[WikiEN-l] RE: Corrected

Thu May 5 23:00:25 UTC 2005

slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:

>On 5/5/05, David 'DJ' Hedley <spyders at btinternet.com> wrote:
>
>>I think that, looking at the previous way that the report was presented, it
>>was written in a way that possibly seemed more like the anonymous user was
>>calling him a kook than reporting it. Thus, Wikipedia was calling him a
>>kook. If it had been written as something along the lines of "Persons that
>>the newsgroup have labelled a 'kook' include [name], who was given the title
>>of 'Kook of the Millenium'" then there would be no reasonable argument
>>against its inclusion.
>>
>>
>This is perhaps an inappopriate discussion to have in public because a
>legal action has been threatened, but in brief, the fact that you
>report, but do not endorse, a claim is not a defense in a libel
>action. If you spread it, you spread it.
>
Can't be that simple - we report on lots of unproven claims made
by leftist politicos and interest groups against rightists, and
vice versa. Not only that, but we report on accusations made
against the Chinese governments that I'm sure they consider
libellous, and likewise for many other governments around the
world. So by your reasoning, we would have to scrub out quite
a few articles, and the Ann Coulter article would likely wind
up empty. :-)

Stan