On Jun 13, 2006, at 1:19 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
Fred Bauder wrote:
On Jun 13, 2006, at 12:01 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
What are examples of things a hypothetically ideal management would do *right* that the present management is not?
Deal with marshaling assets and legal resources to deal with defamation litigation. Tackle the problem of how to effectively avoid such litigation.
Is there anything specific in what you'd like to see done about it? What can the management do to make this work more visible or more complete?
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
I think the major step leadership can do is to made every administrator and user aware that one of the major risks of being a publisher (which Wikipedia and each user is) is defamation litigation. [[Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons]] is an example of good work in that direction. So, consciousness raising and support for administrators who take the initiative and act boldly in this area (the arbitration committee can help in this now). All this goes toward building a track record of good faith efforts to minimize the consequences and damage that results from vandalism and malicious editing. When we do end up in court it is going to very helpful to be able to document the policies and actions we took to minimize and control damage resulting from defamation.
Also we need to start lining up legal resources for every language and jurisdiction on Earth. If someone is libeled in the Finnish Wikipedia, what happens? Do we just say, tough, see you in court in Florida? So part of this is public relations. Being able to quickly apologize in Finnish might be very helpful.
And I guess, we need to consider the question raised by the Siegenthaler incident and focused on by Brandt: the degree of our responsibility for the anonymous malicious editor. The legal defense that we are not a publisher, nor are we responsible for identifying the person who made the malicious edit might be effective, but that is very like keeping a stray dog around and when it bits someone, saying, "not my dog".
Fred
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