On 21/09/2007, Armed Blowfish diodontida.armata@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.