[Foundation-l] Korean Wikipedians charged with "criminal defamation:" a potential threat of censorship

[Fred Bauder]

This seems to be an example of the trouble that the Wikipedia:Biographies
of living persons policy on the English Wikipedia is crafted to avoid,
unsourced or poorly sourced negative information about a living person
can be removed immediately by any editor. Here, if I'm reading right, it
was put back up again despite being repeatedly removed.

Another aspect of this is that if there is a law around, even a disused,
rarely enforced law, the possibility exists that someone will evoke it
and put you into court with baleful consequences, even if you "win" in
the end. For example in Colorado there is a criminal libel law that
covers the dead, see
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Defamation#Criminal_defamation
How one could fully comply with such a monstrosity as that is beyond me.

Fred

User:Fred Bauder


> At most four Korean Wikipedians are charged with defamation of Song
> Young-gil, the Mayor of Incheon Metropolitan City.
>
> According to the contributors, the prosecution is upon the Song's own
> request, and is going to be over publicizing a fabricated sex scandal
> in the article about him and (semi-)protecting it.  The text in
> question is merely a sum-up of various reports about the speculations
> eventually found to be a hoax.  Non-logged-in user(s) from various IP
> addresses have tried to remove the whole controversy section,
> including not only the scandal but other arguments about him,
> replacing it with personal contrary comments and legal threats.  The
> edits are consequently reverted by some users and rollbacked by one
> administrator.  The admin, [[ko:User:Kys951]], is also accused of
> being an abettor just because he is an admin.
>
> In the South Korean legal system, criminal defamation is partially a
> "crime upon complaint," (ì¹œê³ ì£„/親告罪) which becomes irrelevant to
> be a
> crime when the complainant chose to withdraw the case.  (Note that I'm
> not a specialist of law, especially in English terminology.)  The
> police of Southeastern Incheon thought the case itself is too
> insignificant to be a criminal case and tried to persuade him to
> withdraw it, only to be declined.
>
> Song has reportedly demanded the admin to remove the paragraph in
> exchange for fixing the charge, which is definitely not the way how
> Wikipedia works.
>
> Another concern about this incident is that this could happen to every
> bit of contribution to the project.  South Korean government had been
> censoring any scribble on the web they think beneficial to North
> Korea,[2] and for later on, anything they think "fraudulent" whenever
> the state is in "threat," according to an exclusive report.[3]
>
> [1]
> https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ko/w/index.php?title=%EC%86%A1%EC%98%81%EA%B8%B8&diff=5832689
> [2]
> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/shame_on_democratic_south_korea_for_censoring_face.php
> [3] http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/economy/it/455022.html
>
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