QUOTE(Doc glasgow @ Mon 26th April 2010, 10:44pm)
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A lawsuit against an individual wikipedian, or an admin, would also have a chilling effect. Indeed even an unsuccessful one would make a lot of Wikipedians nervous. Do I really want a hobby that could get me having to defend myself in court?
There have been at least two lawsuits against individual Wikipedians.
I am unable to find any recent coverage of the Grebner suit. As for the Livingston suit, it seems it was dropped after the editor responsible was identified, and the vandalism stopped:
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... the very nature of Wikipedia allows libelers to repeatedly repost their libel even after it has been corrected. For example, last year actor Ron Livingston discovered that a malicious Wikipedia editor had posted that the star of the TV hit Office Space was gay. Every time the actor's representatives corrected the falsehood, the libeler reposted it—time and time again. In December 2009, a fed-up Livingston finally sued the anonymous poster as a “John Doe†for libel. With court-granted discovery powers, Livingston's strategy was to seek the identity of the anonymous person and stop him. Using a forensic computer expert, Livingston's attorney was indeed able to identify the culprit, the attorney explained in an interview with this writer. The conduct stopped and the suit was recently dropped. Although it was widely reported that Livingston sued Wikipedia itself, that information was incorrect. In fact, the actor only sued a “John Doe,†that is, the individual poster. Livingston's legal strategy brings out an important feature of Wikipedia's seeming invincibility to lawsuits [...]
Source: Wikipedia - The Dumbing Down of World KnowledgeIs anyone familiar with the author of this article?
QUOTE
Edwin Black is the award-winnng author of "Internal Combustion,"The Plan - How to Rescue Society the Day Before the Oil Stops," "IBM and the Holocaust," and the publisher of TheCuttingEdgeNews.com. Edwin is also a frequent contributor to The Auto Channel.