[Wikipedia-l] California court ruling on responsibility for content

Fri Mar 7 05:05:45 UTC 2003

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

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