[Foundation-l] Wikipedia disclaimers

[Robert Rohde]

Two points.

1) I think whoever you spoke to at Meta was more or less mistaken.
The disclaimers were written by Wikipedians not lawyers (you can look
at their edit history).  However, they are also very old and largely
static.  For example, the general disclaimer has had only ~3
substantive edits in three years.  Possibly the Foundation's lawyer
actually endorsed it at some point, but there is not any record of
that as far as I am aware.  I'll defer the Foundation about whether
they would want to take control of disclaimers moving forward, but
many years ago they were originally written by consensus.

2) The WMF and its projects are subject to US laws.  Period.  Many
non-English projects also strive to comply with laws as existing in
regions that are home to their language, e.g. Russian laws on the
ru-wiki, Italian laws on the it-wiki, etc.  However, given the
physical location of the WMF servers, no project is immune from the
reach of US laws.

-Robert Rohde

On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 3:08 PM, Sebastián González
<daleboca782 at gmail.com> wrote:
> As I have been informed at Meta, the legal disclaimers of the wikipedia in
> english were formulated by a lawyer of the foundation, and it's content is
> beyond discussion or consensus of the community of users. If one day there's
> the need to modify something of it, it would be decided by the foundation.
>
> By logic, the same thing would apply to the disclaimers of all wikipedias,
> wich are traductions of the one in english. But are those disclaimers
> binding documents in the legal sense, or just of informative purposes? The
> GNU free documentation license states "In case of a disagreement between the
> translation and the original version of this License or a notice or
> disclaimer, the original version will prevail", does something similar
> applies between disclaimers of wikipedia?
>
> Let's provide a working example of this. The disclaimer of the wikipedia in
> spanish, located at
> http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Limitaci%C3%B3n_general_de_responsabilidad,
> does not include any mention to the paragraph "Jurisdiction and
> legality
> of content" of the version in english, wich states that the database is
> maintained in reference to the protections afforded under local and federal
> law of the state of Florida, in the United States. Far from being just a
> part that was missing due to an incomplete translation, I have seen that
> some users, including some admins, deliberately refuse to acknowledge the
> authority of US law over the content of wikipedia, either as a plot to
> prevent consensus about non-free content from ever happening or as a
> mistaken display of patriotism. As far as I understand (but correct me if
> I'm wrong) being written in spanish and having a huge majority of admins and
> users from spanish speaking countries rather than from the US do not erase
> the ties with the US and turn the laws of Spain, Argentina, Venezuela or
> other spanish speaking countries into the only ones the project would answer
> to.
>
> What's the situation, then? Can those things be done, or does the law of the
> US apply to all projects regardless of users liking it or not? Can wikis in
> non-english languajes be allowed to interpret and write the legal disclaimer
> as they see fit, or should a version written or supervised by the foundation
> be enforced?
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