It seems that golf legend Fuzzy Zoeller is suing an unnamed Wikipedia editor -- and the law firm that gave him internet access -- for making defamatory edits to his article on Wikipedia. Don't bother looking: the defamatory content, along with all sorts of other stuff, has been aggressively purged from the article -- but are graciously repeated for anyone who cares to look in the lawsuit itself, and are also conveniently provided for your examination by the Naples News.
I'm hoping that this lawsuit helps to remind people that Wikipedia is not a game: these are articles about real people with real lives and people really do need to be more careful about them. Perhaps there will also be more of an incentive to get the long-awaited stable versions now, although ironically Wikimedia's immunity from suit under the CDA definitely dramatically reduces the Foundation's incentive to actually make this feature exist.
I still have to wonder if someone will eventually successfully argue that the Foundation is willfully negligent in failing to provide this feature. It's not clear to me that a prosecution for willful negligence would survive CDA immunity, but the risk of one would certainly provide what appears to be a much-needed incentive for the Foundation to actually do something about the current sordid state of affairs....
Thursday, February 22, 2007
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Stable versions, WYSIWYG, SUL... all features worth exploring, I think. The technical process of SV doesn't seem tooooo complicated -- mostly, I think it's policy/process concerns standing in the way.
ReplyDeleteEspecially, the issue of who gets to determine which view is "stable"? If it were up to me, I'd say we may as well make it another permission on par with the ability to move pages: given to everyone as a matter of course, after some small wait. The particular threshold is less interesting, to me. Page protection could, instead of preventing editing, restrict the ability to set stable versions to particular usergroups.
On the other hand, the ability to see one's changes reflected instantly has its attraction in drawing in new users. Do you figure SV should/would be implemented on all articles, or some narrower focus? Perhaps only those with problems, or only those with possible BLP concerns.
An interesting discussion, I think.