Two points.
1) I think whoever you spoke to at Meta was more or less mistaken.
The disclaimers were written by Wikipedians not lawyers (you can look
at their edit history). However, they are also very old and largely
static. For example, the general disclaimer has had only ~3
substantive edits in three years. Possibly the Foundation's lawyer
actually endorsed it at some point, but there is not any record of
that as far as I am aware. I'll defer the Foundation about whether
they would want to take control of disclaimers moving forward, but
many years ago they were originally written by consensus.
2) The WMF and its projects are subject to US laws. Period. Many
non-English projects also strive to comply with laws as existing in
regions that are home to their language, e.g. Russian laws on the
ru-wiki, Italian laws on the it-wiki, etc. However, given the
physical location of the WMF servers, no project is immune from the
reach of US laws.
-Robert Rohde
On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 3:08 PM, Sebastián González
<daleboca782(a)gmail.com> wrote:
As I have been informed at Meta, the legal disclaimers
of the wikipedia in
english were formulated by a lawyer of the foundation, and it's content is
beyond discussion or consensus of the community of users. If one day there's
the need to modify something of it, it would be decided by the foundation.
By logic, the same thing would apply to the disclaimers of all wikipedias,
wich are traductions of the one in english. But are those disclaimers
binding documents in the legal sense, or just of informative purposes? The
GNU free documentation license states "In case of a disagreement between the
translation and the original version of this License or a notice or
disclaimer, the original version will prevail", does something similar
applies between disclaimers of wikipedia?
Let's provide a working example of this. The disclaimer of the wikipedia in
spanish, located at
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Limitaci%C3%B3n_general_de_responsab…,
does not include any mention to the paragraph "Jurisdiction and
legality
of content" of the version in english, wich states that the database is
maintained in reference to the protections afforded under local and federal
law of the state of Florida, in the United States. Far from being just a
part that was missing due to an incomplete translation, I have seen that
some users, including some admins, deliberately refuse to acknowledge the
authority of US law over the content of wikipedia, either as a plot to
prevent consensus about non-free content from ever happening or as a
mistaken display of patriotism. As far as I understand (but correct me if
I'm wrong) being written in spanish and having a huge majority of admins and
users from spanish speaking countries rather than from the US do not erase
the ties with the US and turn the laws of Spain, Argentina, Venezuela or
other spanish speaking countries into the only ones the project would answer
to.
What's the situation, then? Can those things be done, or does the law of the
US apply to all projects regardless of users liking it or not? Can wikis in
non-english languajes be allowed to interpret and write the legal disclaimer
as they see fit, or should a version written or supervised by the foundation
be enforced?
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