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

[Brian McNeil]

Nor would Wikinews, but there's a minor niggle there. The NYT has a chief
editor who is the one you sue... and he has insurance. I strongly suspect
the anarchic nature of Wikinews means we'd never get libel insurance, even
though community policing is fairly effective. And who would take that
"lightning rod" position of being the person to sue?

This is one of a handful of issues where Wikinews and Wikipedia are worlds
apart. Wikipedia can afford to be patient with the Bauer case and let the
stupid woman's legal action simply build up more sources for a post-case
article. Anything on Wikinews has to be as current as possible; I coined a
phrase to describe one of the key differences, "Facts don't cease to be
facts, but news ceases to be news".


Brian McNeil

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Delirium
Sent: 21 May 2008 23:01
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [WL-News] Wikimedia Foundation in danger
oflosing immunity under the Communications Decency Act

David Gerard wrote:
> 2008/5/21 Todd Allen <toddmallen at gmail.com>:
> 
>>  We'll be able to see why when the court throws out the allegations
>>  against WMF? I fail to see what about the Wikinews article would make
>>  that less likely to happen,
> 
> 
> In a civil action, being seen to play nice is very important indeed
> and gets you lots of points. The courts are perpetually clogged, the
> charges to a litigant for bringing a case are well below what it
> actually costs the taxpayer, and people are very much expected to do
> everything they can to resolve problems before it gets that far.
> Mostly this works. (WMF and its projects have policies of playing nice
> as far as is reasonably possible, not just for this reason but because
> it's important to our reputation and people are scared by how powerful
> we are already.)

Other news organizations (in the U.S. at least) usually take the 
opposite approach, and refuse to take any action at all in response to 
frivolous complaints, lest that simply encourage more frivolous 
complaints. Certainly the New York Times wouldn't retract a story or 
remove it from their website, if they thought there was no legal problem 
with it, simply to "play nice".

-Mark


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