On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 4:16 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
As Wikipedia is becoming more and more a regular part of our civilization, we may expect more and more regular behavior. We already had malicious legal attacks in UK, Germany and France (I remember those three issues).
I'm aware of these, and other legal threats as well.
By building a position with significant holes, and attribution issue
is still a significant hole, we are making unsustainable construction.
My assessment is different from yours.
If we have, let's say, 10.000.000 of contributors and 1% of them (100.000) is not happy with Wikipedia because of any reason and 1% of them (1000) want to sue WMF or whoever and 1% of them can do it, we'll have 10 big problems. We may fail in just 10% of the cases and we'll suffer from significant consequences.
This is a version of Pascal's Wager. I don't really believe, however, the risk is even as high as you suggest here. We'll be fine.
After the first couple of such processes Wikipedia recommendations would loose any credibility.
I don't consider this a significant risk.
BUT, if you think that there is no reasonable threat to be sued for "misleading recommendations", it doesn't cost a lot to try that way. Fixing credibility is much less dangerous than loosing two years budget.
I don't think there's any reasonable threat of this sort.
--Mike