Wikipedia:No legal threats
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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This page is an official policy on the English Wikipedia. It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page. |
 This policy in a nutshell: |
| Do not make threats or claims of legal action against users or Wikipedia itself. If you have a dispute with user(s) or the Community, use dispute resolution. If you see a legal problem such as defamation or copyright infringement, a polite report is welcome and will be acted on quickly. If you do choose to take legal action, please refrain from editing until it is resolved. |
| Wikipedia policies |
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| Article standards |
| Neutral point of view Verifiable information only No original research Citing sources What Wikipedia is not Biographies of living persons |
| Working with others |
| Civility and etiquette No personal attacks Resolving disputes |
Don't make legal threats against other users of Wikipedia. Apart from being incivil, doing so causes a number of serious problems:
- It severely inhibits free editing of pages, a concept that is absolutely necessary to ensure that Wikipedia remains neutral. Without this freedom, we risk one side of a dispute intimidating the other, thus causing a systematic bias in our articles.
- It causes bad feelings and a lack of trust amongst the Wikipedia community, damaging our ability to proceed quickly and efficiently with an assumption of mutual good faith.
- Wikipedia has had bad experiences with users who have made legal threats in the past, and by making legal threats, you may damage your reputation on Wikipedia.
- A legal threat may lead to you being blocked from editing (on a case by case basis), so as not to exacerbate the problem through other than legal channels.
Instead, first attempt to resolve disputes using the dispute resolution procedures. This will often times lead to a solution without resorting to the blunt tool of the law. If the dispute resolution procedures do not resolve your problem then, please use the laws as you like, in the knowledge that you have taken all reasonable steps to resolve the situation amicably.
But, if you really feel the need to take legal actions severely, we cannot prevent you from doing so. We ask you, however, that while you are doing so, you are expected strongly not to edit Wikipedia until the matter of law is settled - one way or the other - to ensure that all legal processes happen via proper legal channels.
If you do decide to proceed with legal action, you should deal with it privately with the user by e-mail. Do not thrash out the issue in a Wikipedia forum or talk page; you may find that other users take the side of the other party. (Would you really want to sue a group of users if that happened?) If your issue involves Wikipedia itself, you should contact Wikipedia's parent organisation, the Wikimedia Foundation.
[edit] Legal complaints
"Making a polite, coherent complaint in cases of copyright infringement or attacks against you" is not a "legal threat".
If you are the owner of copyrighted material which has been inappropriately added to Wikipedia, a clear statement about whether it is licensed for such use or not, is welcome and appropriate. According to the copyrights policy, copyrighted material not licensed for use and not justifiable as fair use will be removed.
Similarly, slander, libel, and defamation of character are not tolerated on Wikipedia. If you feel Wikipedia content libels you or someone else, you may bring it to the attention of the Community and administrators here(Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents), or by contacting the infoteam as described on this page(Wikipedia:LIBEL). In either case the offensive material should be removed quickly. Disagreements as to the identity of a person, their motivations for a given action, opinions of third parties about them, etc. are not slander, and legal threats (of course, except for the disagreements above) cannot be used to have biased points of view enshrined in Wikipedia's articles.
It was proposed that revocation of editing privileges be available as a penalty. In discussion on the talk page, there was no consensus support for that measure, in part because it's necessary to take copyright infringement action. It's also often courteous to ask a site operator — the community in this case — to assist and to notify the other party prior to seeking restraining orders or police assistance to protect yourself from possible threats.
