Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-07-24/Skutt suit

A Nebraska private school has reportedly filed a lawsuit to determine the identity of the person or persons responsible for edits to the Wikipedia article about the school, according to a story published on 22 July by the Omaha World-Herald (subscription required to read the full report).

As reported by the World-Herald, officials from Skutt Catholic High School, a private school located in Omaha, Nebraska, have sued "John and Jane Doe" in Douglas County District Court. The suit claims unspecified damages over edits made from two IP addresses to the school's Wikipedia article. A school attorney said, "These particular edits were really harmful and mean-spirited".

It is not known precisely when the suit was filed, but the court has apparently issued a subpoena to Cox Communications to identify the users of the IP addresses. Cox, which like most internet service providers generally does not disclose such information without legal proceedings, has indicated that it would cooperate with the subpoena.

The reporter, Veronica Stickney, quoted a 13 June edit made by 68.107.235.103, a Cox IP address, that commented about the school's "ridiculously high" tuition, "awful education", and said most students are "complete idiots". This was its only edit to the article, and although it was reverted by the next editor, Shimgray, the IP was not blocked (it did receive a brief block in February for vandalism to Hannibal and Alexander the Great).

While a number of IP addresses have been responsible for vandalism to the article about Skutt, the suit reportedly focused on only two. Based on the nature of the edits, the most likely other candidate is 68.96.26.20. This IP address made a number of edits to the article, and was blocked indefinitely on 29 April by Shimgray for "repeated explicit allegations of illegal activity". (Shimgray also deleted most of the revision history; currently the article is semi-protected and its history begins with edits on 22 July.)

The user in question had regularly inserted claims about the school's principal beginning in February. On the first such occasion, the claim actually remained in the article for nearly two weeks, as the next user to come along simply marked it as citation needed. This type of approach to potentially defamatory and unsourced material has been strongly criticized by Jimmy Wales as inappropriate.

The story seemed to imply that the passage written by 68.107.235.103 came from one of the IPs identified in the suit, but this is not confirmed. If it was not one of the two IPs in question, a third candidate would be 68.99.30.137. This IP address made edits very similar in nature to 68.96.26.20, sufficiently so that one might guess the same person was responsible.

This would be the second lawsuit directly related to Wikipedia content, although so far the Wikimedia Foundation itself has not been a party to either case. The first, a German case brought by a couple whose deceased son has a Wikipedia article, was against the German Wikimedia chapter. In that matter, the court ultimately ruled against the couple's efforts to prevent the publication of their son's full name in the article.