Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 00:42, 29 March 2008

This page documents an English Misplaced Pages policy.It describes a widely accepted standard that editors should normally follow, though exceptions may apply. Changes made to it should reflect consensus.

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This page in a nutshell: If you have a dispute with the Community or its members, use dispute resolution. If you do choose to use legal action or threats of legal action to resolve disputes, you will not be allowed to continue editing until it is resolved and your user account or IP address may be blocked. (A polite report of a legal problem such as defamation or copyright infringement is not threatening and will be acted on quickly.)

Do not make legal threats against Misplaced Pages or members of the Misplaced Pages community over Misplaced Pages disputes.

You should always first attempt to resolve disputes using Misplaced Pages's dispute resolution procedures.

If you must take legal action, we cannot prevent you from doing so. However, we require that you do not edit Misplaced Pages until the legal matter has been resolved to ensure that all legal processes happen via proper legal channels. You should instead contact the person or people involved directly. If your issue involves Misplaced Pages itself, you should contact Misplaced Pages's parent organisation, the Wikimedia Foundation.

If you make legal threats or take legal action over a dispute involving Misplaced Pages, you may be blocked from editing so that the matter is not exacerbated through other channels. Users who make legal threats will typically be blocked from editing indefinitely while legal threats are outstanding.

Legal threats should be reported to Misplaced Pages:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents or an administrator.

What a legal threat isn't

A polite, coherent complaint in cases of copyright infringement or attacks is not a "legal threat".

If you are the owner of copyrighted material which has been inappropriately added to Misplaced Pages, a clear statement about whether it is licensed for such use is welcome and appropriate. You may contact the information team, contact the Wikimedia Foundation's designated agent, or use the procedures at Misplaced Pages:Copyright problems.

Misplaced Pages's policy on defamation is to immediately delete libelous material when it has been identified. If you believe that you are the subject of a libelous statement on Misplaced Pages, please contact the information team.

Background to the policy

Rationale for the policy

Making legal threats is uncivil and causes a number of serious problems:

• It severely inhibits free editing of pages, a concept that is absolutely necessary to ensure that Misplaced Pages remains neutral. Without this freedom, we risk one side of a dispute intimidating the other, thus causing a systemic bias in our articles.
• It creates bad feelings and a lack of trust amongst the community, damaging our ability to proceed quickly and efficiently with an assumption of mutual good faith.
• We have had bad experiences with users who have made legal threats in the past. By making legal threats, you may damage your reputation on Misplaced Pages.

Attempting to resolve disputes using the dispute resolution procedures will often lead to a solution without resorting to the blunt tool of the law. If the dispute resolution procedures do not resolve your problem, and you then choose to take legal action, you do so in the knowledge that you took all reasonable steps to resolve the situation amicably.

Withdrawal of legal threat

The Misplaced Pages community has a long-standing general principle that (almost) anyone is capable of reform. Accordingly, statements made in anger or misjudgement should not always be held against people for the rest of their lives once genuinely and credibly withdrawn.

This policy removes an editor who makes legal threats to prevent damage or deterioration to the project. The editor is not blocked just because "it's a legal threat", but rather because: -

1. It reduces scope for escalation of a bad situation,
2. It reduces stress and administrative burden on the wiki,
3. It reduces disruption to articles and the editorial environment,
4. It prevents the difficult situation where a person is both seeking to be collaborative partner and also setting themselves up as litigatious adversary (in general those two roles are mutually exclusive).

If these conflicts are in fact resolved (or a consensus is reached to test if they are resolved), then in fact there may be no current issue against which to protect the project.

See also

• Misplaced Pages:Don't overlook legal threats
• meatball:LegalThreat

2. Part 2

• Misplaced Pages policies
• Misplaced Pages user conduct