[Foundation-l] Fwd: [WL-News] Wikimedia Foundation in danger of losing immunity under the Communications Decency Act

[Todd Allen]

On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 8:53 AM, Mike Godwin <mgodwin at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> Todd writes:
>
>> I think we all may be missing the point here, however. Regardless of
>> the legalities, what possible business could WMF have in keeping
>> Wikinews from publishing stories that are critical of WMF? Is this not
>> about as clear a conflict of interest as you get?
>
> The Foundation has no interest in preventing Wikinews from publishing
> a story critical of WMF.  If you are under the impression the stories
> were censored because they were critical of WMF, then you have your
> facts wrong.  Anyone who says this is simply mistaken.
>
>>  "Asserting your concerns privately", from a position of authority, is
>> just a roundabout way of not having the "official stamp" on an
>> official action. If the concerns had been brought up PUBLICLY, and a
>> regular community discussion held (I don't know the exact way Wikinews
>> handles deletion discussions, I'm sure they have some procedure), and
>> the community agreed, then we can say it's a community action.
>
> Unfortunately for your point, not all legal concerns can be discussed
> with you in advance in public.  If you think about it, you will see why.
>
>
> --Mike
>
>
>
>
>
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I agree that not all legal concerns can be discussed publicly, and
have made that point myself. And if the Foundation believes that there
is a legal concern, it can certainly OFFICE the article in question.

In this case, however, I did look at the deleted article. I agree that
portions of it which mentioned specific persons (for obvious reason, I
will not go into more detail here), were problematic. There certainly
are parts of the article which are well-supported by reliable sources,
however, and I fail to see why those should not remain.

As to the issue of "community vs. from above", if Jimbo or you
contacted me and said "Hey, Todd, you better take this given action,"
I would generally tend to consider that an official request. If we
wanted the community to decide, we should've let them decide through
normal processes. If action needed to be taken from above, it should
have been transparently (e.g., OFFICE) marked as action from above.
The attempt to make this look like a community decision when it really
appears to be a WMF mandate ("strong suggestion", or whatever we want
to call it) is what I find disturbing here.

-- 
Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.