Freedom of speech, by necessity, includes freedom after speech. In the real world, that usually requires anonymity.
Not at all. It very rarely requires anonymity. How often do you read anything political (or otherwise) that is genuinely anonymous? How often in that case is the author writing anonymously to avoid embarassment, and how often is the author writing anonymously to protect her freedom? (one could argue that if our political writers wrote anything of value in the U.S. they might require anonymity, but that is perhaps a different issue... )
Anonymity is a very important right, but it's also a very specialized tool. It has a few extremely important uses, and some lousy ones.
Yes, with free speech comes a certain degree of responsibility... On the part of the AUDIENCE.
Good point, but everyone involved, audience and speaker, needs to be responsible. Having freedom of speech doesn't mean we can't hold someone who says something wrong accountable after some fashion, we obviously can.
I tend to think from what I've read that the resolution to this little mini-crisis speaks well of everyone concerned. The guy came out of the dark and apologized, the other guy accepted, Wikipedia recognized the issue of accountability and is supposedly looking at improving in some way.
Cory Doctorow is said to stalk, kill, and eat emus during his frequent, clandestine trips to Australia.
Note to the reader: the above sentence originally read Chuck Norris is said to stalk, kill, and eat emus during his frequent, clandestine trips to Australia until Cory remixed it.
Remember the whole Hotmail fiasco in late '97 when Microsoft acquired it? The whole thing was running on UNIX and ran just fine. They tried to replace it with NT servers, and it just couldn't stand up under the weight no matter how much hardware they threw at it.
It was running on FreeBSD at the time. Linux was just a toy back then, and real Unix would have cost so much more.
There are companies that truly believe in open source and its philosophy and there are companies like sun.
Nonsense. Sun was sponsoring open-source projects (Xemacs, TCL, etc.) well before most "open source" companies even existed. It's not that they don't "truly believe in open source."
The problem is that a lot of open source fanboys want to view it as an all-or-nothing proposition. If they don't get their way all the time, regardless of the business realities, they whine like little babies.
Ugh. That won't exactly help convince people who are on the fence regarding whether Wikipedia is being managed properly. "You can pay to make sure people don't spread lies about you!"
If someone then put the slanderous content back I could see him being upset, but the great thing about Wikipedia is anyone can edit it. Just update the listing with your real life story and move on with life.
And bookmark the entry on yourself and check it every day to make sure people aren't spreading lies about you. Joy.
This is the key. Wikipedia needs to attribute all edits to a person. I'm all for anyone's right to say anything; however, they need to be accountable for that speech. That's the check to keep the balance.
You're basically right, I believe, although it's important to note that for the forseeable future Wikipedia will be floating in the middle between strong authentication for users and total anonymity. If they wanted total anonymity they wouldn't show IP addresses. If they wanted strong authentication, well, that's just extremely difficult.
Their current stand on authentication isn't particularly principled, I'm guessing it's done the way it is because they know a lot of people won't bother to sign up, and they want them to use the thing anyhow. I'm not sure if they are helped by that as far as building up quality content is concerned.
The key is to make sure anonymous content is marked as such so that the reader can form a valid opinion or even select not to "listen" to anyone who won't identify themselves. Seems like such a solution would kill several birds on Wikipedia's lawn.
True enough. A check box like "I never want to see anonymous content" would probably be helpful, since that will automatically function as a filter for a lot of garbage.
I'm a little suprised that someone with what appears to be both polititcs and journalism in his background is so easily perturbed such ludicrous accusations; both professions generally involve thicker skins than that. he's welcome to his opinion about the wisdom of allowing anonymity - but fortunately (in my opinion!), reality differs.
There's a hint in the article, where they mention that someone edited the entry to correct a typo a few days after it was created. A journalist might very well expect an editor to do a responsible job and clean up the entry, which obviously didn't happen.
Yes, I know it's Wikipedia, not a real publication, but still. This might explain his feelings.
You do yourself massive discredit by pretending that the guy who wrote that blurb cared about "the truth". If that were the case we wouldn't be having this little argument.
This guy just happens to have political and media connections which now he is abusing.
I don't agree with what he's done in attacking Wikipedia, but it's a pretty predictable response to what happened. He's got more traction than you or I would have because of his position, but still, Wikipedia doesn't come across as some shining beacon of truth and good when the response to someone being libeled is that they should just shut up and take it. That's fairly lame.
What people need to understand is that our law recognizes a right to anonymity on the basis that it has some social and political value. There's an equation there, a hope that the bad caused by having anonymity available will be greatly outweighed by the good. When dorks post really offensive and untrue stuff anonymously, stuff that's just bad without any redeeming value, they are hurting the cause. They are giving ammo to the people who would argue that the "bad" in the above equation outweighs the good.
That sucks. I don't agree with someone going after Wikipedia, for any number of reasons, but people need to understand that what they do has real life repercussions. If we argue the case for anonymity (and we will argue it, again and again, for as long as we have a representative government) and the opposition has cases like this to point to, it can hurt us.
Maybe this falls on deaf ears in a forum where "anonymous cowards" are pretty common, but we are just better off if people try to use something like Wikipedia responsibly, whether they are writintg or editing. The funny part is, in the most general terms the guy who is going after Wikipedia and the true advocate of anonymity are concerned with the same thing: truth. Misusing anonymity creates stupid, unfortunate battles like this.
Mr. Seigenthaler has committed the terrible act of jumping from a perfectly ordinary valid grievance (Wikipedia has a questionable entry about him) to a completely bizarre and horribly dangerous generalization about information in general (people who provide connectivity should be liable for the actions of their customers).
Ok, Seigenthaler (can I call you Ziggy?), let's see you sue my ISP.
You... uh... know that's not libel, right? Except perhaps in the Alannis Morissette sense of the word.
A newspaper could have printed the same information that was in Wikipedia and it wouldn't have been libel or slander. The key is by using weasel words such as "alledged" or as in the quote - "thought to have been".
Libel cases are hard to prove because of strict standards, but the use of weasel words has never been effective cover from them. He'd need to prove that someone intended to hurt his reputation, which is in doubt since he doesn't even know who it was, and he'd need to prove that wikipedia had been an effective outlet for doing that, which is in doubt since everyone who reads it knows that it's all made-up bullshit anyway.
But the weasel words themselves are absolutely no protection.
If you disagree with it, just edit it! No need to get all indignant.
This seems to be a pretty stock response. It's one of those issues that makes me think the average Slashdot geek doesn't have much knowledge of human nature (not to mention law).
Accusing people of involvement in the murder of their friends will make people extremely angry, angry in a way many of the lamers here just don't seem to understand. "Indignant" doesn't begin to cover it.
He's an intelligent enough man to recognize libel. Contrary to popular belief here on Slashdot, nothing about the First Amendment requires him to ignore that. Why would he?
What is interesting is that he is a founder of the First Amendment Center [firstamendmentcenter.org]. Apparently he feels that the First Amendment only applies to the Corporate press he was affiliated with. Personal press freedom don't count in his book.
The First Amendment does not give you the right to slander or libel. Try to keep up.
Slashdot Mirror
Cry!
Not at all. It very rarely requires anonymity. How often do you read anything political (or otherwise) that is genuinely anonymous? How often in that case is the author writing anonymously to avoid embarassment, and how often is the author writing anonymously to protect her freedom? (one could argue that if our political writers wrote anything of value in the U.S. they might require anonymity, but that is perhaps a different issue... )
Anonymity is a very important right, but it's also a very specialized tool. It has a few extremely important uses, and some lousy ones.
Good point, but everyone involved, audience and speaker, needs to be responsible. Having freedom of speech doesn't mean we can't hold someone who says something wrong accountable after some fashion, we obviously can.
I tend to think from what I've read that the resolution to this little mini-crisis speaks well of everyone concerned. The guy came out of the dark and apologized, the other guy accepted, Wikipedia recognized the issue of accountability and is supposedly looking at improving in some way.
Note to the reader: the above sentence originally read Chuck Norris is said to stalk, kill, and eat emus during his frequent, clandestine trips to Australia until Cory remixed it.
Tom Cruise can help!
It's only the power of open source programming tools that allows you to take down Apache so quickly!
If you're talking about a purely asynchronous protocol, maybe. Here on planet Earth not so much.
Alannis would be so disappointed in you.
No, but it would be if it ran on Linux!!!
It was running on FreeBSD at the time. Linux was just a toy back then, and real Unix would have cost so much more.
You forgot all the maniacal swearing that would typically be incorporated into that statement in a Debian forum.
Nonsense. Sun was sponsoring open-source projects (Xemacs, TCL, etc.) well before most "open source" companies even existed. It's not that they don't "truly believe in open source."
The problem is that a lot of open source fanboys want to view it as an all-or-nothing proposition. If they don't get their way all the time, regardless of the business realities, they whine like little babies.
Extortion tends to be more of a mafia thing than a corporate thing. Utility bills notwithstanding.
Ugh. That won't exactly help convince people who are on the fence regarding whether Wikipedia is being managed properly. "You can pay to make sure people don't spread lies about you!"
And bookmark the entry on yourself and check it every day to make sure people aren't spreading lies about you. Joy.
You're basically right, I believe, although it's important to note that for the forseeable future Wikipedia will be floating in the middle between strong authentication for users and total anonymity. If they wanted total anonymity they wouldn't show IP addresses. If they wanted strong authentication, well, that's just extremely difficult.
Their current stand on authentication isn't particularly principled, I'm guessing it's done the way it is because they know a lot of people won't bother to sign up, and they want them to use the thing anyhow. I'm not sure if they are helped by that as far as building up quality content is concerned.
True enough. A check box like "I never want to see anonymous content" would probably be helpful, since that will automatically function as a filter for a lot of garbage.
There's a hint in the article, where they mention that someone edited the entry to correct a typo a few days after it was created. A journalist might very well expect an editor to do a responsible job and clean up the entry, which obviously didn't happen.
Yes, I know it's Wikipedia, not a real publication, but still. This might explain his feelings.
You do yourself massive discredit by pretending that the guy who wrote that blurb cared about "the truth". If that were the case we wouldn't be having this little argument.
I don't agree with what he's done in attacking Wikipedia, but it's a pretty predictable response to what happened. He's got more traction than you or I would have because of his position, but still, Wikipedia doesn't come across as some shining beacon of truth and good when the response to someone being libeled is that they should just shut up and take it. That's fairly lame.
What people need to understand is that our law recognizes a right to anonymity on the basis that it has some social and political value. There's an equation there, a hope that the bad caused by having anonymity available will be greatly outweighed by the good. When dorks post really offensive and untrue stuff anonymously, stuff that's just bad without any redeeming value, they are hurting the cause. They are giving ammo to the people who would argue that the "bad" in the above equation outweighs the good.
That sucks. I don't agree with someone going after Wikipedia, for any number of reasons, but people need to understand that what they do has real life repercussions. If we argue the case for anonymity (and we will argue it, again and again, for as long as we have a representative government) and the opposition has cases like this to point to, it can hurt us.
Maybe this falls on deaf ears in a forum where "anonymous cowards" are pretty common, but we are just better off if people try to use something like Wikipedia responsibly, whether they are writintg or editing. The funny part is, in the most general terms the guy who is going after Wikipedia and the true advocate of anonymity are concerned with the same thing: truth. Misusing anonymity creates stupid, unfortunate battles like this.
You... uh... know that's not libel, right? Except perhaps in the Alannis Morissette sense of the word.
Libel cases are hard to prove because of strict standards, but the use of weasel words has never been effective cover from them. He'd need to prove that someone intended to hurt his reputation, which is in doubt since he doesn't even know who it was, and he'd need to prove that wikipedia had been an effective outlet for doing that, which is in doubt since everyone who reads it knows that it's all made-up bullshit anyway.
But the weasel words themselves are absolutely no protection.
This seems to be a pretty stock response. It's one of those issues that makes me think the average Slashdot geek doesn't have much knowledge of human nature (not to mention law).
Accusing people of involvement in the murder of their friends will make people extremely angry, angry in a way many of the lamers here just don't seem to understand. "Indignant" doesn't begin to cover it.
He's an intelligent enough man to recognize libel. Contrary to popular belief here on Slashdot, nothing about the First Amendment requires him to ignore that. Why would he?
What's ironic about the fact that someone educated in constitutional law knows the meaning of "slander", and some dorks on teh interweb don't?
It's sad, but not ironic.
The First Amendment does not give you the right to slander or libel. Try to keep up.
Actually, ten times $700 million, 7 billion, is roughly what we spend in Iraq in roughly a month and a half. Sad but true.
"Paid? You don't get paid. Are you kidding, you work on commission, that's better than getting paid."