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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.
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.
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'
I suspect he isn't half as famous as he thinks he is, and wants to blame Wikipedia for the lack of business opportunities banging down his door.
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 don't think it can be considered opinion, WP advertises itself as an encyclopedia, it goes out of its way to base its claims on citations. I'm a strong supporter of WP and this guys sounds like a "flim-flam man", however that doesn't mean he is wrong and it does appear that at least one editor was hell bent on causing him financial damage. OTOH $10M is a ludicrous exaggeration of any real damages, or it would be were it not happening in the US.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Oh good, I'll just print up a bunch of fliers saying you torture kittens and set fire to orphanages and post them around your home town. Because nobody has heard of you and I'm not a publicly listed company, it will be 'opinion' rather than 'libel'.
I have no idea whether this guy's claims are justified, but neither do you. My liking Wikipedia does not therefore mean that the facts or the law are on the side of Wikipedia.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
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.
" 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
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.
On 7 May, it looked like this.
On 15 March, this is how it looked.
All because of the four people Barry is now suing.
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.
Who is that?
Yank Barry? He's a convicted extortionist who worked for the Mafia in Montreal in the '80s. After being released from prison, he founded a company that sells fake food to (sometimes fake) clients, through which he conned celebrity endorsements by promising to donate food via his fake charities.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/04/15/yank-barry/
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
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.
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.
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.
Actually you're not. That's the whole basis of libel laws. If you spread false or misleading information that could tarnish the reputation of another person you are most definitely not entitled to an opinion as far as the law is concerned.
I'm interested if you still think this would be the case if you were on the verge of a multi-million dollar deal which suddenly fell through because the other party thought that you actually do kill kittens.
See complacency depends only on how much you have to lose. Now what if the lie cost you your reputation, and your job, and damaged your standing with other people?
Doesn't happen? Just look at how peoples lives are absolutely ruined by an accusation of being a sex offender even if they are subsequently found innocent.
To say that your horrible kitten massacre won't come back to hurt you is incredibly naive.
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.
There were no US scientists who believed in the Medeival Warm Period at the time (800 - 1300).
What was more interesting was reading the comments for that article. Out of the 9 comments, one commented on the Nobel Peace Prize, one commented on show business (I didn't really understand the comment). The remaining 7 were scathing about the journalism, used the standard "well what have you done" argument and questioned the journalists motives. Interestingly enough, all 7 users have only made a single comment each. Clearly that article hit a nerve.
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
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.
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.
Kind of like how climate change activists erased the Medieval Warm Period off of Wikipedia a few years ago.
[citation needed].
Here's the current article: Medieval Warm Period. It has a couple of pages of detailed text, a pair of graphs of temperature records, and three photographs of locations or artifacts relevant to the MWP's effect on human history. The article has 41 footnotes, mostly to peer-reviewed journal articles.
Five years ago: 2009 version. A little over a page, one graph, one photo. 25 footnotes.
For fun, ten years ago: 2004 version. Six paragraphs (three of which are a single sentence). Zero figures, zero photographs. Just 4 inline references.
Scrolling through the article's editing history I don't find any period where anyone "erased" the MWP, aside from some short-lived vandalism. At no point is there any intimation in the article that the MWP didn't occur or was otherwise not a real thing. The article appears to have grown steadily in length, quality, and detail over the last decade, but its central points appear to have remained essentially unchanged. Your comment, however, appears quite typical of climate change deniers--boldly stating things that are patently untrue in order to gain the emotional support of people who don't fact-check you, while wasting the time of the people who do.
~Idarubicin
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.”