On Thu, Mar 06, 2003 at 06:38:48PM -0800, Axel Boldt wrote:
I don't think it affects us: the reasoning of the court was that Matchmaker.com is partly responsible for the content because they partly created it, by providing the user with a long series of yes/no questions and targeted essay questions to produce the ad. But the Wikipedia non-profit doesn't do anything like that. Any harmful content posted on Wikipedia was created completely independently by the (ab)user. All the prodding they got from us was a textbox and a blinking cursor.
More realistic scenario: somone puts something defamatory on. Another person tries to remove it. Rest of Wikipedia dogpiles on person doing the removing, forming a "consensus" that the information should remain in. Said person is then banned by Jimbo for his edits. I think the case would be pretty clear that the Wikipedia as a group, and Jimbo Wales in particular, had "taken responsibility" for the content at that point.
Jonathan