On 21/09/2007, Armed Blowfish <diodontida.armata(a)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(a)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...