Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 23:11, 2 May 2011

Discuss this story

This is actually kind of garbled - "However, Misplaced Pages's servers are based in the United States, meaning they cannot be held liable for publishing content which breaks the terms of a superinjuction.". First, in terms of the sentence itself, rarely are servers held liable :-). I think you're trying to say that Wikimedia is a US-based foundation, with no assets in the UK, so no UK court injunction could easily be enforced on it. The question of liability under UK law for user-generated content is another issue. Also, you might want to mention Kidnapping of David Rohde#Role_of_Wikipedia, where information was successfully suppressed from Misplaced Pages by collaboration -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 08:40, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the note about the servers, it has been fixed (I assume you were aware that you were commenting about a draft version before publication). I didn't quite understand why you put "successfully" in italics - the suppression of the injunctions was "succesful" in a similar sense as in the Rohde case, as noted in the article. (Admittedly, the subtitle may be a bit brief regarding that aspect.)

Regards, HaeB (talk) 22:36, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I was aware I was commenting about a draft - I thought this was the best place to put the comment, so someone might correct the problem before final release. If there's a better place to put such comments, what is it? (P.S. - there's also many misspellings as "injuction"). I stressed "successfully" about the David Rohde case because it still amazes me. The received wisdom about such situations is That Cannot Happen. That all such attempts fail, rebounding to the extreme embarrassment and humiliation of the would-be imprisoner of information (Cry Streisand Effect! And slip the mobs of net.). But it didn't work out that way. You only see the unsuccessful ones, and rarely hear about what you didn't hear about. So it's very much a touchstone for me on that topic. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 23:03, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Has this censorship of information in these articles been discussed and approved by the community or are these admins acting unilaterally because of feared reprisal from a country that really can't do anything against Misplaced Pages itself? Silverseren 22:43, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

I believe there have been strong arguments against using Superinjuctions as sole justification for removing content, but the BLP concerns about tabloidy gossip were sufficient to justify removal on several occasions. At least, that is what I hope is going on. Ocaasi 22:57, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

I find the possibility of it being just gossip is diminished by the fact that superinjunctions were taken out at all. Most of the time, that seems to be claiming guilt in regards to the incident. But, regardless, if it was just normal tabloid stuff, I don't believe that that type of info is normally revdeleted unless it is overly defamatory, which this isn't necessarily. Do the articles at least say that the people took out superinjunctions? Because that would be highly relevant and not gossip. I'm going to go check now and, if they don't, i'm going to add that in. Silverseren 23:11, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

I was the spokesman who was sort-of-quoted by the Telegraph. I chatted to the journalist for about half an hour covering just about every aspect of this rather complex issue (I did emphasise that we don't do things from legal threat, but because we're trying to actually do the right thing); what ran was three disjoint sentences apparently from his notes, tacked on the end. Ah well. The story was then copied by every other paper in the country, without anyone bothering to call and even get a new quote (they just copied it from the Telegraph). I credit it to last week being one of the most paralysingly slow April news weeks in the UK that I can remember - David Gerard (talk) 23:07, 2 May 2011 (UTC)