Jimmy Wales wrote:
The course of action I recommend to everyone is to
leave a crystal
clean paper trail so that the arbitration committee can ban this guy
with a clean conscience if he misbehaves.
His "lawyer" contacted me (from France, so I'm not really worried
about it), but made no specific legal threats other than the typical
lawyerly hints and tone.
It's very important, as a matter of justice and transparency, that we
not ban Irismeister for behavior that others commit against him. This
is one of the biggest reasons why Usenet-style flaming is so bad
around here -- it deprives us of one of the cleanest reasons we have
for getting rid of bad apples.
In a real anarchy like Usenet, where getting someone else kicked out
is impossible, the only known solution to jerks is to yell at them in
the hopes that they get some sense. (This solution doesn't work at
all, but that doesn't keep people from trying it.) Around here, the
solution is to greet them with respect, love, and sincere attempts to
help them achieve whatever rational goals they may have. And this
leaves us a nice clean and simple paper trail for banning if they just
can't behave.
While it's not the approach I advocate, from a purely legal standpoint I
don't see how he has a leg to stand on. The Wikimedia Foundation has no
legal obligation to let all viewpoints be heard, and is permitted to be
explicitly anti-iridology if it so desired. We ought not to be biased
on any particular matter (as far as being unbiased is possible), but
we're *legally permitted* to be. We can even ban people because we
don't like the word "iridology", because it makes my head hurt trying to
pronounce it. Or we can ban people because having a name ending in
"idology" irritates us. Simply put, we don't *need* a clean paper-trail
to ban anyone, legally speaking. "The Wikimedia Foundation does not
like User:Iridology, and no longer chooses to permit him to publish his
material on our website" is a good enough reason.
All, again, legally speaking. Obviously we want a much different
process for our own satisfaction. But not because it's required by any law.
-Mark