Hello In a recent blog post *A German court forced us to remove part of a Wikipedia article’s ‘history.’ Here’s what that means* at https://wikimediafoundation.org/2019/04/11/a-german-court-forced-us-to-remove-part-of-a-wikipedia-articles-history-heres-what-that-means/ Jacob Rogers and Alison Davenport write
> A German court ruled in September of last year that the content was in fact defamatory, largely because the source in question had been taken offline—what we call “link rot.” This is not correct, and suggests that the lessons of this affair have not been fully taken on board by WMF Legal, and that gives rise to the risk that they WMF may be giving bad advice to volunteers, leaving them -- and the Foundation of course -- exposed to further legal claims. The first reason that the court found that the content was defamatory was that it was both damaging to Prof, Weibel's reputation and, importantly, *false*. The statements relied were irresponsible media speculation. The second reason was that under German law the definition of a reliable source is significantly more restrictive than that commonly held by Wikipedians. The third reason was that the WMF had failed to respond correctly, in terms of German law, to Prof. Weibel's complaint. None of these have anything to do with "link rot". If volunteers are left with the impression that they are somehow safe from libel action in Germany provided that links are kept up to date, then that is dangerously misleading. This error is compinded by the statement > it does not impose any new editorial standards on individual Wikipedia contributors which is incorrect: as noted, the definition of a reliable source in the applicable law is different from Wikipedia's editorial standards. If the WMF is claiming to give legal advice to volunteers, it needs to ensure that the advice it gives is correct. JPS > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
