Amir:
I am forwarding your email to Mike Godwin for further opinion--but as far as I'm aware, the Foundation was not contacted regarding this matter. I have received no correspondence about it, and I'm not certain that a national chapter should be superseding a community decision.
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Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
(Short intro: I am User:Amire80, editor in Hebrew, Russian and English Wikipedias, and sysop in the English one.)
The whole article about Amnon Yitzhak, a well-known and controversial Jewish preacher, was deleted from the Hebrew Wikipedia.
It happened after Wikimedia Israel received a letter from an attorney representing Yitzhak, which requested to remove allegedly defamatory material from the article.
The article was deleted and recreated without older versions. For the short time that these versions were available, it was possible to see that the article was not any more defamatory against Amnon Yitzhak than an average newspaper or television item about him. The editors who worked on it were not vandals and the material was reasonably sourced. Now it's impossible to see that, too (unless one is a sysop there).
Nevertheless, the bureaucrats of the Hebrew Wikipedia chose to salt the article with an explanation similar to WP:OFFICE.
The problem is that it is doesn't seem to be a case for WP:OFFICE. Wikimedia Israel is not the main Wikimedia Office, but only a small local association, which is just beginning its life. In any case, as far as my understanding of jurisdictions goes, Wikimedia Israel cannot be held responsible for the content of the article and neither the article's editors.
I am sincerely sorry to be a "schtinker". That's a Yiddish word for "informer". The bureaucrats of the Hebrew Wikipedia are excellent contributors, thanks to whom the Hebrew Wikipedia is one of the very best projects of the WMF. But i am quite sure that they made a mistake in this case. Wikipedia must not censor out sourced material after one feeble legal threat so easily.
Many respected editors of the Hebrew Wikipedia voiced their opposition to this deletion, but the sysops do not agree to restore the deleted versions, saying that they won't do it without proper legal advice. This is understandable; so - can someone from the Foundation Office, who has experience with BLP legal situations help the Hebrew Wikipedia sysops to solve this problem?
Thanks in advance.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni
English - http://aharoni.wordpress.com Hebrew - http://haharoni.wordpress.com
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