[WikiEN-l] Libel chill

Fri Apr 21 09:03:59 UTC 2006

G'day Steve,

> On 21/04/06, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
> > First of all, a neutral encyclopedia article is not an 
> unrestrained free
> > speech zone, and I think the rhetoric of someone's freedom of speech
> > being chilled is out of place to begin with. Second of all, it is
> > entirely consistent with our mission to seek to "chill" content 
> that is
> > decidedly non-neutral and in most cases fails to provide verifiable,
> > reputable sources for its assertions besides. Finally, in terms of
> 
> I would be curious to know - not necessarily with examples - whether
> we have had legal threats related to articles that did meet WP:V. That
> is, we published something which was by all accounts true, and had
> verifiable sources to back it up - and yet was deemed offensive by
> some miffed party.

It's not *exactly* what you're asking for, but ...

A while back soufron appeared on IRC asking for Australian editors to check up on our article on Piers Akerman, which had been the subject of a legal complaint.  I had a dekko, and it appeared that Mr Akerman was a South African who left to protest the end of apartheid and came to Australia, where he immediately began to indulge in a life of debauchery and drug use.  Or something like that.  Now, as any Aussie not too busy braiding their armpit hair could tell you, this is about as far from the life story of Mr Akerman as one could get.

I went in and found some sources and re-wrote the article.  My source was 11 years old, so I had to make some changes after he helpfully pointed out that, for example, he doesn't live in Melbourne anymore.  He was still unhappy about one thing: the article claimed that he'd quarrelled with his school headmaster and failed to complete his exams, whereas Mr Akerman says nothing of the sort happened.  Seeing as he didn't provide a source, I went with "/The Age/ says blah blah blah, but Mr Akerman denies this."  So far he seems to be happy with that arrangement, at least, I believe the Lawyer Cabal (TM) haven't received further complaints.

-- 
Mark Gallagher