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Wikipedia

Wikipedia Criticized After Years of Using the Wrong Man's Picture to Depict a Serial Killer (wikipedia.org) 113

Andreas Kolbe is a former co-editor-in-chief of The Signpost, an online newspaper for (English-language) Wikipedia that's been published online since 2005 with contributions from Wikipedia editors. Kolbe has been contributing to it since 2006.

Last week he returned to the Signpost to share a cautionary tale. Its title? "A photo on Wikipedia can ruin your life."

Also a long-time Slashdot reader, Andreas Kolbe shares this summary with us: For more than two years, Wikipedia illustrated its article on New York serial killer Nathaniel White with the police photo of an African-American man from Florida who happened to have the same name. A Wikipedia user said he had found the picture on crimefeed.com, a "true crime" site associated with the Discovery Channel, which also used the same photo in a TV broadcast on the serial killer.

During the two-and-a-half years the Wikipedia article showed the picture of the wrong man, it was viewed over 125,000 times, including nearly 12,000 times on the day the TV program ran. The man whose picture was used said he received threats to his person from people who assumed he really was the killer, and took to dressing incognito.

His picture is now all over Google when people search for the serial killer.

"Friends and family contacted Plaintiff concerning the broadcast and asking Plaintiff if he actually murdered people in the state of New York," adds a legal complaint the man eventually filed against the Wikimedia Foundation. "Plaintiff assured these friends and family that even though he acknowledged his criminal past, he never murdered anyone nor has he ever been to the state of New York...."

Last month the legal director of the Wikimedia Foundation and a Legal Fellow co-authored a blog post pointing out the lawsuit "was filed months after Wikipedia editors proactively corrected the error at issue in September 2020." The blog post celebrates a judge's dismissal of the suit as "a victory for free knowledge," and acknowledges the protections afforded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. "Our ability to maintain and grow the world's largest repository of free knowledge depends on robust legal immunity.... The Wikimedia Foundation applauds this ruling and remains committed to protecting global exchange of knowledge and freedom of expression across the internet."

But the blog post also argued that "the many members of our volunteer community are very effective at identifying and removing these inaccuracies when they do occur." Andreas Kolbe disagrees. "The photo was in the article for over two years," Kolbe writes on Signpost. "For a man to have his face presented to the world as that of a serial killer on a top-20 website, for such a significant amount of time, can hardly be described as indicative of 'very effective' quality control on the part of the community." The picture was only removed after a press report pointed out that Wikipedia had the wrong picture. This means the deletion was in all likelihood reactive rather than "proactive"...

The wrong photograph appears to have been removed by an unknown member of the public, an IP address that had never edited before and has not edited since. The volunteer community seems to have been completely unaware of the problem throughout...

It would seem more appropriate -

- to acknowledge that community processes failed Mr. White to a quite egregious degree, and
- to alert the community to the fact that its quality control processes are in need of improvement....

Surely Wikipedia's guidelines, policies and community practices for sourcing images, in particular images used to imply responsibility for specific crimes, would benefit from some strengthening, to ensure they actually depict the correct individual.

Pondering the dismissal of the lawsuit, Kolbe ultimately asks if there's a deeper moral question in a world where a man was "defamed on our global top-20 website with absolute impunity, without his having any realistic hope of redress for what happened to him." While to the best of my belief the error did not originate in Wikipedia, but was imported into Wikipedia from an unreliable external site, for more than two years any vigilante Googling Nathaniel White serial killer would have seen Mr. White's color picture prominently displayed in Google's knowledge graph panel (multiple copies of it still appear there at the time of writing). And along with it they would have found a prominent link to the serial killer's Wikipedia biography, again featuring Mr. White's image — providing what looked like encyclopedic confirmation that Mr. White of Florida was indeed guilty of sickening crimes...

On the very day the picture was removed from the article here, a video about the serial killer was uploaded to YouTube — complete with Mr. White's picture, citing Wikipedia. At the time of writing, the video's title page with Mr. White's color picture is the top Google image result in searches for the serial killer. All in all, seven of Google's top-fifteen image search results for Nathaniel White serial killer today feature Mr. White's image. Only two black-and-white photos show what seems to have been the real killer.

A comment on the Wikimedia Foundation blog adds, "What I'd much rather see is an acknowledgement that the community process failed Mr White to an extreme degree and that steps will be taken to prevent recurrence of such cases."
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Wikipedia Criticized After Years of Using the Wrong Man's Picture to Depict a Serial Killer

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  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      Well in this instance the misinformation was started by crimefeed and the discovery channel, and this misinformation then spread via wikipedia and other sites.
      If they want to file a lawsuit against anyone, it should be the original source of the misinformation. As noted in the article, Wikipedia assumed the information from crimefeed to be correct and they also changed the article once they saw proof that it was incorrect.

  • Did it never occur to him to just edit the article?
    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday November 07, 2021 @07:12PM (#61966935)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Re:WTF... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Sunday November 07, 2021 @07:20PM (#61966959) Homepage

        Edits by the subject of an article, including a guy whose picture was shown, would also be subject to reversion based on conflict of interest.

        • by Anonymous Coward
          Which seems pretty stupid, don't you think? Wikipedia wants to present itself as a free source of truth. Removing incorrect information should be just as important as adding correct information with citations. How can you provide a citation for incorrect information?
        • Re:WTF... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by mamba-mamba ( 445365 ) on Sunday November 07, 2021 @07:52PM (#61967027)

          He is not the subject of the article. The article is about the real serial killer.

          • Re:WTF... (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Sunday November 07, 2021 @07:56PM (#61967041) Homepage

            Prove that to Wikipedia standards. Difficulty: He admitted that it's his name and his photo, and primary sources (for example, the police department that booked the guy convicted of the murder) are not allowed.

            • Re:WTF... (Score:4, Insightful)

              by mamba-mamba ( 445365 ) on Sunday November 07, 2021 @08:46PM (#61967123)

              That is the standard applied to adding information. Not the standard applied to including information. Editors have assured me they would much rather err toward excluding useful information than including inaccurate information. If he simply says "that is a picture of me and I am not the serial killer," that should be good enough in the absence of a high quality secondary source.

              • Shit. Should read "That is the standard applied to adding information. Not the standard applied to omitting information."

              • If he simply says "that is a picture of me and I am not the serial killer," that should be good enough

                It would certainly strengthen his case if he had informed them that the information was false and they had refused to correct it.

                It looks like he never even tried to have it corrected, which weakens his claim that it was harming him. It apparently didn't bother him enough to even attempt to correct it.

                • No reason to assume he was even aware of it. He probably put all the hassle he experienced down to the TV programme. The latter actually only showed his picture for about a second – long enough for people who knew him to recognise him, but not long enough for people who didn't know him to memorise his face well. That is why Google and the Wikipedia page probably did more damage.

                  Wikipedia had no business getting its picture from a crappy source like that and then pretending to readers it came from t
      • Even if that weren't the case, it's more likely than not some petty idiot that thinks they own the article would just revert it and ban him or anyone else that made changes.
      • Simply pointing at court records wouldn't be acceptable.

        Wait, why not? Court records are a source, aren't they?

        • by Entrope ( 68843 )

          They are a primary source, so citing them would be original research, which Wikipedia disallows.

        • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday November 07, 2021 @08:22PM (#61967081)
          Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • Huh? What about all the important computer science info in Wikipedia ? Surely journalists would be totally useless in writing about those subjects?
            • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

              by Anonymous Coward

              Yep. Actually journalists aren't very reliable on *any* topic. Also don't forget the phenomenon where some shit "journalist" publishes misinformation from Wikipedia (usually as "background" for a story)... and then that article is used as a reference when somebody else challenges the original misinformation.

              Technically you're allowed to use a textbook or something like that. But the source doesn't have to be available online, let alone free, and textbooks usually aren't, so it's hard for anybody to point o

            • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • by msauve ( 701917 )
            Define "journalist." Anyone can claim to be one.
        • Wait, why not? Court records are a source, aren't they?
          Depends on the country.

          The only court records allowed in Germany are:
          Person X, got accused for Y at date Z, and was prosecuted in City C, at Court Bla, and found guilty/non guilty and convicted to T. Probably you do not even get a photo.

          • by jabuzz ( 182671 )

            Here in the UK all judgements are a matter of public record. These days they are even published on a website for you to download and read. For example a nice IT related one (basically a shit IT system is no defence in the UK)

            https://www.bailii.org/ew/case... [bailii.org]

            Hidden court judgements unless for some national security reasons are incompatible with a free open and democratic society.

            • I did not say the "judgment" is hidden.
              I said the records of the court proceedings are not published.

              If you want to see them, you have to go to the court in question and look in to the archives.

      • There is a possibility that he could just delete the picture and nobody would revert it. If he doesn't log in he can't get banned (except by IP, but he could do it from a starbucks or whatever).

      • Shouldn't he just cite Discovery's retraction or correction? Or be able to just say it's not in that source if they took it down? The Discovery site is the one that made money off of this mistake, not wikipedia.
        • Once discovery retracts, yes. How long did it take them to retract?

          • My point is that hating on wikipedia makes no sense when a well-known well-funded source like discovery is the actual problem. Expecting wikipedia to be better than its cited sources is an obvious fallacy.
            • An encyclopedia with global reach has absolutely no business citing a crappy source like that. Yet this topic area is full of people citing true crime trash. It's the equivalent of citing The National Enquirer or The Daily Express in an article on cancer. You end up spreading fake news. Wikipedia has over the years developed sourcing guidelines and policies for medical articles that are relatively well observed, but in other topic areas like this one anything goes.
      • by N1AK ( 864906 )
        It might have been difficult to get it changed, but based on the summary it doesn't appear that anyone tried to do anything to change it until the single edit that did (and it wasn't reverted at that stage even though the edit wasn't by an established editor); if people had been trying to correct it for a while and commenting on the site that it was wrong, but the image wasn't changed then this would be a significantly different story but that isn't the case.

        Your wrong about the birthdate story. Encyclop
      • In other words, run the editors through a lawsuit shredder to disabuse them of their arrogant positions.

    • Re:WTF... (Score:4, Informative)

      by NicBenjamin ( 2124018 ) on Sunday November 07, 2021 @07:51PM (#61967025)

      It's not that simple.

      The Discovery Channel documentary is considered a secondary source [wikipedia.org], and Wikipedia says secondary sources to be more reliable than primary sources (aka: nobody wants Donald Trump editing his own page) or tertiary sources (ie: other encyclopedias). So he'd need to get the correct picture placed on a well-known news site, then he'd need some third party to make the edit

      Ideally the secondary source would go into some detail about why the Discovery doc is wrong, in an irrefutable manner, preferably including the actual photo, because if the dipshit who put the wrong Nathaniel White photo fights you on the basis that Discovery is more reliable that's gonna be a pain.

      • In a game of rock, paper, scissors shouldn't a court document win over all others?

        • It would in a college essay because that's a primary source. You wouldn't even be able to use the Discovery doc because it isn't a primary source. But this isn't college, it's Wikipedia, and Wikipedia hates primary sources.

          So you have to have a secondary source. If you're lucky nobody argues with you on your new secondary source. If you're not somebody does and life gets difficult.

          • I have never seen a Wikipedia article without a primary source.

            Does that word/term "primary source" have a different meaning in English than in German?

            • Re:WTF... (Score:5, Informative)

              by NicBenjamin ( 2124018 ) on Monday November 08, 2021 @02:09AM (#61967561)

              Primary sources are used, but not preferred because the idea is Wikipedia's an encyclopedia. Primary sources are research, and encyclopedias report on other people's research. They don't do it themselves.

              To quote the link [wikipedia.org] I already posted:
              Wikipedia articles should be based mainly on reliable secondary sources, i.e., a document or recording that relates or discusses information originally presented elsewhere. ....
              Primary sources are often difficult to use appropriately. Although they can be both reliable and useful in certain situations, they must be used with caution in order to avoid original research. Although specific facts may be taken from primary sources, secondary sources that present the same material are preferred. Large blocks of material based purely on primary sources should be avoided. All interpretive claims, analyses, or synthetic claims about primary sources must be referenced to a secondary source, rather than original analysis of the primary-source material by Wikipedia editors.

              When editing articles in which the use of primary sources is a concern, in-line templates, such as {{primary source-inline}} and {{better source}}, or article templates, such as {{primary sources}} and {{refimprove science}}, may be used to mark areas of concern.

              • by pjt33 ( 739471 )

                Primary sources are research, and encyclopedias report on other people's research. They don't do it themselves.

                Which is, of course, bovine excrement. Other encyclopaedias pay experts to write their articles, and the experts report on their own research as well as on other people's.

                • Other encyclopedias pay experts to write their articles, and the experts report on their own research as well as on other people's.

                  The experts use research published in journals as references in the encyclopedia articles. They don't report new previously unpublished research directly in an encyclopedia.

                  Scientific journals are primary sources.

                  Encyclopedias are secondary sources that reference primary sources.

                  • Which refutes his argument but completely supports the conclusion. Avoiding citing primary sources is bovine excrement. It supports a gatekeeper oligarchy.

                    Wikipedia shouldn't be a primary source but pointing at them is fine.
              • That is not a ban on primary sources. That is a ban on inserting (novel) commentary with a primary source as the reference and then claiming it is somehow "superior" to commentary in a secondary source. (which I bet happens a lot in wikipedia editing) The point is that there shouldn't be anything "new" in the wiki article that is not in the cited source. This policy just says that is trickier with primary sources. The policy explicitly says that taking *facts* from primary sources is fine. I think "thi

      • Re:WTF... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mamba-mamba ( 445365 ) on Sunday November 07, 2021 @09:08PM (#61967173)

        I actually don't think this is correct. If he wanted to include a fact in a story, he would need to cite a secondary source. If he is asking to have purported incorrect information removed, it should be sufficient to convince the editors of the page that the information is incorrect, and primary research should do that (court documents). But I have not found wikipedia editors to be very flexible, so I don't know. What they SAY is that they want to avoid incorrect information at all costs, even if they mistakenly omit information that might be true and useful from time to time. But maybe that is bullshit that they say when you try to add something. They have some other line of bullshit when you try to delete something. In reality they just want to control their little page and not let anybody else touch it. Maybe.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          GDPR style rules would really help here. Since they are processing his personal information (a photo of him) they would be required to abide by the usual rules. That means he has the right to get errors corrected, and the right to have inaccurate or no longer relevant information removed.

        • "But I have not found wikipedia editors to be very flexible"

          You click edit. You change the content to a correct picture. You make a notation in the edit indicating prior picture was of an unrelated British (toss in profession here) man who shares the same name. Maybe toss a link to his FB profile. Done.

          People drastically overcomplicate things. Every so often you find an article with a personal dictator, usually contentious and political things, but most of the time not. I've done hundreds of edits in good f
      • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        Well since the discovery channel documentary is wrong, he should pursue them and force them to issue a retraction.
        Then their retraction can be cited to update the other sites like wikipedia.

        • The point is that Wikipedia should never have cited a trash source like "crimefeed" in the first place. It should cite authoritative sources that have an excellent reputation for fact-checking and accuracy, as one Wikipedia policy puts it. That is not "crimefeed". Moreover, the Wikipedia article falsely claimed the picture came from the New York State Department of Corrections.
    • Its the wikipedia alpha-lock.

      Incorrect info in wiki.
      Wiki gets cited in a shitty web news article.
      Shitty web news article is used as source for wiki.

      Now its stuck like that forever.

    • Wikipedia doesn't care about truth, it cares about references. An incorrect reference is more important than truth as far as Wikipedia's article rules are concerned, even if it's an obvious easily verifiable truth.
    • If Mr White called it White Supremacy, then it would have been fixed immediately.
    • The weird bit is that this would not work, for the very reason this should avoid: So people don't inject their own opinion into Wikipedia. Primary sources, i.e. "I know that's true", are not permitted.

      The shit hits the fan when the sources cited by Wikipedia, in this case crimefeed, contain false information. That really puts you in a position right out of something Orwell could have written: You know it's wrong, you could probably even prove it's wrong, but an authority that the one who wrongs you believes

      • "Primary sources, i.e. 'I know that's true', are not permitted."

        Yes, this policy is very odd. The primary source is objectively the best source in almost all cases. Secondary sources selectively reference and misrepresent primary source data on a regular basis... often across the board in a form of mass cognitive dissonance.
  • The dismissal of the lawsuit is certainly nice for Wikipedia but it's crap for everybody else. It sets the precedent that Wikipedia can destroy people's lives without consequence. It's bad enough with the press in general, now we have one more organization.

    *Reference to the movie Brazil

    • Welcome to the Internet, where bad information can get spread for no reason.

      Welcome to humanity.

    • Citizen Journalists and their blogs.

    • Surely it's crimefeed.com/Discovery that ruined this guys life? Wikipedia may have popularlised it, and definitely have some of the responsibility, but surely it's the source material they used that's the real problem here.

      Also, surely, if you look at Wikipedia, and it says "souce: crimefeed.com", you may well contact Wikipedia and say "that picture's not right", but once given the brush off, you'd go contact the actual source and get them to change it. If they don't, then surely you'd take *them* to court.

  • The dirty little secret about the 'encyclopedia anyone can edit' is that there is an upper echelon of editors and diehards that decide on all content. They have a specific point of view and strictly enforce it. I do not use Wikipedia for anything other than a jumping-off point to find better sources. Even their founder Larry Sanger has publicly repudiated their overt bias: https://larrysanger.org/2020/0... [larrysanger.org]

    NOTE: The only exception appears to be the hard sciences, where editors are basically out of their de
    • It seems Wikipedia needs the same 1,000 eyes that open-source uses to ensure better quality.

      • It seems Wikipedia needs the same 1,000 eyes that open-source uses to ensure better quality.

        Making the bug shallow is a completely different problem than getting a pull request approved.

    • The problem is that good information can not be found. In 2016, if you wanted to understand the Trump collusion with Russia, or the server wiping problem, you wouldn't be able to. The golden showers and information around the Steele document took years to be uncovered.

      In the dearth of good information, it's impossible to write an accurate article, it will have to be biased one way or another. The solution is to not use Wikipedia as your source of truth for politically hot topics. Wikipedia is at best a star

      • Well okay, but my friends on facebook told me I need to confirm all this on snopes because that is the trustworthy place.
        I trust my friends on facebook, they provide a lot of good advice.

    • by fermion ( 181285 )
      Back in the days when Real Encyclopaedia like Britanica were still trying to justify their existence and killing a forest a year so people could pretend to be smart, critical analysis proved they were much analysis went into their actual accuracy. While the findings were that they were largely accurate, it was also pointed out that due to the fact that these books were more or less permanent, the inaccuracies would infect the information stream for a very long time.

      The fact is, as we learned in middle sc

    • by N1AK ( 864906 )
      An impressively ignorant response when this story is literally about a change that was made by an anonymous user who has never edited before or since; but sure the upper echolons decide on all content...
      • I went through your comment history and you're a leftist troll; and what do we say about trolls? ;)

        I'll give you the last word you're dying to have. Give me your best shot and sleep well and satisfied that you stuck it to an anonymous person on the internet today.
  • by localroger ( 258128 ) on Sunday November 07, 2021 @07:24PM (#61966971) Homepage
    My wife, who is a very minor public figure, had the wrong date listed for her birthday on Wikipedia for years. Since she is a very minor figure there were no other sources to cite, and they wouldn't take her word for it because she was a primary source. So they left the error up instead of correcting it even though, who the fuck is in a better position to know their own birthday than the actual person whose birthday it is? It's not like there is any advantage for her to gain by changing her birthdate. Yeah, I get it, you don't want people editing their own histories to whitewash things, but sometimes it's just an error that needs to be corrected. In this case, in fact, the man whose picture it was wasn't a "primary source," he was the error. Wikipedia has to get a more sensible attitude about shit like this.
    • She's got a campaign site right?

      She should be able to put it on her campaign site, have a volunteer edit it, and then win based on:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      At least in theory.

      • by lytlebill ( 659903 ) on Sunday November 07, 2021 @08:01PM (#61967053)

        "In theory" is sadly the best anyone may get out of wikipedia. I gave up contributing years ago; the amount of effort required to argue any point (even well-sourced ones) with a fanatical power-editor who has 'claimed' a particular subject's page or pages isn't worth it. As others have pointed out here in these comments, wikipedia is, at best, a starting point to find your own sources and come to a better conclusion.

        • Well, the SCRUM page in German on Wikipedia was wrong for years.
          I edited it several times, then my account got deleted.

          Now it more or less complies with the way I edited it.

        • As others have pointed out here in these comments, wikipedia is, at best, a starting point to find your own sources and come to a better conclusion.

          Yep. Unfortunately the last time I tried to find sources from wikipedia literally all of the relevant ones were paywalled. I don't think wikipedia should allow paywalled citations.

        • Though I would say that it is not too hard to tell when a page has been taken over by one of these people. Even a light checking of the major references or other related pages usually makes it obvious. Such pages also usually claim something ridiculous. The most recent one I have seen is the Paracetamol page [wikipedia.org] (acetaminophen, Tylenol), which is phrased in a way that implies that there is poor evidence that it reduces fever by saying "its benefits are unclear" for management of fever. That is obviously gar
    • On the contrary, primary sources are explicitly allowed for statements of fact [wikipedia.org], such as birthdays. The actual issue is that your primary source needs to be published and accessible [wikipedia.org], otherwise anyone could claim to be your wife and make the edit.
    • by crazyvas ( 853396 ) on Monday November 08, 2021 @03:41AM (#61967653)

      even though, who the fuck is in a better position to know their own birthday than the actual person whose birthday it is?

      Her mom?

    • by N1AK ( 864906 )

      who the fuck is in a better position to know their own birthday than the actual person whose birthday it is?

      How can you have been on a site like /. for this long and not get the flaw in statements like this. Anyone can claim to be someone else on Wikipedia, and people can have plenty of reasons to lie about themselves; you think an actual murderer wouldn't have any motivation to tell Wikipedia that the picture is wrong and to ignore the other sources? To be honest I see claims like this on here way too ofte

  • Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Sunday November 07, 2021 @08:24PM (#61967089)

    Wikipedia is like democracy. It's shit. It sucks. But there's nothing better.

    • Try a public library.
    • Wikipedia is like USA. There are a lot of people calling it democratic, it is oppressive to truth seekers and internally it only works for money by highly political sociopathic people.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      In this case there definitely are better ways though. Wikipedia could have a dispute resolution system that would have allowed this person to show some government ID to a trusted editor, who could then have addressed the problem.

      If he lived in a GDPR country he could have used the Right to be Forgotten to clean up Google too. It's a pretty open-and-shut case, and Google would have been required to remove results containing the wrong photo.

      • Wikipedia could have a dispute resolution system that would have allowed this person to show some government ID to a trusted editor, who could then have addressed the problem.

        That exists. But it didn't happen, because the problem got fixed before the victim even complained.

    • It still doesn't excuse Wikipedia's nonchalant attitude towards the suit and the whole thing. My God, that was just fucked up.
  • In a similar, situation, I had a teacher who's picture shared the same name as a criminal. Presented the issue to the talk page, and was asked if "he had a citation for that" (?) - ie. a citation for something that doesn't exist. He eventually just removed his picture, and the little insufferable shits banned his entire /24 block.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      I had an unpublished article -- a work in progress, in my local/private edit/area. It was removed (in this incident - along with others that I was working on) by a wiki-admin; cited as "not up to wikipedia standards". (Note: when a wiki-admin deletes something; it's GONE; along with all of the history) I worked to get it back -- again in my edit area; not published; and asked in the 'talk' section for help to make it better, along with some improvements. Again - the same admin deleted it. That admin (wh
    • by Moryath ( 553296 )
      That's what you get from an "encyclopedia" run by narcissistic/autistic individuals who form basically a circle-jerk of abuse towards anyone "outside the club." Factually correct information doesn't really matter to them - they'll happily cover each other's butts, and wikimedia foundation doesn't give a fuck about the harm they do to others.
  • This problem isn't specific to Wikipedia. Any encyclopedia (not to mention newspapers) would have this problem. It's just that over half the people alive right now don't remember paper encyclopedias, and there aren't any left to compare it to. Wikipedia's secondary vs. primary source rule exists for a very good reason. But it's certainly not perfect. I'm sorry to say it but this is what lawsuits are for. Someone posted the wrong information about this guy (prior to Wikipedia posting it) and is at leas
  • that specializes on killing people that look like this guy. Now that would be embarassing!

  • The blog post celebrates a judge's dismissal of the suit as "a victory for free knowledge,"

    I don't think there is anything to celebrate about, as I don't think this has got anything to do with 'free knowledge' and also think the judgement is wrong. If it was the right person and he complained about it, it would be another matter, although I still think you have to be very careful what to publish about people on something like wikipedia. But in this case nobody really bothered to actually fact-check if the

  • The rules on Biographies of living persons [wikipedia.org] states:

    Images

    Images of living persons should not be used out of context to present a person in a false or disparaging light. This is particularly important for police booking photographs (mugshots), or situations where the subject did not expect to be photographed. Any police photograph used to imply that the person depicted was charged with or convicted of a specific crime must be sourced to a top-quality reliable source with a widely acknowledged reputation for fact-checking and accuracy that links the relevant image to the specific incident or crime in question.

    Images of living persons that have been created by Wikipedians or others may be used only if they have been released under a copyright licence that is compatible with Wikipedia:Image use policy.

    It sounds like they were not following their own rules.

  • That's a defamation lawsuit right there!

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