Kind of depends, doesn't it. Suppose the material was somewhat credible, it could be true. And it is about one of our respected administrators, casting them in a false light. Now, let's suppose the accusation has been thoroughly checked out and found to not be true. Let's suppose that most of our users have no way of checking out the accusation (no checkuser access, perhaps).
Fred
-----Original Message----- From: William Pietri [mailto:william@scissor.com] Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2007 04:24 PM To: 'English Wikipedia' Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] BADSITES ArbCom case in progress
In that case, we agree completely about the relevance of non-US law. The letter is irrelevant, but the spirit can be worth learning from.
Where we disagree is whether content can be malicious on its own. You and I agree that we should stop *people* from being malicious on-wiki. But I think we should allow people acting in good faith and with good purpose to discuss things that malicious people have said.
William
fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
The issue is malicious content, our concern regardless of legality.
Fred
-----Original Message----- From: William Pietri [mailto:william@scissor.com] Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2007 03:50 PM To: 'English Wikipedia' Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] BADSITES ArbCom case in progress
Mark Ryan wrote:
On 20/09/2007, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
But this is (a) wrong (at least in the case of www hyperlinks), and (b) not relevant to a site hosted in Florida, USA.
It is relevant. Defamation under UK law happens where the content is read, not where it is hosted.
Why exactly would we worry about this?
The way I look at it, all non-US law is relevant only to editors working in those jurisdictions. If Britain or Venezuela or China believes that the public can't handle certain material, that is interesting, but not relevant to how we run Wikipedia.
What might be relevant is the spirit behind the law. If the law gets made because of some particular harm that we think is worse than impeding honest discussion or the free flow of factual information, then we should take a look at altering our course. But the law itself is the business of the citizens under its jurisdiction, and not our collective problem.
William
-- William Pietri william@scissor.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri
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