[WikiEN-l] BADSITES ArbCom case in progress

[Andrew Gray]

On 21/09/2007, Armed Blowfish <diodontida.armata at googlemail.com> wrote:

> However, I do not see how anything defamatory under
> British law would ever make a good encyclopaedia.
> (...)
> If anything, Wikiapedia's BLP standards should be much
> stricter than British defamation law.

Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha no.

Seriously, sneezing at the wrong time can be construed as defamatory.
Calling a man "honourable" with intent can be defamatory*. The law -
which is orders of magnitude broader than the 1996 Act, incidentally -
relies immensely on real or presumed intent, on implications and
motives rather than what was actually written. It is a vast seething
bog of caselaw, with very little hard and clear statute law; it is
conceptually capable of declaring almost anything defamatory, because
almost anything - in the right tone - can be. Truth is no absolute
defence; nor is prior publication.

If our BLP standards are "much stricter" than the potential edge cases
of unusual situations, then it would be impossible to write virtually
anything about a person save to note if they were dead.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk

* Well, not quite; legal exceptions kick in in Parliament, but I
recall hearing there was a case back in the forties(?), and it was
pretty scandalous...