--- On Wed, 5/10/11, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <[email protected]> wrote: From: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia - What exactly does the proposed law say? To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <[email protected]> Date: Wednesday, 5 October, 2011, 12:16
On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 2:05 PM, Milos Rancic <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 12:49, Andreas Kolbe <[email protected]> wrote: >> Even this corrected version does not seem to be right. As I understand the >> proposed law, >> the subject would have the right for a statement to be shown, unaltered, on >> the page (which >> actually would be possible for Wikipedia to do, via a transcluded and >> protected template). > > That's enough crazy and against NPOV. > > Speaking as a citizen of a country with a fairly stringently worded "Right of reply law." I don't think it has ever been applied against an encyclopaedia, or a blog or Usenet thread or anything remotely like that. I think it is very cogently only applied to publications with an editorial plate that says the publishers stand behind every word printed on it. Which is not the case for Wikipedia, and would be ludicrous to even contemplate. Given that a Wikipedia biography is usually the first google hit to come up for a name, it doesn't actually strike me as *that* ludicrous. What Wikipedia writes about a person reaches more readers today than a New York Times article. As someone else mentioned recently, there is a responsibility that comes with that kind of reach. Saying that "we don't necessarily stand behind what our article says about you the way a newspaper publisher would stand behind an article of theirs" is frankly little consolation to an aggrieved BLP subject. There is no question that it is better to go through OTRS and reach an amicable agreement on what an article should and should not say. But I'd be more sympathetic if we hadn't had cases like Taner Akçam and Philip Mould, or if we didn't sometimes have editors involved in personal feuds off-site with BLP subjects they are writing about. One recent such case (about a former Playmate of the Year) took five years to resolve (by deleting the article). So while I'd agree that there are clearly *better* solutions than being forced to post a statement from the BLP subject, I disagree that the idea is *that* ludicrous. I also think that our readers would recognise a self-serving and lying statement from a BLP subject if they see one. Andreas _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
