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German court orders Wikipedia to remove defamatory statements about a computer science professor

Lobby, Landgericht (State Court) Berlin

Writing in Heise Online on 2 November, Torsten Kleinz reports that the State Court of Berlin (file reference 27 O 12/7) has ordered the German Wikipedia to remove a critical passage on language researcher Alexander Waibel. "Just how far can one go in making supposedly reputation-damaging claims without substantiating them?" Computer scientist Weibel had sued Wikipedia following a claim sourced to the MDR magazine Fakt, in which he was linked to surveillance programs of the US intelligence services. Weibel, a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, sees the allegations of being connected with espionage programs as reputation-damaging. "One needs to be very careful before claiming a scientist has connections to the secret service", recommends the presiding judge. Whether the claims were justified or not was not taken into account by the court. The Wikimedia Foundation, which admitted to not being aware of any lack of veracity in the Fakt article, has not appealed the verdict. The corresponding text has since been removed from the encyclopedia's article.

If you are famous and you die, Wikipedia will be one of the first places people will go for the most recent information

Marty Friedman

Wikipedia 'Deaditors': The People Who Let The World Know When Famous People Die, says Antoinette Lattouf, senior reporter of 10 daily on 11 November. Revealing that Conor Crawford, a 30-year-old from Missouri who edits Wikipedia as Conman33 was the first to update the Wikipedia biography on the 2009 death of Michael Jackson, she continues by explaining that he was also involved in the reporting of the passing of Prince in 2016. According to Lattouf, "Wikipedia’s page view statistics show that the site is the first stop for many when actors and entertainers pass away". Crawford told 10 daily that "...in the 'era of fake news' Wikipedia needs to be more stringent".

In brief

Queen
  • Consensus: Why some Wikipedia disputes go unresolved – Study identifies reasons for unsettled editing disagreements and offers predictive tools that could improve deliberation. Rob Matheson reporting on November 6 in MIT News . More on the story of the research is published in the 6 November issue of Science Daily.
  • Paid editing: Yet another exposé, this time by Stephen Harrison in his 29 October column in Medium which includes a brief interview with admin SmartSE and David King (CorporateM) of Ethical Wiki. Entitled Wikipedia’s Top-Secret 'Hired Guns' Will Make You Matter (For a Price), it demonstrates again how hard it is to both combat undeclared paid editing, and to convince declared paid editors that despite the rules, their work is nevertheless unethical.
  • Music: In Loudwire on 31 October, Graham Hartmann claims to prove and disprove what’s written in the Wikipedia article about the Megadeth lead guitarist Marty Friedman. Perhaps a training exercise for would-be New Page Patrollers could be to delve into the history and see who is right and who is wrong. Maybe Tina S the French teenage shred guitar phenomenon would know.
  • Wikipedia: Sportfans schiessen bei Wikipedia gerne übers Ziel hinaus (Sport fans like shooting wide of the goal posts). The Executive Director of the WMF was in Berne, Switzerland on 10 November for a ten minute interview with editor Mathias Born of the German language Swiss daily newspaper Tages Anzeiger. The questions were routine and expected, as were the well-practiced answers, emphasizing the problems with contributions from sport fans, the need for more female contributors, and reassurance that the volunteer community's wishes for support are heard by the staff.
  • Docufilm: Pitchfork's Kristen Yoonsoo Kim in a 2 November review describes the docufilm Bohemian Rhapsody about Queen as "...Basically Queen's Wikipedia entry as a biopic", "Even without all the problems attached to the production, Bohemian Rhapsody is not so much a film as it is a dramatization of a Wikipedia entry, watered down and overedited."
  • Notable vandalism: For obvious reasons, The Signpost doesn't usually cover routine vandalism, but major media have reported on a recent incident at the Donald Trump article. Administrator TheSandDoctor explained the nature of the edit warring vandal or vandals to The Verge in a story widely reprinted (USA Today, Gizmodo, Newsweek and others). The UK media The Independent and Metro also carried a story. It does show that despite our very open policy towards editing, we are fairly quick to revert vandalism.



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  • Wow, with regard to the top story, that is a truly disturbing precedent, though in no way atypical of the general trend in European law (in terms of judgements or statutes) with regard to free speech in recent time. Even so, I think this particular instance deserves substantial scrutiny from all Wikimedia communities. The case summary here is more than a little vague (no offense Kudpung) when it says that "Whether the claims were justified or not, was not taken into account by the court.", but it sure seems as if the WMF chose not to appeal a ruling which forbids it to relay a new story by a third party, even though the underlying report had not been discredited. That problematic on multiple levels, and I for one would like to know a bit more about what the calculus was in choosing not to appeal a ruling that has such massive potential implications for any of Wikipedia's local iterations, not just de.Wikipedia. I don't want to jump to histrionics here until I have had a chance to review the case report and the facts here, but this is certainly a situation our disparate communities ought to investigate in detail, including the WMF's response. Without wishing to sound like a broken record, the possible fallout out here is massive. Snow let's rap 05:44, 1 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is highly disturbing, first in that a foreign country's courts (i.e. not U.S.) are giving Wikipedia orders directly, and second in the details of censoring an article. That said, as best as I can tell now the Wikipedia case started with an article http://www.mdr.de/fakt/usa_bezahlt_deutsche_forschung102.html which does not seem to exist now. It is at Wayback [1]. I don't think Google Translate is responsible for the blurriness of this source - it makes some pretty general claims about US funding research by a professor who is 50% at Carnegie Mellon University, but MDR article doesn't seem to believe in citing sources and details. Now there are things any rational person would guess about anyone in the field of computer science, especially one who works on automated speech recognition, but Wikipedia isn't about guessing and it's in no position to drag an apparently retracted TV news article out of the archive to publish claims sourced to it, which leaves it in a poor position to discuss a libel suit. Even if there's some precedent to be made about not kowtowing to Berlin, it would be best to choose a different test case. In the meanwhile, we should recognize that this was never really de.wikipedia's problem: it's an American research, American university, American government money. The professor says his work is all public record and given the quality of that retracted news article I don't believe its writers saw anything else. So if people are outraged here, get busy, build the article out in every direction without pruning it toward any particular goal, research what he actually worked on, state its support and usage factually and with appropriate credit of any controversial claim to its source. Wnt (talk) 12:52, 1 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • You still haven't covered Chris Hedges' half-hour interview of investigative journalist Helen Buyniski published on 21 October. Wikipedia: A Tool of the Global Elite. Maybe next month? — 🍣 SashiRolls t · c 14:19, 1 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Well, Czar, maybe Hedges' deep embarrassment when people introduce him with text from his Wikipedia page, because he just knows they've read it. I had a look at the undue emphasis on overblown claims of plagiarism when I first read the article. (After reading the talk page, I've removed the section as undue based on the consensus I found there for removal.) There is also a retrospective on a number of things: the Galloway / Phillip Cross incident of course, but also more generally the toleration of full-time editing and the obsessiveness (and competence with templates) needed to do it well, the Kazakh Wikipedia (this bit is particularly poignantly treated, for one of her sources, cf. [4]), the Seigenthaler story, the Clinton Foundation page, the Minassian Media story, WikiPR, COI editing, WikiScanner, the NYPD in March 2015, the antipathy to expertise, Larry Sanger, etc. It's quite the retrospective she's put together. It would be interesting to watch the Signpost tear it apart or recognize that there was some truth to what she says. I was impressed with her research at WPO, WR, and elsewhere. Of course, I should also say that I'm fairly involved in one of the stories in particular that she writes about, though I only had a chance to exchange with her after her research was done and after this interview had been filmed. Disclosure: I was blocked for 500 days, at least in part for a misunderstood comment I left here concerning two things: 1) the Sagecandor morality play & 2) the Minassian Media September 2016 communications audit and c-level training mission. Bri, let's talk content, not contributors (to the knowledge econoflu·x).  :) — 🍣 SashiRolls t · c 12:40, 2 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • I've only taken a brief look at Buyniski's articles on Medium -- the first appears to confuse the concept of evidence that proves chronic & endemic problems with the concept of proving that many problems exist & are being dealt with, & I lost interest half way thru; I'm still struggling thru the second -- but I'm seeing issues with her credibility. She cites Gary Null as an example of a sustained personal attack on a person (where she raises concerns that should be addressed), & claims she or others tried to "correct" the article on Null; however I've found no evidence that these attempts were made, at least in the last 6 months. I'm suspicious. Maybe someone with more time & experience with handling fringe theories can do a better job verifying Buyniski's claims. -- llywrch (talk) 21:57, 2 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
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