Citizendium Blog

In a case that could have a huge impact on the legal situation of online collaborative communities–including the Citizendium–golf pro Fuzzy Zoeller is suing the company with the IP address that showed up when an anonymous Wikipedia contributor defamed him.

An uncomfortably strong argument can be made that Zoeller deserves legal relief if he has been defamed.  Wikipedia’s reach is now enormous, and if indeed it has gained a reputation, whether deserved or not, as a source of reasonably reliable information, and it defames someone for any significant length of time, such defamation can do very real harm to a person’s reputation.  Some of Wikipedia’s more irrational defenders will wish to deny this.  But no matter how much you love Wikipedia, you cannot credibly deny that Wikipedia is capable of very real and very harmful defamation.

 As time goes on, Jimmy Wales’ standard reply, summed up here–

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales declined to comment on the suit. But he said Wikipedia is no different from any Internet message board — meaning objectionable comments have to be posted before they can be removed.

–becomes less and less plausible.  Wikipedia obviously is not just like “any Internet message board,” if it ever was.  Wikipedia articles are collectively written summations of purported knowledge on topics.  Articles that contain defamatory remarks are not “objectionable comments” on a “message board”; they are presented to the world and typically accepted as fact, which is something Jimmy himself encourages by saying, as he does, that Wikipedia is actually pretty reliable.

Nobody likes this situation, in which this fantastically productive project can effectively do character assassination; nobody wants this situation; but Wikipedia is in it.  Ethically, and probably legally, Wikipedia’s managers must face up to it, because the injustice the current situation perpetrates is completely and obviously intolerable.

It is reprehensible, moreover, to react to this situation lackadaisically, regarding false claims that are personally and professionally damaging as in effect “collateral damage” that society must bear as the price of having such a wonderful project as Wikipedia.  That reaction is reprehensible because it assumes that Wikipedia’s managers cannot improve the way that it deals with this sort of problem.  They could, without completely breaking its system; but they choose not to.

The Citizendium, so far, has few if any articles about living persons among its 1000+ articles in development.  When we do start adding such articles, they will come under the management of our Topic Informant Workgroup (see this blog post for more).  Furthermore, we will have a zero tolerance policy toward any even possibly defamatory remarks: to say something that might tend to impugn someone’s reputation, even if true, will require extremely good documentation.  If no such documentation is offered, or if it does not check out, the person who makes such claims will be “escorted to the door.”  We simply won’t tolerate it.