The Wikimedia Foundation has been involve in several lawsuits. Some of them have been successful for the plaintiff, but others have been unsuccessful.
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In May 2011, Louis Bacon took out an injunction against the Wikimedia Foundation in order to compel it to reveal the identity of the editors who defamed him on Wikipedia.[1][2]
Barbara Bauer, a literary agent tried to sue Wikipedia on grounds of defamation, but the case was dismissed because of the Communications Decency Act.[3]
Fuzzy Zoeller tried to sue Wikipedia because of defamation, but he was unable to do so due to the Communications Decency Act. He then sued the Miami firm from whose computers the edits were made.
The National Portrait Gallery has accused the Wikimedia Foundation of violating its copyrights.
Larry Sanger has complained to the FBI regarding childlike pornographic content on Wikipedia.[4]
His letter to the FBI had the following content:
I really regret having to report this, but I feel I must. My name is Dr. Larry Sanger and I am widely known as co-founder of Wikipedia, the encyclopedia project. I have long since departed the organization, over disagreements about editorial and management policy. I have also since founded a more responsible project, Citizendium.org, and a teacher-edited non-profit directory of preK-12 educational videos, WatchKnow.org. Given my position of influence on matters related to Wikipedia, though I'm no longer associated with it, I feel I have a moral obligation to make the following report … [and] a legal obligation as well, so here goes. I believe Wikimedia Commons, owned and hosted by the California-based Wikimedia Foundation, may be knowingly distributing child pornography. The clearest instances I found (I did not want to look for long) are linked from [deleting link; it's a category about [pedophilia] and [link deleted; it's a category about something called lolicon]. I don't know if there is any more, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is—the content on the various Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons and various others, are truly vast.You can see [on the history of the category page] that the page has existed for three years. Considering that Eric Moeller, a high-level Wikipedia manager, is well known for his views in defense of pedophilia, surely the existence of this page must have come to the attention of those with the legal responsibility for the Wikimedia projects.
In my non-lawyer's opinion, it looks like this violates 18 USC §1466A (2)(A). Perhaps the defense of this will be that the depictions are exempted due to §1466A (2)(B), i.e., the Wikimedia Foundation may argue that the images have some artistic value. I guess that's for you and maybe the courts to decide … I don't envy the FBI the task of regulating the seedy underside of the Internet, and I doubt this is very high on your list of priorities. But I want to be on the record stating that this is wrong and should be investigated.
Texas Instruments sent a DMCA takedown notice to the Wikimedia Foundation because certain cryptographic keys were made public on this article: Texas Instruments signing key controversy.
In addition to the above mentioned article, two other articles came under the purview of Wikipedia's office actions, because of the DMCA. These articles are Damon Dash and Conventional PCI.
In 2010 the FBI sent a letter to Wikipedia demanding that it cease and desist from using its seal on its website. The FBI claimed that such practice was illegal and threatened to sue. In reply Wikimedia counsel Mike Godwin sent a counter notice to the FBI claiming that Wikipedia was not in the wrong when it displayed the FBI seal on its website. He defended Wikipedia's actions and also refused to remove the seal.[5][6][7][8][9]