From my long-ago newspaper days, not saying "murder" without a conviction (and similar for many other crimes) is foundationally a CYA so you don't get sued. So I have no problem seeing why Wikipedia adopted it
Brilliant post. As I read it I wondered about pre-trial publicity in the US and UK. Journalists in the US operate under far fewer restrictions than their counterparts here in the UK, and that extends to court reporting too. That must be another headache for Wikipedia.
You know, I honestly don't know very much about that. I tend to prefer UK news over US news (especially the Economist and the Guardian), so I'll say that I read a lot of UK news sources but I have never totally understood the different set of laws and restrictions. I did once read an article (in the Guardian, I think) that was so completely incoherent to me, because there wasn't a single actual name included in it. I wish I could find it now but what would I google?
Anyway, in terms of how this extends to Wikipedia. I truly don't know, and it's possible that it doesn't. There isn't a distinct Wikipedia version for either the UK or the US (or any other international English versions), which I consider to be a good thing. Do you have a recent example of a highly publicized UK court case this I could look into to try to understand this?
I will point out that as of the writing of this comment, the name "Jonathan Ross" has not been added to the article for "Killing of Renee Good" but there is a lot of talk in the Talk page about whether or not it should be. Right now, there is an argument to "wait until charges are filed" but it's unclear if that will be happening.
The craziest UK laws on reporting to me are super-injuctions where not only can the information not be published, but the fact that the information itself cannot be published, cannot be published. This lead to an amazing but quite puzzling article from The Guardian when they had a super-injuction on the Trafigura case, when an MP used parliamentary privilege to talk about the injuction, preventing the Guardian "from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found" : https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/oct/12/guardian-gagged-from-reporting-parliament
I doubt those could be applied to Wikipedia since they only apply to England and they can be freely published in foreign media (including Scotland)
Yeah I don't think you could apply any of those to Wikipedia but it is totally nuts. That's a crazy article. I wish I could figure out how to find the other one I remember like that. It was just as incoherent and meaningless.
The article noted was 2009. Has this travesty (from a U.S. POV at least) been revisited in the intervening decade and a half? This article - and the rabbit hole I descended about the general state of family court proceedings, and of (seeming) “child takings by the State”.. Make me wonder if I’m reading about a nation quite a bit further to the East than Great Britain.
But then, I'm sure the U.S. has its own crazy laws like this.
From my long-ago newspaper days, not saying "murder" without a conviction (and similar for many other crimes) is foundationally a CYA so you don't get sued. So I have no problem seeing why Wikipedia adopted it
Yeah it shouldn’t be a hard concept to grasp but drama bubbles up over it routinely.
Brilliant post. As I read it I wondered about pre-trial publicity in the US and UK. Journalists in the US operate under far fewer restrictions than their counterparts here in the UK, and that extends to court reporting too. That must be another headache for Wikipedia.
You know, I honestly don't know very much about that. I tend to prefer UK news over US news (especially the Economist and the Guardian), so I'll say that I read a lot of UK news sources but I have never totally understood the different set of laws and restrictions. I did once read an article (in the Guardian, I think) that was so completely incoherent to me, because there wasn't a single actual name included in it. I wish I could find it now but what would I google?
Anyway, in terms of how this extends to Wikipedia. I truly don't know, and it's possible that it doesn't. There isn't a distinct Wikipedia version for either the UK or the US (or any other international English versions), which I consider to be a good thing. Do you have a recent example of a highly publicized UK court case this I could look into to try to understand this?
I will point out that as of the writing of this comment, the name "Jonathan Ross" has not been added to the article for "Killing of Renee Good" but there is a lot of talk in the Talk page about whether or not it should be. Right now, there is an argument to "wait until charges are filed" but it's unclear if that will be happening.
The craziest UK laws on reporting to me are super-injuctions where not only can the information not be published, but the fact that the information itself cannot be published, cannot be published. This lead to an amazing but quite puzzling article from The Guardian when they had a super-injuction on the Trafigura case, when an MP used parliamentary privilege to talk about the injuction, preventing the Guardian "from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found" : https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/oct/12/guardian-gagged-from-reporting-parliament
I doubt those could be applied to Wikipedia since they only apply to England and they can be freely published in foreign media (including Scotland)
Yeah I don't think you could apply any of those to Wikipedia but it is totally nuts. That's a crazy article. I wish I could figure out how to find the other one I remember like that. It was just as incoherent and meaningless.
The article noted was 2009. Has this travesty (from a U.S. POV at least) been revisited in the intervening decade and a half? This article - and the rabbit hole I descended about the general state of family court proceedings, and of (seeming) “child takings by the State”.. Make me wonder if I’m reading about a nation quite a bit further to the East than Great Britain.
But then, I'm sure the U.S. has its own crazy laws like this.