Today’s Wall Street Journal Speakeasy blog has a piece about Ron Livingston’s lawyers filing a lawsuit against an anonymous Internet user, in an attempt to identify who’s been editing his Wikipedia article to add rumors that he’s gay. The best legal description I’ve found is at the Copyrights & Campaigns blog:
The complaint includes claims for libel, false light, and violations of Livingston’s statutory and common-law right of publicity, and seeks actual and punitive damages. Presumably Livingston will seek discovery (IP and email addresses and other identifying information) from Wikipedia and Facebook, which they hope will identify the poster. Livingston can then name the individual in the complaint, and proceed against him. Section 230 won’t protect the individual; it only shields the service (i.e., Wikipedia or Facebook) that hosted the material.
The suit is here, as Coupleguys, Inc. vs. John Doe.
In being interviewed by the reporter of the piece, I explained the Streisand effect to him. He mentioned this phenomenon of Livingston trying to combat edits that he’s gay but perhaps bringing more attention to this rumor in the process. The sticky situation about Livingston’s lawsuit (at least according to LGBT groups) is whether calling someone gay is actually “maliciously altering” his article.
My comments about the case pertained instead to the sticky issue of people notable enough to be in Wikiepdia, but not enough to have legions of watchdogs.
According to Andrew Lih, author of “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia” (Hyperion), inaccuracy or vandalism problems are difficult to stop for people who are “notable but not extremely famous,” a category Livingston, best known for his roles in “Office Space”and “Sex and the City,” falls into. Lih, a registered Wikipedia editor and one of 1,000 administrators who oversee the site [his wife is also a reporter for the Journal], said Madonna’s Wikipedia page may have dozens of people watching out for abuse, whereas someone like Livingston rarely receives that kind of attention.
This is roughly the same dynamic that led to the Seigenthaler case, where a fairly notable journalist didn’t have throngs of passionate folks looking out for his article.
And perhaps that’s my worry about a smaller user community than was here in 2007. As the number of articles increase, are there enough watchdogs to keep article quality high, or are other technical measures (flagged revisions, semi-protection, et al.) needed for maintaining quality?
Erik Zachte and Erik Moeller of the WMF blogged recently that contrary to other studies, the core “active editors” has remained stable of late.
On the English Wikipedia, the peak number of active editors (5 edits per month) was 54,510 in March 2007. After a more significant decline by about 25%, it has been stable over the last year at a level of approximately 40,000
Is it enough for that community to have the same numbers, year on year, when that same period saw a growth of over 500,000 articles?
I cannot say that I know, but it is something that gives me pause.
