[Foundation-l] UCMJ and Wikimedia

[Robert Rohde]

On Jan 2, 2008 2:03 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 02/01/2008, effe iets anders <effeietsanders at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think, but i am not sure, that No Legal Threats is a local policy,
> > and not a policy issued by the Wikimedia Foundation? So I guess you'd
> > have to ask enwiki community in this case...
>
> If we have some legal obligation to allow people to give such warnings
> (which would seem unlikely, but I guess it's possible), then it's not
> a decision for the enwiki community - consensus doesn't trump the law.
>
>
>

In principle, I disagree.  You might have a legal obligation to spy on your
neighbor, but it would not be illegal for WMF / enwiki to ban all people who
do so from participating.  It's our community, we can choose to
categorically exclude everyone that does X, even if X is a legal obligation
for some portion of the population of potential contributors.

That said, I don't think it would be reasonable course to take such sweeping
actions given the current arguments.

-Robert Rohde