Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Wikipedia Defamatory Remarks

Fuzzy Zoeller, a renowned golfer has filed a lawsuit to try and track down the author of a defamatory paragraph about him, posted on Wikipedia. Scott D Sheftall, Zoeller's Attorney, has filed the suit against a Miami-based education consulting firm, Josef Silny & Associates. He says he did so because the law would not allow him to sue Wikipedia and allegedly someone used a computer from Josef Silny & Associates to post the defamatory remarks.

Commenting on the lawsuit, Sheftall said the courts have made it clear for him to go after the source of the information, and that the Zoeller family wants to take a stand and put a stop to all this. Otherwise, Sheftall asserted, they would all end up as victims of these Internet vandals, who ought not to be able to act with such impunity.

Although the defamatory paragraph has now been removed from Wikipedia, it has been picked up by other Web sites. Josef Silny of Josef Silny & Associates expressed shock at the incident, and said he could not possibly imagine anybody doing such a thing. Silny has asked his computer consultant to look into the matter. Meanwhile, founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, maintained the online encyclopedia has not been contacted regarding the lawsuit, and that while they try to police the site pretty closely, people do tend to misbehave on the Internet.

As you can imagine, events like this happen quite often such as the Wikipedia Hindi page which had "the language of the pimps" added to it in two different places as well as the whole page being replaced with "
hindi still sucks ballz" and "indi eats poo (not darren)". Many events such as these are under investigation and the culprits may be prosecuted.

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