The point is that Wikimedia is building a war chest, not that they're overspending on salaries (though arguably they have hired a lot of overpaid developers, given what they've managed to actually produce). Jimbo Wales isn't paid directly by Wikimedia, he gets his money on the back-end as a paid public speaker and CEO of Wikia, which benefits somewhat from Wikipedia brand recognition.
The higher Wikimedia salaries are published in tax returns, and they're mostly in line with other Silicon Valley non-profits, but again, that's not the issue here. The issue is they're fundraising as if they're on their last financial legs, when in fact they're not even close to that point - if anything, just the opposite. If they minimized their staff and moved to a cheaper location, they could survive for 10-15 years without another dime and hardly anyone would notice a thing.
The more commonly-used term for what the person referred to was trying to do is "advocate" (on behalf of paying clients), not "advertise." Some folks probably won't bother with the distinction, but anyone who does actual marketing probably would.
Remind me not to hire you to cater my next dinner party!
The point of this whole exercise, which many (if not most) of the commenters here have unfortunately not understood at all, has little or nothing to do with the amount of damage that can be done by inserting any given false fact into any given semi-obscure Wikipedia article. The point is simply to disprove the bogus PR line constantly repeated by Wikipedians (and Wikimedia people like Jimbo Wales) which states that "vandalism is always fixed very quickly." The only "unwelcome edits" that routinely get reverted quickly on Wikipedia are the obvious ones containing obscenities and slurs and the like, as well as anything (vandalism or not) that's inserted into articles that are fully-owned by groups of users for ideological, political, or commercial purposes. True, there's luck involved too, but that enters into it a lot less than most people are led to believe.
You're probably thinking, "Okay, people are lying about how good their crowdsourced website is, so what?" I would have the same reaction, except that Wikipedia is so dominant because of their Google footprint, these kinds of problems (which I believe will only get worse) really have to be taken more seriously, especially by journalists. That's what happened here, and it's a good thing. Obviously there are worse problems in the world, but in the long term, this is something that will eventually have to be dealt with if we're going to continue to move away from paper-artifact dissemination of information.
It wasn't (isn't?) that bad. What would sometimes happen was, if you had a program in Delphi 7 that depended on a third-party component, and you upgraded to Delphi 2009 or later, and got a new version of that component that had been converted to Unicode support, your code might not compile unless you changed your string declarations. But if you only used stock VCL components, you'd almost never have a problem, or if you did it would be fairly trivial to fix.
Unfortunately, third-party VCL components were always one of the main attractions of Delphi, and a lot of third-party database components (including many of the ones available for xBase, which was still big back then) were converted to Unicode that way because (I assume) it was just impractical to try to have it access data files both ways. Another problem was components making Windows API calls. Delphi 1.0 Object Pascal strings were 256-byte arrays, and starting with Delphi 2, dynamically-allocated 32-bit arrays - but Windows API calls have always required null-terminated pointer strings (PChars). So if one of your older components made a WinAPI call, you'd sometimes get compiler errors/warnings about type incompatibility after an upgrade.
It was a PITA in some cases, but generally speaking you only had to fix it once. No fun, but as long as you had the source code for your VCL components, it wasn't so bad - I still thought it was better than Visual Studio, at the time at least. That was back in the COM days, and COM components had their own set of compatibility problems. (Still do, actually!)
It's not just you. Delphi 7 won't even install under post-XP Windows versions, though the applications compiled by it will still work.
Still, I wouldn't call it a "dead" or even "unpopular" language at all, personally. They've made lots changes since 2002, most of them good, that would have resulted all the compiler errors you encountered - the switch to Unicode was probably the biggest one, starting with Delphi 2009. And for years, every new VCL was incompatible with the previous one, so if you didn't have the source code to your controls, you'd either have to dump them or wait for the controls' authors to update them (assume they were still in the business). More recent upgrades have been a lot less painful compatibility-wise, though as you say, they don't seem to have to have put much of a priority on footprint-reduction.
Is this some sort of game to you? We're talking about people's livelihoods. If you want to indulge in sophistry and absurd strawman-making go ahead, but you're not likely to convince anyone with that stuff.
Any rational, thinking person understands what "intent" means in an artistic context. Of course, if Nikon were to give you a camera rig for free, fly you out to Indonesia at their expense, and tell you to take photos of monkeys, they could easily claim copyright on the resulting images - in fact, the music business, the motion picture industry, and numerous others do that sort of thing as a matter of course. That is how copyright works; the only reason you don't often see those practices applied to photography is because the gear is relatively cheap and easily operated by one person. And regardless, this situation has nothing to do with that, because it's assumed the monkey can't knowingly sign a contract or understand its terms and his responsibilities under those terms.
The real issue is, if I'm a judge, what decision would be in the long-term best interests of society? To set a precedent that might eliminate incentives for photographers to innovate, just to free up this particular set of monkey images? Or to keep that incentive in place at the expense of a few websites having to pay a few bucks to the photographer, even though he didn't personally trip the shutter? I'd be surprised if a judge (a real one that is) decides against incentives for innovation in any medium - even computer software.
Okay, you've just given libelers and tabloid journalists and revenge-porners an even greater incentive to lie about people, just so their "update" stories can get a higher PageRank. These people don't care about fairness or other people's reputations, they care about traffic.
Slater set up the self-portraits. False. Slater set up the camera...
Exactly. He set up the camera. Do you always contradict yourself like this? And as for there being "no artistic intent," I suppose he went out and followed those black macaque monkeys around for three days just so he could have them nearby while he took photos of fallen tree limbs and snails?
This same public domain situation exists if you set up your camera with a motion sensor and capture your cat doing funny things. Unless you had intent (difficult to prove, and you have to PROVE it under copyright law), such images are in the public domain.
It's not "difficult to prove" at all, particularly given that no sane person is going to sit in a courtroom and insist, under oath, that you didn't set up the motion-sensor for your camera, which you also set up, for some purpose other than to have it go off when something moved within the frame.
Sheesh!
Admittedly, archaeology doesn't seem to inspire a great deal of petty, needless bickering, even on Wikipedia. I blame DNA testing and carbon-dating, personally.
Fair enough, but if you've actually looked around at some of the post-conference coverage of Wikimania in the UK press, and most other Wikimedia-related stories in the last week or so, I believe you'll objectively find that most of it is rather negative. The Wikipediocracy blog post simply reflects that. (I've seen next to nothing about it in the US press so far, by the way, which may be an interesting point in itself.)
As for the monkey-selfie story, the press coverage there has been fairly neutral, or at least non-judgmental. You actually do have a decent case there for calling the Wikipediocracy post "slanted" - I think it was mostly a case of "someone has to take the side of the photographer, and if not Wikipediocracy, then who?"
Last but not least, what's obvious to me from the context isn't always obvious to everyone else, at least when it comes to people being long-term Wikipedians.
What you mean to say here is that you're interested in discussing Wikipedia's "problems" from a strictly internal, insider's perspective. You're not interested in discussing Wikipedia's problems from the perspective of those who are libeled, victimized, threatened, or driven out of business by it. Apparently, you think a discussion from that perspective, the external one, amounts to little more than a "disingenuous rant," full of non-objective "moaning."
Thankfully there is more to life, and the world, than what goes on inside Wikipedia - not that I would expect someone like you to ever admit it, just as you've failed to admit that you're a hardcore Wikipedian yourself. Why is that, I wonder?
The Ferguson story is just starting to take off, but since it's a race-riot over what looks like a racially-motivated shooting, that story would tend to contradict the right wing's recently-held position that racism is no longer an issue in America, hence the SCotUS decision to strike down portions of the Voting Rights Act, etc. The right wing owns most of the US media, so they're going to downplay this as much as they can. Still, stories about it are starting to show up, despite the Robin Williams story still dominating coverage pretty much everywhere.
More to the point, Wikipediocracy is not a "news organization trying to discredit a competitor." It's a criticism site that exists to expose the arrogance, hypocrisy and lies coming from Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. It isn't asking you to trust it so much as simply consider the ways in which Wikipedia has become a negative aspect of internet culture and society in general.
Not if the provisions don't "sharply curtail free speech," which they don't, and not if they aren't "ridiculous," which in fact they are not. If European society is making a conscious decision here to value privacy over easy access to content, it means they're trying to take back something they've lost - indeed, the whole world has lost - and the people who took it away from them are the ones who should pay, not them. Google created this problem, not the EU taxpayers. Just because Google is good in some other ways doesn't mean people should just accept the ways in which they're bad.
What are you going to do then, require Google to give this "update" a higher PageRank than the original false accusation? Congratulations, now you've just made the problem worse for everybody, and for what? So that people doing research on false accusations can have an easier time of it?
Also, you don't seem to understand that to fix a law, you must pass a new law that replaces, augments, or amends it, or else repeals it altogether. If you're living in the USA, this isn't really a good time to be asking for that to happen.
It's tempting to agree, but the fact is, before the internet came along people were far less cynical about published information, authorial anonymity was extremely rare (especially in non-fiction and reference publishing), and perhaps most importantly, the whole business of producing encyclopedias for print required a lot of up-front money. Encyclopedia publishers didn't risk that kind of money just to bash people and organizations nobody had ever heard of - I'm not saying it never happened, but in comparison to what we see these days, you might as well say it never happened. So, that sort of thing ended up being the domain of pamphleteers and graffiti artists.
That, in turn, is why there's a perceived lack of legitimacy and responsibility with Wikipedia now. The fact that traditional publishers were risking something, even if it was just money, conferred a sense of seriousness to the enterprise. Wikipedia has never had that, just like it has never had pre-publication review, background checks of contributors, or even a formalized system of quality assurance.
The difference was mostly a matter of emphasis. Barry wants to be seen as a philanthropist first, musician second, then businessman, family man, and then somewhere way down the list, a convicted extortionist who has since reformed and grown up. I'm sure he'd have loved it if they'd left out the extortion stuff altogether, but that wasn't really what he was asking for. For a long time, the version that was on Wikipedia essentially had him as an extortionist and seller of dubious-quality vitamin supplements first, and everything else somewhere down the list. Wikipedia user accounts and AnonIPs presumed to be him (or people working for him) tried to remove the extortion conviction from the first paragraph in the article and were reverted, but they didn't try to remove information about the conviction altogether.
At one point, the transcluded template used for the handy "infobox" in the upper-right corner of the page was changed (by one of the named WP users being sued) from WP's "musician" template to their "convicted criminal" template. Presumably that made Barry rather unhappy. Apparently he (or his associates) also tried to address the negative emphasis by overwhelming it with sheer quantity of positive information, listing all of the awards he'd ever received as well as his entire discography (which seems to have included recordings he'd only been tangentially involved in). That didn't work either of course, though there were sources for most of that material.
Mind you, I don't think Barry has any chance of winning this lawsuit, and even if by some amazing happenstance he does, he won't get much in the way of damages. Suing for opportunity costs rarely works even with a really solid defamation case. But I can't really say he has no grounds for complaint or legal standing to sue, either.
I'm not sure the Streisand Effect applies in this case. He's not actually trying to hide unpleasant or embarrassing aspects of his past - what he seems to want is for the article to reflect his own version of those events, or at least to contain his version (or "spin" if you prefer) in some way. And since he's a marginal figure to begin with, he's really in one of those "any publicity is good publicity" situations.
And these days, among the people whose allegiance Barry seems to value most (i.e., former professional boxers and their fans), attacking Wikipedia is hardly seen as a bad thing to do - just the opposite in fact, and you could probably say that for a wide range of people and professions, especially celebrities. Wikipedia has always been seen by many of them as an illegitimate, irresponsible, self-appointed power-grab by anonymous nobodies - because after all, it is - and the passage of time (and the continued unctuous malfeasance of Wikipedians) has only cemented that impression in their minds.
It's all rather unfortunate, but also inevitable, given the way Wikipedians often behave.
Many commenters here have, unfortunately, assumed that Wikimedia and its lawyers are acting in good faith, when in fact they are not and almost never do. Wikimedia's Terms of Service actually say nothing at all about what Wiki-PR has been doing - not even implicitly. The ToS prohibits "misrepresentation of affiliations," and it says nothing about non-representation of affiliations, people using multiple accounts, or even people editing for pay, all of which are allowed (and sometimes even encouraged) on most (if not all) Wikimedia "projects," depending solely on who is doing it. My guess would be that the lawyers hired by Wikimedia deliberately lied about the content of the ToS because they assumed (perhaps correctly) that nobody would actually read them, and the strongly-worded letter featuring this lie would make it appear as though the Wikimedia Foundation is willing to take an active role in combating commercial activity on Wikipedia, something it has never really done in the past.
The reality is that if this case were to actually go to court, Wikimedia would have no case - and not only would they lose, but the loss could set a dangerous precedent that could conceivably make it much more difficult for other interactive website operators to fully control who can say what, anonymously or otherwise, on sites they own.
US case law is already heavily slanted towards commercial interests, to the point of having corporations defined as legally equivalent to actual people, etc. It would be incredibly stupid for Wikimedia to mount a legal challenge of this nature in this kind of legal environment (though of course I should add that the stupidity of the Wikimedia Foundation is legendary, and unusually bad even for a social media property). If they really want to stop the activities of paid PR consultants on Wikipedia, they should devote their considerable financial resources to developing software features to help identify such people, and they should also hire paid investigators to ferret them out, rather than rely on their already overly-exploited volunteers to do it.
It's an incredibly dangerous precedent, and incredibly stupid of the French courts to allow it. The potential for fraud here is very, very high - theoretically, Company A can now pay someone in the employ of one of their competitors, Company B, to remove a Wikipedia listing for Company A (using an IP address "assigned" to Company B) from some article - which, remember, can be edited anonymously by anyone at any time - and Company B is suddenly in court, having to defend itself from unfair competitive practices. And that's just the simplest form of this kind of fraud.
Companies (at least in France) will now be forced to apply all sorts of new web-filtering software and policies to protect themselves from this, which means Wikipedia will probably be blocked in most corporate offices in France. And rightfully so.
I'm tellin' ya, just when you think it's finally safe again to move to France, things like this happen...
If only we could use similar technology to uncover new satellites and infrared imaging gear in outer space, think of the money we could save on rocket fuel.
Slashdot Mirror
FYI, the documentary is called Inside North Korea, and the behavior in question begins at around the 40:00 mark.
I think there are at least three of us left...?
The point is that Wikimedia is building a war chest, not that they're overspending on salaries (though arguably they have hired a lot of overpaid developers, given what they've managed to actually produce). Jimbo Wales isn't paid directly by Wikimedia, he gets his money on the back-end as a paid public speaker and CEO of Wikia, which benefits somewhat from Wikipedia brand recognition.
The higher Wikimedia salaries are published in tax returns, and they're mostly in line with other Silicon Valley non-profits, but again, that's not the issue here. The issue is they're fundraising as if they're on their last financial legs, when in fact they're not even close to that point - if anything, just the opposite. If they minimized their staff and moved to a cheaper location, they could survive for 10-15 years without another dime and hardly anyone would notice a thing.
The more commonly-used term for what the person referred to was trying to do is "advocate" (on behalf of paying clients), not "advertise." Some folks probably won't bother with the distinction, but anyone who does actual marketing probably would.
Remind me not to hire you to cater my next dinner party!
The point of this whole exercise, which many (if not most) of the commenters here have unfortunately not understood at all, has little or nothing to do with the amount of damage that can be done by inserting any given false fact into any given semi-obscure Wikipedia article. The point is simply to disprove the bogus PR line constantly repeated by Wikipedians (and Wikimedia people like Jimbo Wales) which states that "vandalism is always fixed very quickly." The only "unwelcome edits" that routinely get reverted quickly on Wikipedia are the obvious ones containing obscenities and slurs and the like, as well as anything (vandalism or not) that's inserted into articles that are fully-owned by groups of users for ideological, political, or commercial purposes. True, there's luck involved too, but that enters into it a lot less than most people are led to believe.
You're probably thinking, "Okay, people are lying about how good their crowdsourced website is, so what?" I would have the same reaction, except that Wikipedia is so dominant because of their Google footprint, these kinds of problems (which I believe will only get worse) really have to be taken more seriously, especially by journalists. That's what happened here, and it's a good thing. Obviously there are worse problems in the world, but in the long term, this is something that will eventually have to be dealt with if we're going to continue to move away from paper-artifact dissemination of information.
It wasn't (isn't?) that bad. What would sometimes happen was, if you had a program in Delphi 7 that depended on a third-party component, and you upgraded to Delphi 2009 or later, and got a new version of that component that had been converted to Unicode support, your code might not compile unless you changed your string declarations. But if you only used stock VCL components, you'd almost never have a problem, or if you did it would be fairly trivial to fix.
Unfortunately, third-party VCL components were always one of the main attractions of Delphi, and a lot of third-party database components (including many of the ones available for xBase, which was still big back then) were converted to Unicode that way because (I assume) it was just impractical to try to have it access data files both ways. Another problem was components making Windows API calls. Delphi 1.0 Object Pascal strings were 256-byte arrays, and starting with Delphi 2, dynamically-allocated 32-bit arrays - but Windows API calls have always required null-terminated pointer strings (PChars). So if one of your older components made a WinAPI call, you'd sometimes get compiler errors/warnings about type incompatibility after an upgrade.
It was a PITA in some cases, but generally speaking you only had to fix it once. No fun, but as long as you had the source code for your VCL components, it wasn't so bad - I still thought it was better than Visual Studio, at the time at least. That was back in the COM days, and COM components had their own set of compatibility problems. (Still do, actually!)
It's not just you. Delphi 7 won't even install under post-XP Windows versions, though the applications compiled by it will still work.
Still, I wouldn't call it a "dead" or even "unpopular" language at all, personally. They've made lots changes since 2002, most of them good, that would have resulted all the compiler errors you encountered - the switch to Unicode was probably the biggest one, starting with Delphi 2009. And for years, every new VCL was incompatible with the previous one, so if you didn't have the source code to your controls, you'd either have to dump them or wait for the controls' authors to update them (assume they were still in the business). More recent upgrades have been a lot less painful compatibility-wise, though as you say, they don't seem to have to have put much of a priority on footprint-reduction.
Also, I should probably move to Atlanta.
Thanks, Dave.
Is this some sort of game to you? We're talking about people's livelihoods. If you want to indulge in sophistry and absurd strawman-making go ahead, but you're not likely to convince anyone with that stuff.
Any rational, thinking person understands what "intent" means in an artistic context. Of course, if Nikon were to give you a camera rig for free, fly you out to Indonesia at their expense, and tell you to take photos of monkeys, they could easily claim copyright on the resulting images - in fact, the music business, the motion picture industry, and numerous others do that sort of thing as a matter of course. That is how copyright works; the only reason you don't often see those practices applied to photography is because the gear is relatively cheap and easily operated by one person. And regardless, this situation has nothing to do with that, because it's assumed the monkey can't knowingly sign a contract or understand its terms and his responsibilities under those terms.
The real issue is, if I'm a judge, what decision would be in the long-term best interests of society? To set a precedent that might eliminate incentives for photographers to innovate, just to free up this particular set of monkey images? Or to keep that incentive in place at the expense of a few websites having to pay a few bucks to the photographer, even though he didn't personally trip the shutter? I'd be surprised if a judge (a real one that is) decides against incentives for innovation in any medium - even computer software.
Okay, you've just given libelers and tabloid journalists and revenge-porners an even greater incentive to lie about people, just so their "update" stories can get a higher PageRank. These people don't care about fairness or other people's reputations, they care about traffic.
Too many people think it's a place to publish news or original content. They don't understand what an encyclopaedia is.
Unfortunately, neither do most Wikipedians.
Slater set up the self-portraits. False. Slater set up the camera...
Exactly. He set up the camera. Do you always contradict yourself like this? And as for there being "no artistic intent," I suppose he went out and followed those black macaque monkeys around for three days just so he could have them nearby while he took photos of fallen tree limbs and snails?
This same public domain situation exists if you set up your camera with a motion sensor and capture your cat doing funny things. Unless you had intent (difficult to prove, and you have to PROVE it under copyright law), such images are in the public domain.
It's not "difficult to prove" at all, particularly given that no sane person is going to sit in a courtroom and insist, under oath, that you didn't set up the motion-sensor for your camera, which you also set up, for some purpose other than to have it go off when something moved within the frame. Sheesh!
Admittedly, archaeology doesn't seem to inspire a great deal of petty, needless bickering, even on Wikipedia. I blame DNA testing and carbon-dating, personally.
But I married the Jamaican whore and recognized our love-child as my sole legitimate heir! What's more, he's now head of a major media conglomerate.
Fair enough, but if you've actually looked around at some of the post-conference coverage of Wikimania in the UK press, and most other Wikimedia-related stories in the last week or so, I believe you'll objectively find that most of it is rather negative. The Wikipediocracy blog post simply reflects that. (I've seen next to nothing about it in the US press so far, by the way, which may be an interesting point in itself.)
As for the monkey-selfie story, the press coverage there has been fairly neutral, or at least non-judgmental. You actually do have a decent case there for calling the Wikipediocracy post "slanted" - I think it was mostly a case of "someone has to take the side of the photographer, and if not Wikipediocracy, then who?"
Last but not least, what's obvious to me from the context isn't always obvious to everyone else, at least when it comes to people being long-term Wikipedians.
What you mean to say here is that you're interested in discussing Wikipedia's "problems" from a strictly internal, insider's perspective. You're not interested in discussing Wikipedia's problems from the perspective of those who are libeled, victimized, threatened, or driven out of business by it. Apparently, you think a discussion from that perspective, the external one, amounts to little more than a "disingenuous rant," full of non-objective "moaning."
Thankfully there is more to life, and the world, than what goes on inside Wikipedia - not that I would expect someone like you to ever admit it, just as you've failed to admit that you're a hardcore Wikipedian yourself. Why is that, I wonder?
The Ferguson story is just starting to take off, but since it's a race-riot over what looks like a racially-motivated shooting, that story would tend to contradict the right wing's recently-held position that racism is no longer an issue in America, hence the SCotUS decision to strike down portions of the Voting Rights Act, etc. The right wing owns most of the US media, so they're going to downplay this as much as they can. Still, stories about it are starting to show up, despite the Robin Williams story still dominating coverage pretty much everywhere.
More to the point, Wikipediocracy is not a "news organization trying to discredit a competitor." It's a criticism site that exists to expose the arrogance, hypocrisy and lies coming from Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. It isn't asking you to trust it so much as simply consider the ways in which Wikipedia has become a negative aspect of internet culture and society in general.
Not if the provisions don't "sharply curtail free speech," which they don't, and not if they aren't "ridiculous," which in fact they are not. If European society is making a conscious decision here to value privacy over easy access to content, it means they're trying to take back something they've lost - indeed, the whole world has lost - and the people who took it away from them are the ones who should pay, not them. Google created this problem, not the EU taxpayers. Just because Google is good in some other ways doesn't mean people should just accept the ways in which they're bad.
Also, you don't seem to understand that to fix a law, you must pass a new law that replaces, augments, or amends it, or else repeals it altogether. If you're living in the USA, this isn't really a good time to be asking for that to happen.
Pretty much like all other encyclopedias...
It's tempting to agree, but the fact is, before the internet came along people were far less cynical about published information, authorial anonymity was extremely rare (especially in non-fiction and reference publishing), and perhaps most importantly, the whole business of producing encyclopedias for print required a lot of up-front money. Encyclopedia publishers didn't risk that kind of money just to bash people and organizations nobody had ever heard of - I'm not saying it never happened, but in comparison to what we see these days, you might as well say it never happened. So, that sort of thing ended up being the domain of pamphleteers and graffiti artists.
That, in turn, is why there's a perceived lack of legitimacy and responsibility with Wikipedia now. The fact that traditional publishers were risking something, even if it was just money, conferred a sense of seriousness to the enterprise. Wikipedia has never had that, just like it has never had pre-publication review, background checks of contributors, or even a formalized system of quality assurance.
The difference was mostly a matter of emphasis. Barry wants to be seen as a philanthropist first, musician second, then businessman, family man, and then somewhere way down the list, a convicted extortionist who has since reformed and grown up. I'm sure he'd have loved it if they'd left out the extortion stuff altogether, but that wasn't really what he was asking for. For a long time, the version that was on Wikipedia essentially had him as an extortionist and seller of dubious-quality vitamin supplements first, and everything else somewhere down the list. Wikipedia user accounts and AnonIPs presumed to be him (or people working for him) tried to remove the extortion conviction from the first paragraph in the article and were reverted, but they didn't try to remove information about the conviction altogether.
At one point, the transcluded template used for the handy "infobox" in the upper-right corner of the page was changed (by one of the named WP users being sued) from WP's "musician" template to their "convicted criminal" template. Presumably that made Barry rather unhappy. Apparently he (or his associates) also tried to address the negative emphasis by overwhelming it with sheer quantity of positive information, listing all of the awards he'd ever received as well as his entire discography (which seems to have included recordings he'd only been tangentially involved in). That didn't work either of course, though there were sources for most of that material.
Mind you, I don't think Barry has any chance of winning this lawsuit, and even if by some amazing happenstance he does, he won't get much in the way of damages. Suing for opportunity costs rarely works even with a really solid defamation case. But I can't really say he has no grounds for complaint or legal standing to sue, either.
I'm not sure the Streisand Effect applies in this case. He's not actually trying to hide unpleasant or embarrassing aspects of his past - what he seems to want is for the article to reflect his own version of those events, or at least to contain his version (or "spin" if you prefer) in some way. And since he's a marginal figure to begin with, he's really in one of those "any publicity is good publicity" situations.
And these days, among the people whose allegiance Barry seems to value most (i.e., former professional boxers and their fans), attacking Wikipedia is hardly seen as a bad thing to do - just the opposite in fact, and you could probably say that for a wide range of people and professions, especially celebrities. Wikipedia has always been seen by many of them as an illegitimate, irresponsible, self-appointed power-grab by anonymous nobodies - because after all, it is - and the passage of time (and the continued unctuous malfeasance of Wikipedians) has only cemented that impression in their minds.
It's all rather unfortunate, but also inevitable, given the way Wikipedians often behave.
Many commenters here have, unfortunately, assumed that Wikimedia and its lawyers are acting in good faith, when in fact they are not and almost never do. Wikimedia's Terms of Service actually say nothing at all about what Wiki-PR has been doing - not even implicitly. The ToS prohibits "misrepresentation of affiliations," and it says nothing about non-representation of affiliations, people using multiple accounts, or even people editing for pay, all of which are allowed (and sometimes even encouraged) on most (if not all) Wikimedia "projects," depending solely on who is doing it. My guess would be that the lawyers hired by Wikimedia deliberately lied about the content of the ToS because they assumed (perhaps correctly) that nobody would actually read them, and the strongly-worded letter featuring this lie would make it appear as though the Wikimedia Foundation is willing to take an active role in combating commercial activity on Wikipedia, something it has never really done in the past.
The reality is that if this case were to actually go to court, Wikimedia would have no case - and not only would they lose, but the loss could set a dangerous precedent that could conceivably make it much more difficult for other interactive website operators to fully control who can say what, anonymously or otherwise, on sites they own.
US case law is already heavily slanted towards commercial interests, to the point of having corporations defined as legally equivalent to actual people, etc. It would be incredibly stupid for Wikimedia to mount a legal challenge of this nature in this kind of legal environment (though of course I should add that the stupidity of the Wikimedia Foundation is legendary, and unusually bad even for a social media property). If they really want to stop the activities of paid PR consultants on Wikipedia, they should devote their considerable financial resources to developing software features to help identify such people, and they should also hire paid investigators to ferret them out, rather than rely on their already overly-exploited volunteers to do it.
It's an incredibly dangerous precedent, and incredibly stupid of the French courts to allow it. The potential for fraud here is very, very high - theoretically, Company A can now pay someone in the employ of one of their competitors, Company B, to remove a Wikipedia listing for Company A (using an IP address "assigned" to Company B) from some article - which, remember, can be edited anonymously by anyone at any time - and Company B is suddenly in court, having to defend itself from unfair competitive practices. And that's just the simplest form of this kind of fraud.
Companies (at least in France) will now be forced to apply all sorts of new web-filtering software and policies to protect themselves from this, which means Wikipedia will probably be blocked in most corporate offices in France. And rightfully so.
I'm tellin' ya, just when you think it's finally safe again to move to France, things like this happen...
If only we could use similar technology to uncover new satellites and infrared imaging gear in outer space, think of the money we could save on rocket fuel.