Actor Ron Livingston is suing a Wikipedia vandal because his article incorrectly claimed that he is homosexual and in a relationship with Lee Dennison. Livingston claimed that the offending material was inserted by the vandal, and his later attempts to remove the misinformation were reverted by the same person. Livingston is suing for libel, invasion of privacy, and for the use of his name and likeness without his permission.[1][2][3]
A judge at the High Court in London ordered the Wikimedia Foundation to disclose the IP address of an editor who had added some sensitive information to the article of a business woman, also involving the woman's young child. The information has since been removed from the article. The woman, who cannot be named in relation to this case, had previously received threatening anonymous letters.
The Wikimedia Foundation said it would reveal the IP address if it received an order to do so.[4] Its Privacy policy restricts the disclosure of such data to some very limited circumstances, one of them being "a valid subpoena or other compulsory request from law enforcement". In a policy update last year, it had committed to notifying (if possible) community members when their personal data, such as IP addresses, has been sought by legal processes (see previous story).
In an article for The Daily Beast titled The Myth of Wikipedia Democracy, Nicholas Ciarelli asserts that "[d]espite its reputation for openness, the online encyclopedia has long been ruled by a tight clique of aggressive editors who drive out amateurs and newcomers". Among others, the article cites Jimmy Wales, User:Wikimachine (who had been banned for one year in the Liancourt Rocks arbitration case), independent physics researcher Eric Lerner (an advocate of plasma cosmology; a theory contradicting the current scientific consensus in cosmology), and Internet expert Clay Shirky (member of the Wikimedia Foundation's advisory board) who offered the following to explain the fact that Wikipedia regulars are "reflexively suspicious of everyone from watching people attack Wikipedia over all the years":
Discuss this story
Are we sure that Wikipedia is the entity being sued in the Livingstone case? This claim is cited to the UPI piece, which references its claim only to TMZ, whose article does not seem to support it. Skomorokh 04:32, 9 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The skepticism is correct. See the more accurate legal coverage at Copyrights and Campaigns and THR, Esq -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 14:21, 9 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]