German Wikipedia Back Online After Controversial Shutdown
After it had been unavailable in Germany for more than two days, the Wikipedia's German portal is finally back online. The local German version of the Wikipedia had become unavailable after a member of the German parliament, Lutz Heilmann, pressed charges against the German Wikipedia because of defamatory statements in his biography on the site. Heilmann argued that the article was "false and slanderous." A German judge then ordered the closure of the German portal for the Wikipedia, wikipedia.de.
The Wikipedia entry about Heilmann, who is no stranger to controversy, accused the politician of sending threatening text messages to his ex-partner and stated that Heilmann was about to lose his diplomatic immunity. There have indeed been rumors that Heilmann is under investigation by the German parliament because of these reports, though other statements in the article about the questionable status of his college degree and his involvement in an online pornography venture are rather questionable.
'Unintentional'
After assessing the damage he had done, Heilmann, according to a post on his own site, has now decided not to press any further charges against the non-profit organization behind the German Wikipedia project, though he might still press charges against the authors of the controversial statements in his Wikipedia entry. In this statement, Heilmann argues that he never intended for the whole site to be shut down because of this, but that he wasn't able to stop the German bureaucracy from taking its course during the weekend because of a legal error in his request to have the ban overturned.
Streisand Effect
Of course, the whole affair spectacularly backfired on Heilmann and turned out to be a boon for the German Wikipedia, which collected donations worth over 32,000 Euros during the weekend. The controversial article about Heilman was read over half a million times since last Friday.
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Can somebody explain to me how can a site be legally shut down if the piece of information in question was contributed by a user?
Does it mean that if I write something derogatory about Heilmann on RWW this site might be shut down in Germany as well?
No, they can not. Only if your site is hosted in Germany or if you are a German residential. That is the reason why they shut down the German entry site of Wikipedia. The article is hosted in the United States and could be read the whole time via de.wikipedia.org.
In regard to user generated content, the different courts in Germany made different judgements. In the north they give the website owner more responsibility for the hosted content than in the south.
The interesting thing was that Heilmann was a second row politician and now he made it on the news and probably his typical voters don not care about the internet. So it could be that it was actually a smart move. Bad news are better than no news.
Regards,
Marco
So then Germany = China then? I mean when something like this happened in Russia there was a huge scandal. I didn't know that Germany is such an authoritarian state. How can they shut something down just because one of the users wrote something? I thought there was a law that takes the responsibility off the website owner if the content was contributed by one of the users. Otherwise they might as well shut down Google and Yahoo because they show unfavorable info in their search results...
So, the German wikipedia site was not shut down. The URL http://www.wikipedia.de whose owner is www.wikimedia.de (an unincorporated association) redirects to the German wikipedia-site http://de.wikipedia.org.
The German (brain amputated) politician Lutz Heilmann has enforced by law to desist this redirect. Whatever, the whole action was just sick.
Marco, you are propably right. Now almost every German knows Heilmann, but I doubt that more people would vote now for an asshole.
deemeetree, what to say? In Germany we are a little more caring about our personal rights.
The whole website was actually not taken down. The German Wikipedia (which has been the frequent target of legal action, more perhaps even than the much larger English Wikipedia) remained available throughout at de.wikipedia.org and de.wikipedia.com (which redirects to .org).
So it could be that it was actually a smart move. Bad news are better than no news.