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Re: Wikipedia?

Alas, Greg, lawsuits, not to mention death threats, are part of the reference publishing game. Some members on this list may have experience with the attempts (long in the past, I am told) by the Church of Scientology to browbeat publishers (including Britannica) about certain articles, with the threat of litigation always looming. Or there was the group threatening Merriam-Webster with a boycott for the inclusion of the word "niggardly" in the dictionary, which was thought to be a racial epithet. That is nothing compared to the trademark group that threatened to tear Merriam down for printing those words in common use that some believed were protected marks. We should not leave out Britannica's map of Kashmir. Pakistan or India? Answer wrong and your books will be embargoed by the customs department. Or have we all forgotten the firestorm surrounding MIT Press a few years ago upon the publication of a book dealing with rape?

It's an unwelcome fact of life that publishing good books and publishing them well is occasionally an act of heroism (not unlike the situation of those librarians who, for example, protect Harry Potter from the enemies of "witchcraft").

Joe Esposito

On 2/23/07, Greg Tananbaum <gtananbaum@gmail.com> wrote:
A fundamental difference between Wikipedia and, say, the
Encyclopedia Britannica is the level of gatekeeping that exists.
I am not aware (though, of course, that does not mean there is
not precedent) of a subject suing a "real" encyclopedia for an
entry that is unflattering at best and libelous at worst (see
below).

Of course, would Fuzzy Zoeller have an entry in Britannica?

Best, Greg

________________________
Greg Tananbaum
gtananbaum@gmail.com
(510) 295-7504


http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197008201

Pro golfer Fuzzy Zoeller filed an anonymous lawsuit against a
Miami law firm for allegedly defamatory edits to his
Wikipedia<http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/defineterm.jhtml?term=Wikipedia&x=&y=>page,
hoping to prevent further injury to his reputation and to protect
his family's privacy.

But Zoeller was quickly unmasked as the "John Doe" plaintiff by online news site The Smoking Gun<http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2007/0222071fuzzy1.html>, which used a search engine<http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197006843>to find the source of the allegedly defamatory material cited in Zoeller's legal filing.

The lawsuit claims edits to Zoeller's Wikipedia profile last December came from a computer <http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/defineterm.jhtml?term=computer&x=&y=> with an IP <http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/defineterm.jhtml?term=IP&x=&y=> address registered by Miami-based law firm Josef Silny & Associates.

The altered profile <http://www.answers.com/topic/fuzzy-zoeller>,
which Zoeller claims is false and libelous, remains online at
Answers.com. The Zoeller entry at Wikipedia appears to have been
purged of the objectionable passages.