[Foundation-l] Wikimedia/Wikipedia trademarks?

[Andrew Gray]

On 18/12/2007, Nathan Awrich <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> Admins with language proficiency who are also able to identify what is
> and what is not libel (or in violation of some other law) in a given
> state?

OTRS isn't primarily a legal assessment system; it's an alerting one -
once you've been pointed to a problematic article you can usually deal
with it independent of what the actual email said! If it's bad enough
to be [percieved as] libellous we shouldn't have it anyway, so really
what needs to be done is to bounce it to someone with experience of
dealing with bad content and let them solve the problem normally.

Common sense and the ability to say "yep, that's sucky content" is
what you and I do on-wiki all the time, after all, whether OTRS is
involved or not.

In the event that a) it was one of these odd language cases; and b) it
did look like a confusing legal minefield that they didn't feel up to
treading in, we'd probably encourage them to report back with notes on
WTF is going on, with any useful editorial commentary they can
provide, and we'd try to get some legal advice before continuing -
much the same as we would do for a problem in a language we do
routinely handle, like English or German.

[Legal problems are not very common overall, and complex legal
problems that aren't "oops, sorry, we've removed the thing saying you
screw goats, please don't sue" are rarer - especially on small
projects!]

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk