Wikipedia:Don't overlook legal threats

The scenario

“ Bob, you really ought to take a look at Wikipedia. Those vile people have a truly awful article on you. I’d call my lawyer. ”

After receiving his cousin's call, Bob Jones, a semi-famous sportsman, looks up his entry on Wikipedia – a website he's never really visited before. To his horror he reads a ghastly article – either full of lies or a one-sided hatchet job spinning its sources to make him read like a dangerous criminal. (Actually, unbeknownst to him, the article was anonymously written by his ... ex-lover, disgruntled ex-employee, old school-bully, business rival, dangerous stalker etc. – but hey, they let anyone edit here!)

Furious, Bob is about to call his attorney in Trenton, when he sees the "anyone can edit" tagline. He presses the edit tab and, thinking "hey, maybe I can sort this?", he blanks the libellous piece of spite. "Phew, now how do I complain to a moderator?"

Then, something strange happens. A yellow bar appears, and there's some official-looking notice, on something called his "talk page", that's accusing him of wanton vandalism and spitting threats at him. What the hell is going on? Bob returns to the article and finds to his horror that "Wikipedia" has restored the libel. Now he's angry and unsure how to communicate the seriousness of this to the site, so he blanks the article again, leaving what he views as a clear but polite note: "Please do not replace this page. It contains legally actionable material. If it is replaced again, I will need to take legal action".

User:Headhunter409

Meanwhile, Colin Gordon aka User:Headhunter409, from Blackacre in Auchterturra, is a high school student (or maybe a retired mechanic). He likes editing, but what he really wants to do is be noticed as a good guy on project work – anti-vandalism, new page patrol – and his eye's really on being a Wikipedia administrator. He might be using automated tools to do more admin-type stuff, faster, and watching his edit count climbing. Before a late breakfast that morning he's doing a spot of vandal slaying – when he stumbles first across the blanking (revert and warn) and then Mr Jones' message. "No legal threats! I’ll just pop to the administrators' noticeboard and issue an All points bulletin to get an immediate block done." Checking off one more good judgement to cite at his RFA, he heads off, feeling good.

Switch back to Bob Jones. Bob's in a hell of a mess, and it's not his fault. He's officially blocked from editing as a Bad Editor, whilst his insane stalker is free to add more libels to the article. Bob has no idea why "Wikipedia" wants to do this to him – why don't they think about the effect their articles have? Why do they help someone wreck his life, then make it impossible to fix? His expensive lawyer is about to interrupt Cary Bass's morning's work at the Wikimedia Foundation.

One thing you can be sure of: Bob and Cary's disastrously bad day won't be noted in Headhunter409's Request for adminship – in fact, Colin may never realize how much of a problem his action led to, for Wikipedia and for Bob.

The message

• Don't be a DOLT – stop and think.
• Always check basic facts before making assumptions
• Never unblank biographies without asking why the IP might be blanking it. Remember, you could be personally responsible for re-publishing libellous content. Not good.
• When a legal threat is made, step back and ask "why?" Maybe there's an obvious reason, and you could help the victim rather than increase their woes. How would you feel if it were you?
• Don't let policies like no vandalism and no legal threats lead to your editing cluelessly and adversely affecting some innocent person's life by your thoughtless action.
• Wikipedia has real life consequences; Wikipedia is not a video game.

Jimmy Wales on the same

In August 2006, Jimbo stated:

“ There's a sort of typical pattern where I've seen this happen over and over and over. Somebody, they go to an article and they see something they don't like in it so they blank the article. Right. So somebody warns them, and then they blank again and they get blocked. Right. Then they make a legal threat and they really get blocked. And it's just like a totally bad experience for that person, when in fact, they may have been right in the first place. Or maybe they weren't right. maybe they just didn't like what we wrote about them, but still, we didn't handle it well ... And the few people who are still sort of in the old days, saying, "Well, you know, it's a wiki, why don't we just... ", yeah, they're sort of falling by the wayside, because lots of people are saying actually, we have a really serious responsibility to get things right. ”

And in September 2008, further stated:

“ The [No Legal Threats] policy is a good policy, overall, but there is a very unfortunate sequence of events that happens far too often. A BLP attack victim sees something horrible in Wikipedia, and I think we can all acknowledge that they have no moral responsibility to become Wikipedians to fix it. Some of them react in ways that we, as Wikipedians who favor reasoned discourse over threats, find inappropriate. Sure, and why not? They are being unfairly attacked and they are hurt and angry and they have no idea what our rules are. That's not their fault. Banning them on the spot for a legal threat is not a very helpful response, usually. ”

And in November 2008:

“ I see that a user was blocked for blanking this article, and I do understand why page blanking is generally discouraged. However, I must say, this article has no references and the template at the top says – correctly – that "Unsourced or poorly sourced material about living persons must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (April 2008)". We can't have it both ways: do we want to punish people for helping us to deal with the serious problem of BLPs) ”

See also

• Wikipedia:Wikipedia is in the real world
• Wikipedia:No legal threats
• Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons