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

[Brian McNeil]

I'm hardly a random admin.

For the Bauer article I received a most concerned email from Mike Godwin
that there was a risk that publication was contempt of court, so the issue
was an IAR one.


Brian McNeil

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Anthony
Sent: 24 May 2008 15:55
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [WL-News] Wikimedia Foundation in
dangeroflosing immunity under the Communications Decency Act

On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 12:45 AM, Todd Allen <toddmallen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 6:07 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>
wrote:
>> 2008/5/22 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
>>> On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 5:34 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> 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.
>>>
>>> Shouldn't the WMF play nice with everyone, not just those who sue it?
>>
>> When doing so doesn't compromise our goals, yes.
>
> I think that's an important point, and one perhaps forgotten a little
> too often. Our ultimate goal is an accurate, NPOV work. If we can
> avoid bruising feelings while writing such a work, great. If bruising
> feelings is an inevitable consequence of following accuracy and NPOV,
> and not doing so would compromise those things, we, to put it bluntly,
> should bruise them. Unfortunately, sometimes, as the old saying goes,
> the truth hurts. That doesn't mean, when it's well-sourced and
> appropriate for inclusion, that we should not tell it.
>
I think it's an open question as to which category the deletion of the
Bauer article falls into, but if the answer is that its deletion
*doesn't* compromise the goals of the foundation, then I think there's
a lot more deletion that should take place.

If this was an office action, that's one thing.  If Mike Godwin
properly assessed the legal risk the article posed and Sue or Erik (or
whoever is supposed to be in charge of making decisions on "office
actions") decided that the risk wasn't worth it, that's fine.  But if
this wasn't an office action, then what was it?  Can a single random
admin decide they don't like an article and delete it?  Does Wikinews
give that much power to its admins?

Is there a good place to go for a neutral account of the story about
the story about the story about the article?

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