Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw83838445 | Hacker News Reader

You can not sue Wikipedia. You could sue facebook.

I hope I don’t sound condescending, that’s not my intent, but this made me smile, it means you think Wikipedia is special. I like that.

But, for the record, they regularly get sued. I think they are being seriously sued in India for defamation at the moment, for example.

But could you actually get any money from suing Wikipedia? They would just deflect blame to volunteer editors.

Why do you think facebook is ending fact-checkers now? Editors are hired by facebook, facebook is the publisher. If facebook publishes "fact" and people get harmed as result, Facebook gets sued to bankruptcy. There is no protection from government anymore!

> If facebook publishes "fact" and people get harmed as result, Facebook gets sued to bankruptcy.

What a nice reality would it be where Facbook could be actually sued to bankruptcy for whatever reason, let alone such minor one. Sadly it's not our reality.

Of course you can sue Wikipedia. There's no law against suing Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is just a platform, it is not a publisher. Facebook was the publisher!

Suing Wikipedia would be like suing email and SMTP protocol!

In the U.S. (relevant because it is home to the Wikimedia Foundation), you can sue anyone for any reason at any time. You might get immediately dismissed, sued back ("abuse of process" or similar), or something along those lines, but there is nothing structural that stops you.

The structural reason that you can't sue email is that email is not an "anyone", it's an abstract concept. How would you even e.g. notify "email" that it is under litigation?

Neither email not SMTP are legal entities.

Wikipedia (or more precisely, the Wikimedia Foundation that owns it) is.

You can absolutely sue Wikipedia [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_News_International_vs._W...

edit: My bad, I get the joke now.

I'm referring to the organisations that anoint themselves as arbiters of truth rather than just Facebook but I suppose the point almost stands

Reply on news.ycombinator.com