Wikipedia:No legal threats
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This page documents an official policy on the English Wikipedia. It is a widely accepted 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. |
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This page in a nutshell: Do not make threats or claims of legal action on Wikipedia. If you have a dispute with the Community or its members, use dispute resolution. A polite report of a legal problem such as defamation or copyright infringement is not threatening and will be acted on quickly. If you do choose to take legal action, please refrain from editing until it is resolved and note that your user account or IP address may be blocked. |
| Wikipedia policy |
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| Behavioral standards |
| Bots Civility Editing policy No legal threats No personal attacks Ownership of articles Sock puppetry Three-revert rule User accounts Vandalism |
Do not make legal threats on Wikipedia.
You should always first attempt to resolve disputes using Wikipedia'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 Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia itself, you should contact Wikipedia's parent organisation, the Wikimedia Foundation.
If you make legal threats, 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 Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents or your friendly local administrator.
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[edit] 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 Wikipedia, 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 Wikipedia:Copyright problems.
Wikipedia'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 Wikipedia, please contact the information team.
[edit] Background to the policy
[edit] 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 Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia.
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.
[edit] Withdrawal of legal threat
The Wikipedia 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: -
- It reduces scope for escalation of a bad situation,
- It reduces stress and administrative burden on the wiki,
- It reduces disruption to articles and the editorial environment,
- 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.
