it.
Andreas