Rootology has posted an interesting discussion about a decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. It seems that a British paper was successfully sued by the court for an allegedly defamatory story in its archive from 1999. The plaintiff had earlier sued and settled for the printed version of the story, but started a new action for the online version. The court ruled that every new download counted as a publication and was actionable for libel.

I'm not sure that it's as relevant to Wikipedia as Rootology thinks it is: the decision explicitly disclaims the publisher's responsibility to remove all libel from the archives--one could merely issue a correction when the libel has been pointed out:


One might only be liable if one is on notice of the libel (I find it surprising that the paper didn't simply remove the article from their archive, actually--their free speech argument strikes me as absurd). Still, it's worth pondering whether this would apply to individuals who do not take actions to remove the material once they are aware of it.

It also suggests that merely reverting libel is not adequate--every time someone accesses the previous version, it's an archive view "publication." Does anyone want to guess how many libelous statements are in article contribution histories?

Wow. This means that fixing BLP defamation problems will require oversight-powers. Which, since we cannot possible grant those to enough admins to watch 300,000 articles, will have to involve some kind of software change such that reversion by ordinary admins in articles tagged "BLP" will result in in an oversight style edit.

None of this may apply in the US until sec 230 libel problems are resolved (which I have no doubt they eventually will be), but it will still be a problem for WP elsewhere.

This is going to lead to various consequences, none pleasant: turning BLP-watch over to admins only (there aren't enough of these, even if the software if jiggered so that admin-rollback on BLP oversights edits), or else having a BLP free version of WP everywhere outside the US (I don't think this is even possible), deleting all BLPs except for clearly notable figures who are not protected by libel laws (which would mean in practice, the dead-tree-famous test, since otherwise we're back to square-one about how to decide this), or else simply delete all BLPs entirely. Gosh, who would have thought it would come to that.

Semi-protection and flagged revisions for at least BLP will be a given, the moment WP gets successfully sued outside the US. But that still doesn't fix the problem of all those old defamations in the BLP archives, most of which are for figures who wouldn't pass a notability test as courts apply it. So there really is no way to deal with this except nuke and salt all BLPs of non-paper-encyclopedia famous people.

Maybe somebody should keep them on a stack of CD-ROMs in a safe at WMF headquarters, so the work isn't lost, later when these people finally die. You see, I'm an inclusionist at heart. I hate to see wasted work, since work is so hard.

Most honest news orgs have huge stockpiles of largely worthless ostensible information that they keep forever and may never see fit to print. I think they call 'em "files". It's only lately that certain dumbarses feel like that have to print everything that's not fit to print.

Jon

A few days after J. Edgar Hoover died, there was a fire in the firepit in his backyard that lasted for days. I can't image what must have gone up in it. Well, reading about the tapes of MLK banging those hookers, maybe I can. Is that on iTunes yet?

Probably a whole lot of Calico and Crinoline — but that's the nice thing about oversighting, you get to pick what you burn on CD and what you burn in the BBQ.

Jon

One simple solution would be to prevent the casual reader accessing the history. If less people can see the history, then it is less obvious that it is "published".

One of the problems with wikipedia is that it insists on making all of its sausages in public, which is an unedifying spectacle for the consumer.

Cuts both ways. Only allowing admins to view previous versions – which I think is what you're suggesting – would mean that when someone replaces the body text of The Log from the Sea of Cortez with "I want to be fucked in the asshole", no-one can access the valid version to revert back to it.

Yep.

I used to think this was an uncontroversial point, but Protonk feels differently:


It disturbs me to imagine that endless miles of policy debate, AfDs, and drama is one of Wikipedia's products.

Most online communities review the history and literature of community organization in the process of crafting their community organization model at the outset. Wikipedia is unusual in that it reprises the organic process of inventing community governance from scratch, starting with the tribal ochlocracy model that prevailed some 4000 years ago before humans began to think seriously about functional community governance models.

It disturbs ME how out of touch Protonk's remark is, on so many levels. I hardly know where to begin. I suppose Jimbo the God-King, author of policy which is non-negotiable and recipient of all possible website powers, is in no way part of any "heirarchy"??

And what about that ass-kissing administrative and beaurocratic and stewardship heirarchy, Protonk? Do you want for me to send you some chapstick? How about some clown-white pancake makup to cover your rapidly-browning nose, there on Wikipedia?

This is the Protonk who was going to find me easy examples of en.wiki articles in which helpful IP edits easily surpassed IP-vandal edits which had to be reverted. I don't see them. I suppose the "novel and interesting experiment" is not novel and interesting enough for him to do any work to take a close look at how it's actually running?

Milton

I had to read that twice. Without a hierarchy? Without an effective, legitimate, or transparent hierarchy perhaps, but not without a hierarchy.

While IMO it's certainly an exception, not a rule, here's an article where good-IPs outweigh bad-IPs.

I don't think many people see them, largely because the idea that IP editors are usually well-meaning experts in their field who don't wish to be easily identified (although revealing an IP address makes that kind of dubious) is by and large a fiction which can best be explained by a too liberal use of illegal substances during one's formative years.


That's a pretty impressive article, I learned so much from it.

I prefer to think of it as a miracle; Cal has risen from the dead and is editing his own article, but to avoid scaring the horses he's using a convenient IP address. Very thoughful of him.

Um, the 75.161.xxx.xxx is obviously the same IP, logging in from two different locations, or dynamically, from Qwest. The "other IP" is this same guy, by his own note.. They're all Qwest IPs. So that's a single person on that last page doing all those helpful edits from three IP addresses. And then there's one IP-vandal. So I'd say you're 1:1.

Your inning.


Well, his soul is stuck using 3 Qwest dynamic IPs, for some reason.

I think much of this discussion is premised on what call the "please whisper when you call my wife a whore" approach to managing the risk of defamation either by tucking information away into the shallow grave of edit histories or through more sophisticated means. I have come to see some value in this "whisper" approach especially as my (still limited) understanding of search engines, crawlers, robot.txt, noindex meta-tags and related internet features has increased. Still the question must be addressed: What if a person is still harmed by untrue statements found by persistent would-be employers, customers, life partners, and associates?

I believe there are two possible approaches:

• The website has exercised reasonable care by taking the steps to mitigate the extend that the statements where distributed or made accessible and therefore they are free from any liability, or;
• It is still foreseeable that some people looking for adverse information will exert extra effort and be able to locate the information even if "whispered' and while the website might have wisely limited their exposure by taking steps to "whisper" they still might be found liable depending on the specific circumstances and facts.

Has the law really been tested sufficiently yet anywhere in the world? Here in the UK, for instance, the long-running Demon Internet vs Godfrey case was settled without it going to appeal, so the law is still unclear.

Much of this discussion hinges on the legal ramifications of such articles, which vary depending on where you are, rather than the moral ramifications, which are much more universal.

Kevin

Can't really say I agree with that. What are these "universal moral ramifications" of which you speak? I bet you a pound to a penny we wouldn't agree on what they were, so hardly "universal".

Could someone fix the spelling of "indefinite"?

Thanks,

Jon

I'm talking about our moral responsibility to protect BLP subjects from the harm an article could cause them.

Kevin

Please bear in mind: this is the same Protonk who is
supporting that lovely bastard, Aitias, with his RFA.

While I agree with what I think is your general proposition, I don't agree with the details of what follows from it.

Suppose that an exceptionally flattering BLP encourages its subject to embark on an absurd scheme that ends in disaster. Or that encourages others to support that deluded soul in that scheme? In a country (perhaps just California, I don't know), where anyone who wants to hire a pair of skis has to be stood up against a wall and photographed holding a signed statement saying they understand that skiing can be dangerous, anything is possible.

Exactly.

Many Wikipedians seem to view this in blinkered terms of protecting the project from legal attack. Oblivious to the elephant in the room, which is we've unleashed a monster with no moral responsibility which will have serious negative ramifications on society, if left unchallenged.

I feel that I've fallen into a time warp, to the invention of printing. La plus ca change, la plus c'est la meme chose (couldn't be bothered to look up the ASCII codes for those French characters, so please excuse that). Anyone who seriously believes wikipedia unleashed that monster has no historical context.

This is an interesting point - what may read on the surface as (overly) positive may in fact be negative (to the subject). My feeling is that the BLP rules should refer to all unsourced material, not just that which is overtly negative or controversial. I don't always feel qualified to judge what may or may not harm a BLP subject.

I'm not saying we should ignore a legal aspect, but by following our moral responsibility we probably have little risk of legal action.

Kevin

The answer to me is patently clear. As none of can possibly know what the effect of anything said in a wikipedia BLP might be on its subject, whether what was written is positive or negative, BLPs have no place on wikipedia except for the most obviously notable people like presidents, whose articles ought to be semi-protected anyway.

You've got a lot to learn Malleus.

Where's your BLP? If not on Wikipedia, then on one of the numerous sites that are following in its wake? Sites that lack even WP's hazy notability guidelines?

When you eventually see your real name at the top of google with an accompanying biography open to anonymous people, with no moral responsibility to you, that is riddled with malicious lies about you, viewed by friends, employers, familty etc, and there's nothing you can do about it, then come back and rejoin the conversation.

That's before we even begin to discuss the wider negative impact on governance, democracy, accountability and so on, that Wikipedia provides.




"Giving such an individual the choice not to have an article written about them is an obscene suggestion if your goal is to build a general reference work."

Erik Moeller (username Eloquence), Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

You assume too much Kato, stick to what you know.

If we all stuck to what we already know, how would we ever learn anything new?

Well I assume you've got a lot to learn if you think that highlighting proven problems stemming from Wikipedia is on a par with Medieval misoneism about the Printing Press.

I agree. So somewhere between Barack Obama and Gail Trimble, there is a notability cutoff, but that needs to be defined. There have been several suggestions here about using dead tree sources only for BLP's.

There should also be a speedy deletion criteria for unsourced BLP's, similar to that used for images with no source noted. If it's in the category for more than 7 days, it should go. Surprisingly, previous discussions have resulted in no consensus to change.

Kevin

How did you learn anything new? By telling your teachers they were ignoramuses who had much to learn?

I'd go even further than that. Lots of settlement articles have (usually unsourced) lists of so-called notable people living there. I'd call that an intrusion into personal privacy unless the person is in some way publicly associated with the settlement.

My main method was to ask good questions, including good questions that pushed the envelope of what anyone knew. And then, as necessary, I embarked on original research to answer questions that stumped even the most knowledgeable subject-matter experts.

Perhaps the most important questions to ask are those which probe the current frontiers of knowledge.

And my role models for that practice are historical figures like Socrates, Buddha, Hillel, Gamaliel, Jesus, Becket, Archimedes, Leonardo, Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, Feynman, and a substantial number of lesser known 19th and 20th Century researchers in Mathematics, Cybernetics, and Systems Science.

By the way, Socrates was one of the first great teachers to freely admit he was an ignoramus.

Who told you that? How did they know he was one the first? Because someone else told them? What kind of original research have you conducted into earlier Chinese teachers, for instance?

What Socrates actually said was that the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. Not quite the same thing as saying "I am an ignoramus". I note that you do not appear to share that Socratic view.

The cited remarks from The Apology, as recorded by Plato, is one of the oldest and probably best known example of a great teacher saying something along those lines. In the annals of philosophy, Socrates is notable for having articulated that view.

But I actually prefer the version attributed to Einstein, "If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"

I usually reword that for the benefit of my young colleagues who are just joining us in the research enterprise: "Research is what we do when we don't know what we're doing. We do a lot of research here."

I couldn't tell you when I first stumbled across either the quote from Socrates or the comparable one from Einstein. I've been aware of those quotes for decades. Feynman echoes the same sentiments in his humorous autobiographies.

I'm rather fond of the Chinese philosophers who contributed to Taoism and Zen Buddhism. Perhaps the most apt quote from that tradition is "The Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao." My favorite source for Taoist philosophy is Raymond Smullyan's charming little book, The Tao is Silent (1977). There is also a very nice English translation of 101 Zen Koans in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Paul Reps (1957).

Yeah, well, what's a dead tree source? On the one hand, if the new york times prints an article about someone, are we not allowed to cite the online edition unless someone verifies that the same thing is in the print version?

Er. No, the dead tree standard is about inclusion, not sourcing. The idea is that there must be a printed encyclopedia article to demonstrate notability. A New York Times article would not suffice.

And by "printed encyclopedia" we mean printed general encyclopedia. Where the bio of the living person has to compete for article paper-page space against Atoms and Zebras. If it survives that test, the subject is truely notable enough that "public figure" standards will apply in all jurisdictions.