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Wikipedia Editors Hit With $10 Million Defamation Suit
New submitter Andreas Kolbe writes: "Businessman, philanthropist and musician Yank Barry and the Global Village Champions Foundation are suing four Wikipedia editors for defamation, claiming they have maliciously conspired to keep Barry's Wikipedia biography unduly negative. The Daily Dot article includes a copy of the legal brief and quotes Barry as saying, "My page was so ridiculously false and made me sound like a terrible person and people believed it causing deals to fall through. I finally had enough."
No, not at all.
It was informative while it lasted.
I'm not sure about the English version, but the German version about Falun Gong / Falun Dafa contains a lot of negative lies, spread by the CCP. Every time someone corrects it, someone from china will change it back. At the end they didn't allow any changes anymore, and put half the truth and half the lies in it. Unfortunately a lot of people believe what is written in those articles. I can imagine this happening to a lot of subjects.
And why does he matter?
Seriously, has anyone here even heard about this guy before today? Yank Barry sounds more like an invitation to some ribbing than a name...
And, and here's the next question, how could this lawsuit fly? Anything short of outright libel is pretty much in the "don't care" area. Last time I checked Wikipedia was a privately owned entity. So, if push comes to shove, whatever is expressed there is an opinion. And last time I checked you're entitled to one in the US, and also to saying it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I know that defamation suits can be filed (and sometimes even won) even if the information being published is true (if it's false, then one could further sue for libel) but it's my understanding that in the case where the published information is true, the onus is on the person who is suing to show that the *intent* of the publishers was to actually defame them... which of course is quite difficult to do in court. They would have to, using factual evidence, show how it was somehow considerably more probable that there was actually any malicious intent on the publisher's part than any claim the publisher the might make to contrary being true. Unless the publishers actually confess that this is the case, this will not be easy... no matter how good their lawyers are.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Because to find about him, I'd naturally go to his Wiki page, which he alleges paints a wrong picture of him. I don't know anything about this person, so it would be good to hear from experienced commentators what the fuss is all about.
Of why all the lawyers should be shot. And then a stake to their heart, and heads cut, just in case...
Reading the Wikipedia article, it doesn't seem all that negative.
There are some negative details in there, but these are simple facts, stated in a short and factual manner.
If you don't want people to know of your extortion practices, then either don't extort people or do a better job at it so you don't get convicted for it in a public court.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Obvious campaign slogan for his pursuit: "Yank Barry from Wikipedia!"
I know Yank Barry well; he can't be trusted.
Obvious campaign slogan for his pursuit: "Yank Barry from Wikipedia!"
Don't quit your day job... unless you're a comedian!
lucm, indeed.
In principle, I can imagine that wilfully wrong wikipedia information can ruin someone's business and career opportunities, and in that case a defamation suit seems appropriate, very similar to spreading defamation through other publication channels. Wikipedia, as much as I love it, should not be above the standards by which books or magazines are judged.
However, in this case, if the negative information checks out true (and there are plenty of references), such as the convictions he received, then there is no good reason for him to sue. If he weren't convicted, it would not be in the article. As others have mentioned he should rather look up "Streisand Effect" before sueing.
In 1982, Barry was convicted of extortion from and conspiracy against John Royden McConnell, and served 10 months of a 6-year prison term.[4][23]
In a 1982 civil case, a separate court ruled that Barry had extorted money from McConnell in record company dealings, requiring a financial award of C$285,000.[10] In 1987 he declared bankruptcy, voiding the award.[24][1] Barry said in an October 2013 Larry King interview that he had been a cocaine-addicted, twenty-something rocker at the time and credited the extortion conviction for changing his personal life.[25]
In 1998, Barry was indicted on corruption charges related to a VitaPro contract worth US$34 million with the Texas prisons.[26][27] In 1999, the Texas Supreme Court ruled the VitaPro contract with the Texas prisons was invalid.[28] After a trial in 2001, he was initially declared guilty, but the verdict was thrown out by U.S district court judge and a new trial was ordered in 2007.[26] He was then acquitted in 2008 after a bench retrial.[26] Barry said the charges were politically motivated.[24][27]
" I made a deal with God that whatever I save in tax, I give to kids.”[16]" I nearly chocked when I read that.
It said "windows 98 or better" so I installed Linux
So, are you saying that the Wikipedia article on Metal Alloys is all Lies too? Say it ain't so...
Once again......
That's what it looks like today -- after months of editwarring, followed by 2+ weeks of people trying to "fix" it, because of the bad publicity brought by the lawsuit.
Use the "History" tab yourself. It was an ugly war, and no one else noticed it until Barry made legal threats.
And oh, BTW, Wikipediocracy people discovered that a couple of the guys trying to attack Barry had also been doing COI editing of other Wikipedia articles. In addition, UC Berkeley's "official Wikipedian-In-Residence" Kevin Gorman has been taunting Barry on Twitter. All petty, small-minded bullshit. But typical Wikipedia.
He's suing the editors, the people who wrote the stuff. A few years back, people would have sued wikipedia for showing the page, the hosting company for hosting the page, the company that maintain the DNS record for WIkipedia and Dell (or whoever) for running the site on their servers.
Not really news.
Well, well, well, I don't suppose you're really Lee "Camembert" Pilich, one of Wikipedia's earliest administrators and arbitrators, are you?
If so, why did you more-or-less give up on Wikipedia in 2010? Did you finally realize that Jimbo Wales wasn't an "Internet Hero" or some bullshit like that, and that he had installed some very dishonest people in the admin ranks, and thence at the WMF? When did it dawn upon you that Wikipedia was declining?
Maybe he should move to Europe and ask Google to remove his wikipedia entry from the search results (Right to be forgotten)
http://Anveto.com - Web Design, SEO, Marketing, Analytics & Security
Wikipedia is a MMORPG where the guy with most free time always wins. Anybody who takes it seriously is a victim of either ignorance or zeal.
I have given up contributing to Wikipedia. My contributions are invariably reversed by an editor. Collectively, editors seem to spend their time annotating pages with [who?], [reference needed], etc, but then they revert any attempt to fill in the missing information.
I'm really curious if this guy is a legitimate businessman with a valid suit or some shady character trying to whitewash his reputation.
*goes to check his bio on Wikipedia*
Whoa! That guy looks pretty shady! The lawsuit must be a scam!!
I stole this Sig
You do know that he was acquitted on appeal in 2005 don't you? Or did you read the WP page and get a false impression. There maybe 100 links to references about legal issues, but if you keep deleting the final outcome ...
Yank Barry is a fucking asshole, and the "Global Village Champions Foundation" is a bunch of retarded morons.
You may quote this entry on Wikipedia in case you need a citation.
It's not free time. It's just that these organizations already have a PR department.
If Wikipedia starts to generate what they consider bad publicity it becomes a priority and suddenly they have several 8 hour/day positions available to maintain the page.
In between the forum posting and Wikipedia editing they can continue to write press releases and other things that doesn't require immediate response.
Problem is, Wikipedia isn't trying to portray the truth. Instead, it just repeats what "credible sources" report. So if this was 1984 and all the sources reported 2+2=5, Wikipedia would have no choice but to do the same, citing the sources, no matter how obvious it is that it's wrong. Fortunately though, the Western world generally has freedom of the press, so going by credible sources generally comes pretty close to the truth.
Of course, determining which sources are credible is a challenge, especially on controversial issues like global warming or for things like urban myths that are often reported by "credible" sources without doing research.
Seems appropriate.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
someone kill wikipedia with fire i've had it with whiteguy nerds having a monopoly over information f### wikipedia!!!
The only people with enough time to "win" at Wikipedia are zealots and trolls. Anyone well intentioned just gets fed up after the 5th revert and bout of rule lawyering.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"Windows NT and its successors .. were not .. designed with Internet security .."
Non-profits are being used more and more as to either promote for-profit causes or enrich non-profit executives. This is why major non-profits and college presidents are earning million dollar plus compensation. Global Village Champions sounds like a perfect example of this. Separately, Yank Barry is a convict who did prison time for extortion, now he's trying to use his muscle on Wiki volunteers. How pretty of a picture does he expect?
So totally true. But once you allow that 99% of modern life is jumping off, I'm not sure what you're griping about.
Just as one comparison, take every organization prominent enough to have it's own article in en.Wikipedia, go to their own websites (the vast majority will have one) and scrape all of the "about us" web pages these organizations authored about themselves, and imagine these as a collective "About Us"-apedia.
This "About Us"-apedia would make MySpace's worst year look like an exercise in design consistency. I for one can live without the metric fuckton of Flash-based incoherence as my standard point of departure on the agencies of the world.
It seems to me that all the people who hated Wikipedia on first sight share an underlying belief in knowledge as an authority network. The reason Wikipedia succeeded is that knowledge isn't what we thought it was. For the vast majority of purposes, authority is a boundary condition, not the thing itself.
The first step in assimilating a new body of knowledge is to survey the field's lexicon: What words are used and roughly how are they linked together? This cognitive process takes place long before factual assertions amount to a hill of beans. When the facts do begin to matter, most smart people are well aware that in this world we're all fed baloney 24 hours a day. Wikipedia is one of the places where it becomes especially clear how the baloney is made. That doesn't make it worse baloney than Superbowl Sunday—America's national slick-baloney celebration day. Is iOS somehow less Orwellian than the IBM PC? So we were told through a non-linguistic medium.
On Wikipedia, when I spot baloney, I click the magic button called "History" where I scan for edit wars and substantial discards. For the vast majority of articles, it's all there in plain view. The mythical, Orwellian-smashing parentage of iOS is harder to trace.
In the upcoming era of Deep Watson, those Wikipedia crumb trails of sturm und churn will suddenly become interesting resources to expose to automated data mining. Perhaps then the present surface form of the articles will begin to fade in importance. There's nothing stopping this, except for the will to go there, which is depressingly thin in the general public for the 99% of the time they're merely jumping off.
The glyph 5 could just as easily (and arbitrarily) be used to represent the value that is 2+2. It would be no more wrong than 4. It would only be wrong if 1+1=2 but 1+1+1+1 didn't equal 5.
Bingo.
I remember once working on a Wiki article about a film that was increasingly in depth and cited various written original scorches, interviews et cetera. A lot of work went into it. One day a kid replaced it all with his undergraduate essay.
The whole thing.
Of course we tried a revert but his buddies —all students — have a lot more time to spend on this than others did so naturally they "won". The fanboys basically win at Wikipedia and an MMORPG is an excellent way of summarizing it.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Willingness to employ sock/meat puppets seems to be the main one.
An April 15, 2012 National Post newspaper article by Joe O'Connor:
The world according to Yank: Montrealer with checkered past gets Nobel nod, or does he?
Mr. Barry is never far from the spotlight. He was the focus of a 4,000-word investigative report by the Montreal Gazette in October 1998.
The front page article delved into Global Village Market, a company through which he was selling VitaPro, and one he marketed to potential investors with the help of the motto: “doing well by doing good.”
Mr. Barry’s pitch, backed by some celebrity punch, reportedly sold investors on the notion that the more money the company made the more food he would distribute to the needy.
Celine Dion was one of the celebrities involved. She was led to believe that she was endorsing a humanitarian mission to Africa led by Mr. Ali, and engineered by Yank Barry. She taped a message trumpeting her support for a purely philanthropic cause. Said message, in audiotape form was then, unbeknownst to Ms. Dion, reportedly used by Mr. Barry as part of his promotional material selling investment units in Global Village Market, a for-profit business.
Cracks appeared early in the enterprise. Promises of philanthropy dried up. Investors lost everything and several lodged complaints against Mr. Barry with the Quebec Securities Commission. The securities regulator did not sanction Mr. Barry, though the entire episode lingers as a sore spot for many, including Celine Dion.
Her image still appears on the Global Village Champions Foundation website, a presence that irks Paul-Andre Martel, the Montreal lawyer representing the famous singer and husband, Rene Angelil.
“My clients have absolutely no involvement with Mr. Barry or his organization,” Mr. Martel said. “What we think is that Mr. Barry is using the name and the fame of people that have spent time with Mr. Ali over the years.”
Hello Global Village, your idiot is missing. This should be an open and shut case, either he did all those crimes and shady behaviours or he didn't.
Is it completely a coincidence that Wikipedia is doing another fundraising drive right now?
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
It generally isn't a positive indication of how wholesome and wonderful a person you are when you sue one of the greatest achievements of the internet. If twitter, facebook, yelp, and even slashdot went away, there would be a loss but the loss of Wikipedia would be an epic loss for the internet.
Also it is not the threat of a win that is a problem but Wikipedia's budget could be trashed by even just fighting a suit like this. So I hope that this guy gets horrifically Barbara Streisand'd to show that the cost to his reputation for suing Wikipedia will far exceed whatever gains he hopes to have.
Citation needed.
You should have called their mommies and told them they were seen out partying on a school night.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
He filed a lawsuit before to try to shut someone up and lost (in Canada even). He's trying to hide his conviction and trying to show off all his nominations for Nobel Peace Prize (which can't be independently confirmed). Just another whitewash attempt. {Citation Needed}, which is the same thing as actual facts these days. Yeah, I read the ANI postings about him before and when this was filed.
If this issue had been one of Lible, then a lawsuit of $1.00, not $10Million would raise eye brows. Instead we have a person trying to make bank on the flimsyest of social issues.
[Citation needed]
No seriously post a link to this wiki page. I have never edited wikipedia myself and I'm curious to see an example of the infamous editing wars there.
Why don't you spend the time to publish your article in an academic journal instead, where it will be peer reviewed and respected. If mass public appeal is your thing, then publish it in your own blog. Sorry if I sound prescriptive.
Wikipedia is a MMORPG where the guy with most free time always wins. Anybody who takes it seriously is a victim of either ignorance or zeal.
Well, duh.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
Yank Barry has been a writer, composer, publisher, member of ASCAP since 1971 and a member of NARAS, CARAS and American Federation of Musicians. He now spends his time trying to use these past incidentals to rip people off and he's surprisingly clever though surprisingly stupid at the same time. So let us talk and prove about Yank Barry. Yank Barry was convicted of extorting money from his very partner through a sham in the late 80’s. And he even tried to have that judgment against him over-turned by introducing on appeal that his floushie girl-friend of the time had winked at the judge during trial: Yvette, gonna wear a short-shirt and spread your legs in court, we’ve seen Mohammed Ali!? He met Sidney Lallouz in prison and therein developed a system of defrauding the Cdn. Federal government through their Small Business Loan Program. That Program allows a bank to draw on federal guarantees to support defaulting business loans. He conspired with Denis Faubert, a “bouncing” branch manager of the National Bank of Canada and paid Faubert 5% of the value of the illicit cash proceeds of bogus loans put through by the Barry/Faubert combo from fraudulent SBL clients he generated in the early 90’s. Barry would take a 5-7.5% as well. I would sometimes count the cash. It was a very simple system, a borrower would be approached by a front-man for Barry, Batista who he met in a strip club and later Bernard May, to bring in a fraud client who wanted to make money illegally. The fraudulent borrower would put up the cash and a business plan would be composed to make sure the paper work was in order for the bank files and submitted to Faubert with a cash payment and the loan would be extended to the borrower. The borrower would then get his friends to supply bogus invoices to support the loan extensions whereby the friend, third line down, would not remit the sales tax payments, that would be his payment for the bogus invoice, and cash the bank cheque and remit the cash to the borrower, who would later default on the loan, and the bank would then, per the system, call on the federal guarantee. That way the National Bank would not lose almost any of its money. The set-up of Vitapro was almost exclusively financed in such a way with fraudulent invoices with cash-back to Barry (either personally or on the books as company loans), before and as I was there: fraudulent invoice suppliers included Yvette Findley, his to-be wife, Ben Myers, his derelict former bookkeeper, Rubin Fogel his partner in Vitapro who supplied fictitious invoices all the way along, and there were others – sometimes the amounts would come back as “loans” booked on Vitapro’s/YB Productions books, sometimes exclusively as cash directly into Barry’s pocket to be put into the bare-bones company that had no sales to speak of. (Until Barry decided he was going to bribe Andy Collins of the TDCJ using an off-shore bank account with those proceeds of crime). The purported supplier, the purported borrower, the front-man(men), Barry and Faubert would make their illegal cash on a federal guarantee: now when you read about his father’s and brother’s loss of life in his younger years, think about the doctors’ salaries he ripped off. I would write the business plans and no trace was ever to be, initially, made to the Barry/Faubert combo by having a front-man being imposed. That is why in 1993 Barry’s tax returns do not show any income from his fraudulent business business, why there are no cancelled cheques from his fraudulent SBL client payments. Said clients included that burger joint on the SE corner of Rachel and St. Laurent in Montreal, Donald Picard of Evo Design in Montreal, Claude De Fazio of Satellite Specialist, Edward Shum, Barry’s own company created to fabricate a music track for a worn-out artist named Gary US Bonds,, Rubin Fogel of Rubin Fogel Productions and finally Sidney Lallouz of Montreal. Now Yank, don’t you have something to look forward to as you are crushed from al
cited various written original scorches
Was the movie Fahrenheit 451?
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
If that's what the definition of if is.
Ba-da-bump
I'll be here always.
-AC
He'll lose this suit and in the end some of his money will transfer to lawyers. That's not ideal but it's better than this douchebag from keeping it. The lawyers have a small chance of being good people.
Except he didn't mention you at all.
His post referred to some asswipe "thegarbs".
Since you aren't smart enough or don't have the attention to detail to even note that I doubt the rest of your commentary is worthwhile. The law is a very precise thing, my friend.
BTW you can sue anyone for just about anything. Having the suit accepted by a court and put on the calendar, and winning are entirely different from filing a lawsuit.
Never heard of him before this, but he sure sounds like a dick if he's suing Wikipedia.
Well, duh.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
I dare you to show an actual case of this happening where the "higher level" editor is not already under some sort of substantial ArbCom restriction or had it in the recent past.
Seriously.
No doubt some new contributors are discouraged from participation by overzealous editors, but abuse should be reported and it is usually dealt with rather harshly when pointed out.
This should also not be an excuse for not participating on Wikipedia with bona fide edits with new information. I would recommend avoiding popular articles (like George W. Bush or Barack Obama), as a new user mainly because of the churn rate on those articles, but irresponsible behavior by bullies is just that and can be dealt with. I wouldn't mind dealing with a specific example myself.
Finally! There's a bunch of wiki nazis who run wikipedia, as I've tried edits on wiki which summarily get removed, over and over again, so it's nice to see someone with the pockets deep enough to reinforce their change and respect of the concept of group collaboration!
It would be an "epic win" if you could comprehend that "Wikipedia" isn't being sued in this case. Several editors of the site who were using it as a gleeful attack mechanism are being sued. Wikipedia, that "greatest achievement" of yours (baffling how human beings could possibly think that) is quite safe. Keep donating your money to the Wikimedia Foundation, too... since they only manage to spend on program services 54 cents of every dollar received.
Greate pick Soulskill... a real yawner.
Break it at your own risk Yank Berry, you asshole
If someone sued me for defamation as a Wikipedia editor I'd just distort the article about the court case to make them and the judge look like ogres. That would fix them!
Thank you, God! At long last someone has the time and money to stand up to the terrorism of the Wikipedia nerd squad. So now to break out the champagne and celebrate this awesome news, and then I shall go and donate to his organisation. Fantastic news and so, so, so long in finally coming.
Love without logic is insanity. And vice versa.
There's the problem right there. You are supposed to target the believers. They are the ones at fault and should be sanctioned.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
1 million Slashdot readers go and peruse the diffs for shits and giggles.
Seems to me Wikipedia is edited by children, biased spiteful children. They'll do a "Speedy Deletion" on you if they simply don't like the person or entity you're writing about, despite having valid references and significant information.
They also "vandalize" in areas they think most Wikipedia officials may not notice.
Wiki claims there are no designated "editors" or "monitors" in the Wikipedia site. But you just try to add a new article or edit an existing one... At least a couple editors (who were watching) will jump all over you, practically call you names, change your article around (a lot), then even threaten you that you'd "better not violate the site's protocol" again or you'll be banned from making contributions. This has happened to me more than once. Note: My contributions were right on point an inoffensive in every way. (Then they dare to ask us for donations!)
i wish Yank Barry and the Global Village Champions Foundation success in the suit...