[WikiEN-l] Libel chill

Fri Apr 21 05:29:02 UTC 2006

Tim Starling wrote:

>The basic problem with {{office}} is that I don't trust Brad Patrick and Danny to decide between
>them what's right and wrong. I'm not making a slight on their character. I'm just saying that there
>needs to be oversight, when something so important as the neutrality of the encyclopedia is at
>stake. In some cases, we may need to make a tradeoff between NPOV and risk of being sued, and I fear
>that due to their background, a lawyer may be inclined to automatically choose minimisation of risk
>over neutrality, even when the risk of a successful lawsuit is very small.
>  
>
In all of the cases that I've looked into so far, I hardly think what's 
going on is a choice of minimizing risk at the expense of neutrality. In 
fact, lack of neutrality has been very much at the root of these 
problems, probably as much so as the risk of a lawsuit.

Unfortunately, the community has proven unable on a number of occasions 
to actually produce a neutral encyclopedia article in a timely fashion. 
This tends to draw complaints from affected parties, who not 
surprisingly want the Wikimedia Foundation to be responsible once it has 
been put on notice of problems on a site it operates. I shall not 
comment on whether any particular case truly involves actionable libel, 
but I think to speak of "libel chill" misapprehends the situation.

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 
producing a better encyclopedia, it really matters very little whether 
libel is the real concern or not. Quite simply, the articles involved 
have fallen abominably short of our declared standards, with very poor 
prospects for improvement, so intervention has been necessary.

There is also the point that whether a lawsuit would be "successful" is 
not the only consideration. Any lawsuit, even a frivolous one, would 
entail significant costs. Much more than the value of the man-hours it 
should take to bring something up to the standard of a neutral article 
that properly cites reputable sources for its facts--even if we assign a 
suitable value to the time being donated by volunteers. Hence when it is 
possible to avoid a lawsuit by intervening on the wiki, it is highly 
desirable to do so. Sometimes the execution has been awkward, but that's 
a different problem.

>I would like to see review of these "office actions" by a diverse committee, such as the juriwiki-l
>mailing list.
>  
>
I won't speak for the other participants on that mailing list, but from 
my personal interaction and observation, I trust Brad Patrick to handle 
outside concerns appropriately when they arise. There hasn't been much 
discussion of these cases on that list; I won't speculate as to whether 
that's due to apathy, or because nobody thinks it's that big of a 
concern. Certainly anybody who's worried that we're not aware of these 
situations is welcome to email the list and call them to our attention.

--Michael Snow