[WikiEN-l] Libel chill (original) (raw)

Jimmy Wales jwales at wikia.com
Fri Apr 21 21:17:22 UTC 2006

Steve Bennett wrote:

On 21/04/06, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:

First of all, a neutral encyclopedia article is not an unrestrained free speech zone, and I think the rhetoric of someone's freedom of speech being chilled is out of place to begin with. Second of all, it is entirely consistent with our mission to seek to "chill" content that is decidedly non-neutral and in most cases fails to provide verifiable, reputable sources for its assertions besides. Finally, in terms of I would be curious to know - not necessarily with examples - whether we have had legal threats related to articles that did meet WP:V. That is, we published something which was by all accounts true, and had verifiable sources to back it up - and yet was deemed offensive by some miffed party.

To my knowledge, no. Of course some people complain excessively, and we do get a fair number of frivolous complaints. But if after some really hardcore scrutiny (the purpose of the WP:OFFICE policy is to give us as a community time to do that) we find the complaints frivolous, and someone still wants to sue us, we will not back down.

NPOV, as I have always said, is non-negotiable.

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