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A photo on Wikipedia can ruin your life

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By Andreas Kolbe
Andreas Kolbe is a former co-editor-in-chief of The Signpost and has been a Wikipedia contributor since 2006. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Signpost, its staff or of any other Wikipedian. Responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section.
WMF Legal Director Jacob Rogers

The Wikimedia Foundation's Legal Director, Jacob Rogers, this month published a triumphant essay on Wikimedia's Diff blog, titled "A victory for free knowledge: Florida judge rules Section 230 bars defamation claim against the Wikimedia Foundation". As he says in his post describing this legal victory for the Foundation,

The case began when plaintiff Nathaniel White sued the Wikimedia Foundation in January 2021, claiming that the Foundation was liable for the publication of photos that incorrectly identified him as a New York serial killer of the same name. Because of its open nature, sometimes inaccurate information is uploaded to Wikipedia and its companion projects, but the many members of our volunteer community are very effective at identifying and removing these inaccuracies when they do occur. Notably, this lawsuit was filed months after Wikipedia editors proactively corrected the error at issue in September 2020. Wikimedia moved to dismiss the amended complaint in June, arguing that plaintiff's claims were barred by Section 230.
In its order granting the Wikimedia Foundation's motion to dismiss, the court affirmed that "interactive computer service providers" such as the Foundation generally cannot be held liable for third-party content like Wikipedia articles and photographs. ... the plaintiff argued that the Foundation should be treated like a traditional offline publisher and held responsible as though it were vetting all posts made to the sites it hosts, despite the fact that it does not write or curate any of the content found on the projects. The court rejected this argument because it directly conflicts with Section 230 ...
This outcome perfectly demonstrates how critical Section 230 remains to crowdsourced projects and communities.
— Diff

So what actually happened on-wiki?

The case against the Wikimedia Foundation was dismissed by the Second Judicial Circuit court for Leon County, Florida. Picture shows Leon County Courthouse.

The case discussed in Rogers' essay on Diff concerned the Wikipedia biography of New York serial killer Nathaniel White. For more than two years this Wikipedia article had as its lead image a police photograph of a quite different Nathaniel White, an African-American man resident in Florida whose picture has also, equally erroneously, been used in a Discovery Channel broadcast on the New York serial killer of the same name.

The image was inserted into the Wikipedia article by User:Vwanweb on 28 May 2018, incorrectly identified as originating from the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. It was removed from the article on 4 September 2020 – an edit attributed by Wikipedia only to an American IP address, rather than a registered Wikipedia user account.

The removal of the image occurred about a week after Karl Etters, writing for the Tallahassee Democrat, reported that the Florida Mr. White had sued the Discovery Channel for defamation. In his article, Etters wrote that Wikipedia was also using the wrong picture to illustrate its article on the serial killer: "A Google search turns up the name of the Florida Nathaniel White with a Wikipedia page showing his photo and label as a serial killer."

Taken together, these facts contradict Rogers' characterization of how well Wikipedia deals with cases such as this:

  1. The photo was in the article for over two years. For a man to have his face presented to the world as that of a serial killer on a top-20 website, for such a significant amount of time, can hardly be described as indicative of "very effective" quality control on the part of the community.
  2. The picture was only removed after a press report pointed out that Wikipedia had the wrong picture. This means the deletion was in all likelihood reactive rather than "proactive", as it was described in the Diff essay.
  3. The wrong photograph appears to have been removed by an unknown member of the public, an IP address that had never edited before and has not edited since. The volunteer community seems to have been completely unaware of the problem throughout.

Image sourcing

Vwanweb captioned Mr. White's picture as originating from the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision in the Wikipedia article but named crimefeed.com, a site associated with Discovery, Inc., as the source in the picture upload. The Florida Nathaniel White first sued the Discovery Channel, with the Wikimedia Foundation added as a Defendant later on.

Now, surely no individual editor can be blamed for having failed to see the Tallahassee Democrat article. But it is just as surely inappropriate in a case like this, where real harm has been done to a living person – on which more below – to praise community processes. It would seem more appropriate –

  1. to acknowledge that community processes failed Mr. White to a quite egregious degree, and
  2. to alert the community to the fact that its quality control processes are in need of improvement.

The obvious issue is image sourcing, and especially the sourcing of photographs of criminals. The original upload of the picture by User:Vwanweb cited crimefeed.com as the source of the picture. Crimefeed.com today redirects to investigationdiscovery.com, a site owned by Discovery, Inc., which also owns the Discovery Channel. The Web Archive shows that an article on Nathaniel White was indeed published on the site on August 2, 2017. The article itself is not in the archive, but its URL matches the truncated "http://crimefeed.com/2017/08/31713..." URL listed in the log of the upload.

If this, then, was Vwanweb's source, subsequent events clearly showed that it was unreliable. And even less trustworthy sites (such as murderpedia.org) have been and are used in Wikipedia to source police photographs. Surely Wikipedia's guidelines, policies and community practices for sourcing images, in particular images used to imply responsibility for specific crimes, would benefit from some strengthening, to ensure they actually depict the correct individual.

Correctly indicating image provenance in an article, along the lines of the "Say where you read it" guideline that applies to written texts, is another aspect that may require attention: according to the upload information, the picture came from a "true crime" site, not the New York State Department as was indicated in the article.

Section 230: a quick recap

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has come under fire of late, from both sides of the political spectrum.

As Rogers explains in his Diff essay, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is essential to the way Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites have operated for the past twenty years. The key sentence in Section 230 is this: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." But the law has come under fire lately in the US, both from the political right and from the political left.

Republicans who feel their views are being censored online argue that social media websites have abandoned the ideals of plurality and political diversity, and that as a consequence websites should no longer enjoy Section 230 privileges that were originally designed to benefit neutral hosts. Some Democrats, meanwhile, have criticized sites for hiding behind Section 230 and doing too little about problematic content. In their view, Section 230 was created to enable sites to moderate content without liability risk to them, and if they don't do so, then the law is not fit for its purpose.

A common but mistaken idea about Section 230 in this context is that site operators like the Wikimedia Foundation would "lose" their protection if they started to moderate more content than they were legally required to remove (i.e. if they went beyond copyright infringements, child pornography, court-ordered removal of defamatory content, etc.). This notion is often expressed as follows: "If the Foundation were to start moderating content, it would no longer be a platform, but a publisher, and would become liable for everything posted on its sites."

This is almost the exact opposite of the truth. As Mike Godwin, former General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation, explained in Slate last year, Section 230 was actually "designed to empower internet companies to remove offensive, disturbing, or otherwise subscriber-alienating content without being liable for whatever else their users posted. The idea was that companies might be afraid to censor anything because in doing so, they would take on responsibility for everything." Section 230 was designed to remove that risk.

Interested readers can find more information on this issue in the following articles:

Who can the victim hold responsible?

This picture, uploaded by Vwanweb in the same week in 2018, purports to show Paula Angel, a woman said to have been hanged in New Mexico in 1861. According to historian John Boessenecker, it is a fabrication of far more recent origin by Gladwell Richardson alias Maurice Kildare, a man described by Boessenecker as "a leader in publishing fake stories and fake photos of the history of the Southwest". Significantly, perhaps, the image is not – or no longer – present on the page cited as its source in the Wikipedia upload.

The Diff essay contains another paragraph related to Section 230 that is worthy of particular attention. It implies that Mr. White would have done better to direct his complaint at User:Vwanweb. Let's look at this passage in detail. Rogers states:

It is important to note that Section 230's broad protection of Wikimedia projects and other online services does not leave litigants like Mr. White without options. Instead, the law simply requires that litigants direct their complaints at the individuals who made the statements at issue, rather than the forums where the statements were made. This both allows litigants to challenge the appropriate parties responsible for their harm and protects online hosting companies like the Wikimedia Foundation from the costs associated with liability for user-generated content.
— Diff

This may sound plausible and equitable enough to the general reader, but Rogers surely knows that Wikipedia editors, by and large, write under the cover of pseudonymity – a practice which the Wikimedia Foundation explicitly encourages and vigorously defends. Identifying contributors is no easy task – and certainly not one the Foundation wants people to pursue. According to the Wikimedia Foundation's Universal Code of Conduct, which is in the process of being adopted, determining and sharing a contributor's identity is "unacceptable". So, how genuine is this advice given to Mr. White?

Moreover, there is no reason to assume that User:Vwanweb, the editor concerned, would have been able to give appropriate compensation to Mr. White. To cite a precedent, when John Seigenthaler learned the identity of his pseudonymous Wikipedia defamer, Brian Chase, Seigenthaler ended up feeling sorry for Chase, and interceded with Chase's employer, who had fired Chase, to give him his job back.

Nor is there any reason to assume any malice or racist motives on the part of Vwanweb. That user had been very involved in Wikipedia's crime articles for a while, frequently requesting and uploading police photographs. In 2016, Vwanweb argued passionately (and unsuccessfully) for including criticism of an instance of all-white jury selection in a criminal case in which the perpetrator was white and all the victims were black. Their insistence on including criticism of this practice eventually earned them a warning for edit-warring. If there was any race whose failings this editor was likely to highlight on Wikipedia, judging by that episode, it was Caucasians.

I believe that like many other editors, Vwanweb simply followed community practices they had observed here. In this subject area, this involves widespread use of "true crime" sources that present crime as entertainment, and whose level of reliability is akin to that of tabloids and other types of publications that are banned or deprecated as sources in other parts of Wikipedia.

When asked for comment by The Signpost the WMF legal department responded that they are not trying to encourage victims to sue Wikipedia contributors, only that there may be others beyond the WMF who can be held responsible.

In this particular case the Discovery Channel was sued and is not protected by Section 230. But in the general case, would the majority of victims be able to find another responsible party?

The effect on Nathaniel White of Florida

As an interactive computer service provider, the Wikimedia Foundation is not considered to be exercising a publisher's traditional editorial functions. Instead, the court order said, "the relevant content was provided by another information content provider" – in other words, the volunteer who uploaded the picture and added it to the article.

Here are some excerpts from Mr. White's complaint. It states that after the 2018 Discovery Channel broadcast,

… friends and family contacted Plaintiff concerning the broadcast and asking Plaintiff if he actually murdered people in the state of New York.
Plaintiff assured these friends and family that even though he acknowledged his criminal past, he never murdered anyone nor has he ever been to the state of New York. …
Plaintiff has been threatened with harm to his person and shunning by members of the public who, because of the broadcast and social and digital media imagery, assumed that Plaintiff was the vicious killer who committed the murders in New York state. …
Plaintiff has resorted to dressing incognito so he is not recognized in order to preserve his life and damp down the threats he received.
Defendants published this false and defamatory image, photo and information regarding Plaintiff to a third party which is and was the public at large on its television broadcast, social media and digital & electronic audience which encompasses millions of people in Florida and billions of people around the world.
Plaintiff is an African-American man and Defendants appear to believe that all African-American men are interchangeable and that no one would notice or care Defendants were defaming an innocent man, not even other African-Americans, in their description of Plaintiff in this matter.
It is obvious in this case that Plaintiff is not the gruesome murderer that was supposed to be depicted in Defendants' broadcasts and media platforms and that this is more than a simple, excusable or inadvertent error.
African-Americans have always borne an unequal brunt of punishment in this country and this behavior continues from these private Defendants upon Plaintiff.
— Nathaniel White's complaint

This has clearly been an extremely harrowing experience for Mr. White, as it would surely have been for anyone.

While to the best of my belief the error did not originate in Wikipedia, but was imported into Wikipedia from an unreliable external site, for more than two years any vigilante Googling Nathaniel White serial killer would have seen Mr. White's color picture prominently displayed in Google's knowledge graph panel (multiple copies of it still appear there at the time of writing). And along with it they would have found a prominent link to the serial killer's Wikipedia biography, again featuring Mr. White's image – providing what looked like encyclopedic confirmation that Mr. White of Florida was indeed guilty of sickening crimes.

Moreover, it can be shown that Mr. White's image spread to other online sources via Wikipedia. On the very day the picture was removed from the article here, a video about the serial killer was uploaded to YouTube – complete with Mr. White's picture, citing Wikipedia. At the time of writing, the video's title page with Mr. White's color picture is the top Google image result in searches for the serial killer. All in all, seven of Google's top-fifteen image search results for Nathaniel White serial killer today feature Mr. White's image. Only two black-and-white photos show what seems to have been the real killer.

Black Lives Matter

The Wikimedia Foundation has declared its solidarity with the worldwide George Floyd protests.

The Wikimedia Foundation has in the recent past cited the fate of George Floyd and the resulting Black Lives Matter protests as its inspiration for the Knowledge Equity Fund, a $4.5 million fund set up last year to support racial equity initiatives outside the Wikimedia movement. It has declared "We stand for racial justice", expressing the hope that the Wikimedia projects would "document a grand turning point – a time in the future when our communities, systems, and institutions acknowledge the equality and dignity of all people. Until that day, we stand with those who are fighting for justice and for enduring change. With every edit, we write history." A subsequent blog post on the AfroCROWD Juneteenth Conference again referenced the Black Lives Matter movement.

Yet here we have a case where a very real black life was severely harmed, with Wikipedia playing a secondary, but still highly significant part in the sorry tale. The Wikimedia blog post contains no acknowledgement of this fact. Instead it is jubilant – jubilant that the Wikimedia Foundation was absolved of all responsibility for the fact that Mr. White was for over two years misrepresented as a serial killer on its flagship site, the result of a pseudonymous Wikimedian trusting a source that proved unreliable.

Now we can shrug our shoulders and say, "This sort of thing will happen once in a while." Would we have accepted this sort of response from the police force in George Floyd's case?

The Seigenthaler case resulted in changes to Wikipedia's referencing requirements for biographies of living people. Will this present case result in similar changes to sourcing practices for images, especially those implying responsibility for a crime? Who will help Mr. White clean up his continuing Google footprint as a serial killer?

There is also a deeper moral question here. What kind of bright new world is this we are building, in which it is presented to us as a cause for celebration that it was possible for a black man – a man, perhaps, not unlike George Floyd – to be defamed on our global top-20 website with absolute impunity, without his having any realistic hope of redress for what happened to him here?


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  • I'm not really buying that the Wikimedia Foundation's response was out of line. The community responded promptly once notified of the issue - a problem that nobody knows about can't be fixed. This case is different from the Seigenthaler incident where a vandal just made stuff up. The issue here is that a good faith editor trusted a source, and it turns out that source was wrong. Under the current Wikipedia model of verifiability, not truth and aggregating what existing news sources say, there's an understanding that sometimes these sources will be wrong, and then Wikipedia will echo that wrongness - the blame is with Discovery, here. The only way to stop this would be for Wikipedia to do boots-on-the-ground fact-checking, which would essentially not be Wikipedia anymore - that would require the resources of the paid news media, a step far beyond Nupedia (and many mainstream newspapers don't even bother with fact checkers anymore, at least for most stories!). That said, I do agree that being more stringent on image sourcing would be a good idea - bringing up bad sources on the reliable source noticeboard and deprecating them would certainly be a step forward if the goal is to inform good-faith editors of what can be used (and maybe adding in some sort of soft-blacklist edit warning if a link to a deprecated site is noticed in an image description). But, this is ultimately just whack-a-mole that will reduce the frequency of this happening, not eliminate it entirely. Even really solid sources will still make mistakes sometimes. So I don't think it's realistic to expect that this kind of mistake will never happen, again without Wikipedia stopping being Wikipedia and instead becoming a normal magazine with a staff; fixing such errors promptly when detected is far more feasible, and it's what happened here. SnowFire (talk) 20:59, 31 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    The Wikipedia addition occurred several months prior to the Discovery coverage, so I don't agree that it was Discovery who was to blame. The issue was a well-intended author sourcing an image of someone with the same name and assuming that it was the same person as the subject, and that we don't have any means of picking these up - thus we need to own the issue. (Oddly, we do when it comes to text, where WP:BLPPRIMARY is intended to prevent this from occurring). Perhaps we need something like BLPPRIMARY for images, in that we required sourcing connecting the image to the specific subject prior to including it, and that sourcing needs to meet BLP. - Bilby (talk) 23:29, 31 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    There's a contradiction here, because what you write above doesn't agree with the current version of the article. According to the caption currently in the article, "Vwanweb captioned Mr. White's picture as originating from the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision in the Wikipedia article but named crimefeed.com, a site associated with Discovery, Inc., as the source in the picture upload." That means the uploader was citing Discovery's crimefeed website which apparently at the time claimed its picture came from the Department of Corrections, and thus it was Discovery that made the error in misclassifying the picture, and the uploader was properly citing their source - just the source, Discovery/Crimefeed, was incorrect. If the caption is truly wrong and your order of events is correct, then the article should be updated; I'm just going by what the article says. SnowFire (talk) 23:39, 31 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    We don't actually know what Vwanweb saw. I've been unable to find the Aug 2 2017 article (Crime History: Serial Killer Nathaniel White Gets Busted, Blames “RoboCop” August 2, 2017 by Mike McPadden) in the Internet Archive. You can see the blurb for it here in the Internet Archive: [1] So we don't know whether the picture was present in the article or not, and whether it was captioned as originating from the New York State Department or whether Vwanweb just optimistically assumed that must have been the source. At any rate, Vwanweb should arguably not have said the picture came from the New York State Department if all he had seen was crimefeed.com. This is what WP:SWYGT tells editors to do for text: cite what you've actually seen. And moreover you can certainly argue that editors should check state records rather than relying on true crime sites that have no or poor professional oversight – just like we don't allow editors to cite tabloids for articles on cancer.
    The timeline was, as far as I have been able to piece it together:
    1. The crimefeed.com article listed here appears in August 2017. It is now lost (unless someone smarter than me can find it).
    2. The picture is uploaded, citing this article, and added to the serial killer article in May 2018.
    3. The Discovery Channel broadcast is shown in August 2018. --Andreas JN466 23:52, 31 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    My fault for the earlier error - I was going by the broadcast date. - Bilby (talk) 00:13, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    The potential issue you raised is just as valid. --Andreas JN466 00:47, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
There's an earlier article, dated July 1, 2017, on Monsters and Critics website that also sports the same photo of the wrong Nathaniel White, so Mike McPadden's article at crimefeed.com can't have been the original source of the misidentification (or not the only one, at least).
2001:8003:1DF2:D00:2482:6F1C:C109:DAC6 (talk) 07:02, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for mentioning it, you're absolutely correct. I was aware of that page but had missed that it preceded the crimefeed article by a month. The show referred to on that monstersandcritics page, CopyCat Killers, was produced by another defendant in the suit, Reelz. This also seems to have a Discovery connection. The program is listed e.g. as episode 4 on https://www.discoveryuk.com/series/copycat-killers/?ss=2#episodes It should be obvious that Wikipedia has no business citing this sort of material. Discovery used to be reputable but has descended into the realms of pseudoscience and reality TV. --Andreas JN466 09:51, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • @SnowFire: "Verifiability, not truth" was never supposed to mean that verifiability is all that matters and truth does not count. The complete phrase was "the threshold for inclusion is verifiability, not truth." In other words, things had to be both true and verifiable in a high-quality source before they could be added to Wikipedia. It's precisely because of this common misunderstanding that the phrase "verifiability, not truth" is deprecated today, and has been for years. If we propagate incorrect info by relying on poor sources then we are actually spreading fake news. Cf. the Paula Angel picture mentioned in the image sidebar: we're creating an alternate reality. --Andreas JN466 09:56, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      • Of course the goal is truth, but that's just a desired end state. It's like a coach telling their sports team to score more points - sure, but how? VNT makes people uncomfortable precisely because it's honest and accurate about what the Wikipedia process really produces. The problem of garbage in, garbage out is not one easily fixed - it can only be mitigated.
      • That said, I agree with the suggestion below on being stricter on sourcing in articles on purely negative aspects of people, as this is suggesting a useful change - to simply not accept anything on certain topics without ironclad sourcing, and to perhaps cover such topics in less detail in general. SnowFire (talk) 21:29, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Inmate photos for the New York prison system are not as readily available as in Florida, which has a broad public records law. So this guy's problem is compounded by the Internet's inability to find an actual photo of the serial killer to replace the "bad photo", which helps the "bad photo" continue to propagate. The Internet hates a vacuum, and insists on filling it with anything it can easily find. Wikipedia editors could play a fact-checking role by attempting to verify facts or photos provided by secondary sources by attempting to obtain verification from primary sources. – wbm1058 (talk) 03:42, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • At the bottom of every page in Wikipedia is a link, "Contact Wikipedia", which goes to Wikipedia:Contact us, which has very clear instructions as to what to do about problems in a Wikipedia article. There is no indication that Mr. White or a friend or relative ever followed that link. If the photo in the Wikipedia article was causing a lot of pain, why wasn't something done by Mr. White before he paid a lawyer (I presume) and a process server? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 05:33, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • John, at the time the WMF was added to the suit, the picture was already gone. I don't think he was aware of it during the two years it was on here. --Andreas JN466 09:35, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      • Which was sort of my point. It's true that harm can be caused even if one is unaware of the underlying source of libel, but if he was unaware, and no friends or family or acquaintances mentioned it, then it's more difficult to argue for large damages. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:23, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
        • He was aware of being threatened with violence by people who thought he was the perpetrator, John. Think about it: he could, without ever being aware of the WP image himself, quite realistically have been beaten up, stabbed or shot by someone who'd looked him up online just before to check they really had "the right man". He took to donning disguises ... Covid restrictions may have saved his life.
        • Conversely, if Wikipedia had had the correct image, or even no image, this would instantly have reduced the level of threat to him, and he would not have his image all over Google even today. Do you see what I'm saying? I can't imagine that you would not feel aggrieved upon learning that your picture had been in a Wikipedia article like that for two years, if you had experienced threats and feared for your safety during that time. --Andreas JN466 19:15, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • @John Broughton: Your response is still going round my head this morning. You speak like someone who – like me – spends hours online each day. I'm sure you're old enough to remember what life was like before the Internet. Well, there are people living much like that today (I'm sure some of us here have (grand)parents for whom that's true ...). Even among people who do go online, many don’t consider Wikipedia part of their lives. According to survey data in a recent UK study, 32.14% of the UK online population say they do not use Wikipedia. This matches my own observations. I used to play competitive pool in a local league (badly) until Covid put a kibosh on all that. For many of the people who competed there Wikipedia was like something from a different universe. Just not on their radar.
    • This notion that we can rely on injured people to complain if something goes wrong here neglects to take that into account. Do you remember Jimbo's 2014 suggestion to James O'Brien (who'd been vilified in his WP biography) in a BBC interview that it’s a good idea for people to check Wikipedia regularly to see whether it says anything bad about them? Even O'Brien, a professional media person, said he had been unaware of his Wikipedia biography until his wife accidentally spotted it, and thought it would be "kind of hard to get the message to Wikipedia". What seems natural to you or me now, from our perspective as long-time, regular users of Wikipedia, just does not match the world other people live in. Nor, I'm sure, would you have spoken or thought with the same assurance and conviction about Wikipedia on the day you made your first edit. Regards, --Andreas JN466 10:59, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      @Jn466 This is so true. Though I am new at editing with a logged-in account and attempting to make changes of substance, I have occasionally just edited a page from an anon ip for years; generally to fix a spelling error or improper link. Recently my wife showed me a legal error (she is a lawyer); specifically a law attributed to the wrong statute. I told her "don't complain, fix it". She was shocked that she could just go in and fix the article (again, minor error, the period was in the wrong place, leading to a completely incorrect Texas code). So she moved the period one spot to the left.
      The ideas that Wikipedia has become an authoritative source AND that anyone can just change it are mutually exclusive to many people. FranMichael (talk) 14:19, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      Yep. Exactly the way people in my family have reacted. And actually, if you click "Contact us", you are first presented with a bewildering array of discouraging disclaimers like "edits will not generally be made in response to an email request" that look almost designed to instill a sense of hopelessness. Regards, --Andreas JN466 15:05, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      When you click on "Contact Wikipedia", the upper left of the large box with content says, in fairly large font, under the link "Readers", "How to report a problem with an article, or find out more information." Since English speakers normally read starting on the upper left of a page/article, this is fairly prominent. (I do agree that the disclaimer you mention is overly broad; it should include something like "except when legal issues are involved".) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:23, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      Surprisingly, the "left to right" often doesn't apply to web pages, especially if someone is trying to glean information about a subject quickly. Check out this image for a common web consumption method; basically it's a 'z' pattern. I think this overlay on Facebook's login page is fairly representative, which would land viewers of contact us into the disclaimer and then into "article subjects". here is a good article on the overall theory of z-shaped UX ).
      That's all a little outside my overarching point, though; I have never went to the Britannica website to see if I can edit their entries. I just assume I can't. Back when WP was considered an extremely unreliable source, I believe many people did believe they (and anyone else) could change things at will. Heck, I did it in 2009; the article I wrote would have gotten deleted before I hit save now (rightfully so, it was overly-biased, poorly sourced, and I worked for the company).
      However, once Wikipedia first started deserving respect as a place for accurate and fairly unbiased information, and then a few years later actually started getting recognized as such, I think the idea that you could just change something exited the (non-wiki) collective consciousness. Of course, that is an opinion with anecdotal evidence at best, but it has been my experience. FranMichael (talk) 18:54, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is horrible. I'm not saying the WMF was legally responsible for it, but regardless, I am disappointed in the way this was handled. I'd like to see the community go through existing BLPs on criminals and check that the photos are accurate, and implement a stronger policy going forward, to reduce the chance of such a case occurring again. 70.175.192.217 (talk) 17:32, 6 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Much the same point was made by (retired, I think) journalist Dan Murphy at WO. He said,
    In a weird way this appalling screw up should have been a communications person's dream, because the response is so obvious.
    "tktktkt. While we appreciate the ruling that reaffirms the legal protections that have helped us become the world's leading online reference work, we also want to send our heartfelt apologies to Mr. Florida Man. Legal liability is not the threshold for doing the right thing, and this incident has illustrated failings in our rules and procedures. We need to do better. In that vein, we are taking steps x, y, and z to ensure this doesn't happen again."
    And they couldn't do it.
    It's surely worthwhile to think about why this is not what was done. --Andreas JN466 16:12, 8 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

What could the WMF have done better

  • Instead of gloating over a win on a legal technicality, WMF should had paid some compensation. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 02:39, 3 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • @Hawkeye7: That was my instant response to the blog post: it felt like gloating, and so inappropriate in this context where Wikipedia had evidently harmed someone who had done nothing to deserve being tarred with this particular brush. (I've added a subheader above, as this is a new and important aspect in this discussion.) And it seemed to me from looking at the Google results for Nathaniel White serial killer that no one at the WMF (or Google, for that matter, who were also sued along with the WMF, back in February) seemed to have lifted a finger to even do as much as clean up Mr. White's Google footprint.
    • There was a bit of correspondence with Smallbones and the WMF's Greg Varnum prior to publication of this piece (in particular, the WMF asserted that I should not have interpreted their blog post as telling people that lawsuits should be directed at Wikipedia contributors rather than the WMF; we added a paragraph to that effect and made some other changes). Subsequent to that I put it to Greg a couple of days ago (Monday) that when you bump into someone in the street, and they drop their shopping, oranges rolling across the sidewalk, surely the most natural thing to do is to stop, voice concern and help the person pick everything up. This situation here, I said, is surely much the same: Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation were demonstrably instrumental in creating Mr. White's undeserved Google footprint, even if thanks to Section 230 they weren't ever going to be held legally responsible. (It's worth noting that if Wikipedia had had the correct picture, it would have countered rather than amplified the misinformation from the Discovery TV broadcast. Even no picture would have been better.)
    • I added that the WMF are well placed to help here: they have plenty of contacts at Google. Jimmy Wales even once went on holiday with Larry Page, years ago, and User:Denny, as a former Google staffer who worked for years on the Google Knowledge Graph and is now a WMF employee, could provide expert advice on how best to help clean up Mr. White's appalling Google footprint, which continues to dominate searches for the serial killer. It just seems the decent thing to do.
    • I have had no reply to date, not even a brief note to confirm receipt. It feels like nobody cares, which would be very concerning, because if you stand by when an individual is crushed by the wheels of the system it makes all the talk about George Floyd empty virtue-signaling – more than that, hypocrisy. I'd like to see the WMF live up to its words and at the very least try to do this much for Mr. White. --Andreas JN466 11:24, 3 November 2021 (UTC) While I was writing this post, Greg posted the WMF comment below. --Andreas JN466 12:01, 3 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    I disagree. They should have organized a wiki-thon on social justice or such. But wasting money on just saying sorry? No, that's not smart. Give people the fishing road, not the fish. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 11:03, 10 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    @Piotrus: Making a few phone calls to Google, or contacting a few sites that picked up the wrong picture, does not cost money and would be a decent thing to do. I do wonder why Google aren't cleaning the Knowledge Graph panel up anyway. They know about the case (they were a party to it). They have done as much for other people – see Vox article, where a Swiss software engineer had the same problem. Apparently it takes "a few hours" to fix. Yet in Mr. White's case, they're letting it go on for years. --Andreas JN466 13:28, 10 November 2021 (UTC) I got confused by the way the indent displays. I thought you were replying to me rather than to Hawkeye7. Cheers, --Andreas JN466 13:33, 10 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    Right, I was replying to him. I agree with you re the other issues. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 15:12, 10 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

BLP policy implications

  • It seems to me that if we have a system where someone can be falsely labelled as a serial killer then we have a system which is broken - it doesn't really matter if the sources we used were broken too, as we're still responsible for what we allow to be accepted. In BLP there's a section on photographs. It only speaks of not including photos to disparage the subject, but I don't see why that can't be extended to require photos to be "reasonable depictions of subjects", and to require high quality sourcing for the use of photos where the subject is accused or convicted of a major crime. - Bilby (talk) 12:37, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Sourcing and verification on Wikipedia is poor all round

Before people get too hung up on thinking this is about image sourcing, or policy or images in general, can I direct your attention to the very next edit after the mysterious stranger who removed the image. Another IP editor has changed the date of birth. They didn't say why, and didn't provide a source. Which is perhaps immaterial, because the original date, added all the way way in 2008, never had a source either. Who knows which is correct, if either even is. Why would that be important? Well, obviously, dates of birth are one way you can prove you're not the serial killer that Wikipedia says you are. On current evidence, a malicious actor, on seeing the press coverage, could have altered the date to make it look even more like the misidentified man is the serial killer. There's nothing here that suggests anyone would have even noticed. Even now, even after this article has been subject to much attention for lack of editorial oversight, still nobody appears to have noticed (or perhaps have but just don't care) that the date of birth is unsourced. A basic and obvious violation of BLP, if ever there was one. Policy is clear, and has been for a very long time. That unsourced DOB should be removed immediately. Would take seconds. And yet, it hasn't happened. There have allegedly been efforts to improve Wikipedia's sourcing. If those efforts have not even reached a quick first pass over dates of birth, it doesn't instill much confidence. One wonders what's behind the delay. Perhaps it is lack of editors all round (see below section for a related observation). Mackabrillion (talk) 18:17, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, and while BLP are rightly a particular concern, it's poor sourcing all around. Most of my editing time on Wikipedia is on STEM articles, mostly geology and mostly noncontroversial. Much of that time is supplying missing sourcing. I find myself hesitant to rip out entire sections of articles that lack sourcing, out of fear that some source, somewhere, might support it, and because I am as prone to anyone to the magical thinking that if I simply put a "citation needed" mark on the statement, the source will magically appear. In spite of the fact that I can count the times that has happened on one hand with fingers to spare.
But, not long ago, I found that most of a geology article I had started reviewing was extremely well-written but suspiciously devoid of any sourcing. Sure enough, after some digging on Google Scholar, I found that it was a flagrant, extensive, and 16-year-old copyright violation. Copyright violation may not be as serious a moral issue as libelous BLP, but it's nonetheless a serious legal issue.
I am strongly inclined now to put a "citation needed" on an unsourced statement only if it really, really sounds right, is interesting and important, but for some reason I can't immediately dredge up a supporting source. Otherwise I just cut it and be done with it.
I am coming round to the view that if a statement in an article is unsourced (whether a BLP article or a definition of a igneous rock type) it should be removed immediately. It's nice if the editor makes a good-faith effort to find a supporting source first, but I'm beginning to think there is no obligation to do so. Sure, if we pull every "citation needed" statement out of Wikipedia today, the encyclopedia will lose half its content -- but I suggest that this content will not be much missed and the rest will acquire a much better reputation.
Apologies for the long rant. --Kent G. Budge (talk) 19:13, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Kent G. Budge is right on the money here. Large amounts of Wikipedia articles, even highly viewed ones, have tons of uncited material that is very difficult to deal with, usually the easiest solution is to rip it out and start again, but it's so much work. Hemiauchenia (talk) 23:36, 3 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Mackabrillion, the article actually had two birth dates for more than six years, ever since this 2014 edit: [2] – 26 July in the infobox, 28 July in the lead paragraph. No one noticed or cared. The edit you mention made the two dates the same ... both wrong. The date in the article now (28 July in both lead paragraph and infobox) is sourced ... The article had nearly 12,000 views in a single day in August 2018, when the TV program aired. Overall, there were more than 128,000 pageviews during the time when it contained Mr. White's photograph. As a system for writing a reliable reference work, at least in this subject area, it's surely a very, very far cry from being "very effective at identifying and removing these inaccuracies when they do occur". Cheers, --Andreas JN466 21:28, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Low participation is also a factor

What should also be noted is that although a mysterious IP editor did notice and remove the incorrect image, in all likelihood because of the press coverage of the lawsuit, they didn't detail why they were doing it. It could quite as easily have just been vandalism for all anyone knew. And after that edit was made, no other edits are made to either the article or the talk page for at least a year. While we can't know for sure, it seems quite likely that no established editor noticed the removal, or they did but they weren't sufficiently moved by the unevidenced claim that Wikipedia had misidentified a serial killer, to investigate and provide their colleagues with a positive indication that they had chased this down and found the press report. There was, as far as I can tell, nothing stopping the image from being readded from one of the sources that had reused it from Wikipedia. Most likely by someone who might never have even seen the IP editor's note in the edit history. Mackabrillion (talk) 18:17, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The folly of being mostly right, most of the time

The Wikimedia Counsel cited a study in Wikipedia's defence that says Wikipedia editors are quite quick to removed most bad edits. And who knows, maybe that study is true. I am dubious of the Berkmam Klein Centre's findings, ever since it was quite obvious that in the case of a publication of theirs that mentioned Gateway Pundit, they had sourced basic descriptive information from Wikipedia. Information that didn't have a source here, and appeared nowhere else on the internet before it appeared on Wikipedia, suggesting quite strongly that this had been simply made up by a Wikipedia editor, and other Wikipedia editors either never noticed or simply didn't care (for obvious reasons, the Gateway Pundit isn't exactly going to get a gold star service from Wikipedia). The folly of resting on some assurance that you'll get it right most of the time, is when you have the risk of the few times times you do get it wrong, it can quite easily be very, very, harmful. It has been suggested that BLP articles should be fully protected. And to be honest, when there is nothing to suggest that in similar cases the editor community would not make the same mistake here again (chiefly to not notice press coverage of a lawsuit that mentions Wikipedia), that looks like a wise move. As this case showed quite well, other often suggested changes, such as preventing IP editing, might not yield the same level of protection. Mackabrillion (talk) 18:17, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The identity of the IP editor

Probably futile, but an explicit on the record denial from the Wimimedia Counsel that to the best of their knowledge, neither he or anyone in the Wikimedia Foundation is behind the IP that removed the image from the Wikipedia article, would go some way to better understanding the true weaknesses of the Wikipedia model. Mackabrillion (talk) 18:17, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comment from Wikimedia Foundation

First, we note that the editorial makes some thoughtful suggestions regarding the possibility of taking greater care when dealing with articles and photographs of people accused of crimes. We agree with the editorial that the most ideal outcome would be that the mistaken photograph on Wikipedia had been caught and removed immediately after upload and we are supportive of the community's ongoing efforts to develop processes which improve the quality of potentially sensitive articles. At the same time, we also believe that the overall Wikipedia process for this case worked once the problem was discovered. It appears that the broader internet was not aware of the original research mistake until after the Discovery TV program came out. Once the mistake was reported on, Wikipedia’s open structure allowed someone (an IP editor) to remove the image quickly and there was no further problem on Wikipedia. This is a considerably better outcome than how the TV program responded and compared with other websites that hosted the same content. We would point to this as an example of Wikipedia’s open structure working well while agreeing that it could still be further improved to catch future mistakes sooner.

Second, we wish to offer a clarification regarding a misunderstanding in the Signpost editorial. The original blog stated “Instead, the law simply requires that litigants direct their complaints at the individuals who made the statements at issue, rather than the forums where the statements were made.” The Signpost editorial interprets this to mean that one should sue a specific Wikipedia editor, but this was neither the intent nor what the section stated. In this case, the “statement at issue” is the original research conducted by Discovery Television that misidentified Mr. White. Our intent was to highlight the fact that Mr. White actually did sue Discovery Television in his lawsuit and the case against them was not dismissed by the motion that ended the case against the Foundation. It is fairly likely that Mr. White will be able to proceed with the court and receive a full hearing regarding his claims of harm from the misidentification or to reach an agreeable settlement with Discovery Television. We would also note that in the cases that are most difficult to address on Wikipedia because they have an existing reliable source, there is very often a corporation that can be held responsible for what they originally published.

The goal of the people from multiple departments within the Foundation that came together to help Jacob author and factcheck the Diff article was to show that this is a successful case where the law worked well: Mr. White still has a route to compensation for his harm from the business that appears to have made the original mistake while the Wikimedia Foundation was protected from legal liability that could have significantly disrupted open community editorial processes. While many other websites have feedback links to report errors, this is yet another example of how and why it often takes less time to address these issues on open platforms like Wikipedia in comparison to closed platforms.

--Stephen LaPorte, Wikimedia Foundation Associate General Counsel — Preceding unsigned comment added by GVarnum-WMF (talk • contribs) 10:36, 3 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

For reference, the relevant passage of the WMF blog post reads:

It is important to note that Section 230's broad protection of Wikimedia projects and other online services does not leave litigants like Mr. White without options. Instead, the law simply requires that litigants direct their complaints at the individuals who made the statements at issue, rather than the forums where the statements were made. This both allows litigants to challenge the appropriate parties responsible for their harm and protects online hosting companies like the Wikimedia Foundation from the costs associated with liability for user-generated content.
— Diff

If Wikipedia is the forum that was improperly sued here, then the Discovery Channel is not "the individual who made the statement at issue" in this forum.
I am certainly not alone in having interpreted the post this way. For reference, the top-rated post at last month's Slashdot discussion (which I was unaware of until a couple of days ago) of the Diff post reads as follows:

It is important to note that Section 230â(TM)s broad protection of Wikimedia projects and other online services does not leave litigants like Mr. White without options. Instead, the law simply requires that litigants direct their complaints at the individuals who made the statements at issue, rather than the forums where the statements were made.
So they want him to subpoena the IP address and sue the contributor who posted his image.
Seems like a fair compromise.

The effectiveness or otherwise of the quality control system is amply covered by others in the discussion above. I don't think the system works at all well in the True Crime area. Also, why should it matter what the "broader internet" is aware of? Reality matters. People matter. Mr. White matters. (And there actually has long been what I believe is a real photo of the killer on the Internet. It does not look like Mr. White, beyond their both being African-American men.) Regards, --Andreas JN466 11:38, 3 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Some thoughts

  • Even though Section 230 in Wikipedia's case does not lay the blame for any damaging edits on the responsible editor, it also does not mean they won't get sued; it just immunizes the Foundation. In this case, Vwanweb can still be sued, & even if they successfully defended themselves in court, lawsuits are expensive.
  • It can be surprisingly easy to misidentify people in photos; there are only so many combinations of names, & even people with uncommon names can find someone else in the world with the same exact name. For example, years back I was surprised to find a car salesman in Australia with the same first & last names as me, same spellings -- & my birth name is unusual. (While I do have some distant relatives living in that country, AFAIK the salesman is not related to me.) Further, based on incidental surfing, I suspect a non-trivial number of teen-aged & college-aged women happen to have names identical to the stage names of female pornstars. So caution is warranted.
  • I had a look for that "Contact Wikipedia" link. Now I have more experience with Wikipedia than probably anyone else reading this article, but I had some difficulty finding that link. And once I did, & followed the link as if I were the concerned subject of the article, the remedy I was offered was to leave a note on the Talk page.
    That's not feasible.
    Anyone with more than casual Wikipedia experience knows the vast majority of pages are reviewed by volunteers maybe once every few years. A note on the talk page of one of those articles may never be read. There ought to be a link to some place where it will receive immediate attention. (Yeah, I know such a place exists, but the name slips my mind at the moment.)
  • And I agree with Andreas above: when derogatory information is identified & removed from Wikipedia, Google should have a process for scrubbing its echoes from their search engine. Once upon a time, their motto was "Don't Be Evil"; it would be nice if they still tried to follow that occasionally. But they are a for-profit business, unlike the Foundation. -- llywrch (talk) 17:29, 3 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
If we learn any lessons from this, one of them ought to be that the nonprofit status of the Foundation does not automatically keep us from doing evil. --Kent G. Budge (talk) 17:46, 3 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
An additional point I forgot to make, in addition to my first 2 points above. Since it is easy to make mistakes with articles about living people, the dangers of editing them could have a chilling effect on new editors -- which is not desirable. I would hope that the Foundation has some plan of action for those cases where an editor is being sued over a good-faith mistake. As I wrote above, lawsuits are expensive to defend, & editors should not be penalized for such mistakes. Even experienced editors can make mistakes that less haste or more sleep would help them avoid. -- llywrch (talk) 15:27, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Invalid fair use rationale

Fair use rationales are not valid for images living people, this image should never have been uploaded in the first place. Hemiauchenia (talk) 21:05, 3 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I can't see deleted images, but the image was likely uploaded under a claim of being public domain - which is accurate for mugshots taken by the federal government, and I have no idea for mugshots taken by New York State Corrections. (See File:Thomas_Hagan.jpg for a suspicious example that's still current - is this really public domain?). That said, even if it was copyrighted, there are rare exceptions that do allow fair use images for living people when taking a fresh compatibly licensed photo is not reasonable, and prisoners may qualify. (As usual, no guarantees, FFD is a roulette wheel.) SnowFire (talk) 22:38, 3 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Here is the log entry, which you don't need special permissions for: [3]. It says,
  • "(== Summary == This is an inmate photograph (mugshot) of American serial killer Nathaniel White, by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, United States, dated: after 1993. == Rationale information == {{Non-free use rationale 2 |description = After 1993 inmate photograph (mugshot) of American serial killer Nathaniel White. |author = New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, United States. |source = http://crimefeed.com/2017/08/31713...)" (The picture was only deleted because it was an unused non-free fair use image.) --Andreas JN466 23:02, 3 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Never mind, then. Guess it was uploaded as fair-use, surprising. SnowFire (talk) 00:24, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This part of the edit that added the rationale was truncated in the edit summary: 

|commercial  = If this image is subject to copyright, it belongs to the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision.  Which is a government (or government contracted) public service and not a commercial entity nor artist, and by using this low-resolution image it does not impact the department of any monetary value.  
|other information = Source (no image):  provides inmate data from the state’s department of incarceration:<br>
http://nysdoccslookup.doccs.ny.gov/kinqw00 <br>
DIN (Department Identification Number):   93A4050 <br>
Fair use: Ensured conformance with the image’s “low-resolution” sizing by using the recommended [https://tools.wmflabs.org/cp/resize.php Image Resize Calculator].

Vwanweb acknowledged that there was "(no image)" on the NYS Department of Corrections' website, and wrongly assumed that this was where crimefeed.com obtained the image from, despite the failed verification. – wbm1058 (talk) 13:49, 5 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

An observation: Good intentions do not justify cutting corners. I have to remind myself of that frequently. --Kent G. Budge (talk) 14:55, 5 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. I've added a sentence covering images and media files to WP:SWYGT. Also, I learned today that the Discovery program only featured the picture very briefly, right at the end of the program. Of course that's long enough for anyone who knows a person to recognise them, but for everyone else it would have been far harder to memorise the face from that than from a stationary image on an internet page. --Andreas JN466 18:44, 5 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Discussions of this story elsewhere

Bottom line: We have just provided Exhibit A in favor of repealing Section 230, which already has broad bipartisan support. --Kent G. Budge (talk) 15:39, 8 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Note that there is a difference between social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, where each post appears with the name of its author prominently identified, and Wikipedia. In Wikipedia, the names of the authors are obscured. Everything is published under the name "Wikipedia". And the Wikimedia Foundation collects hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of "Wikipedia". A lawyer could actually argue that the volunteers are not social media users, but unpaid Wikimedia Foundation staff. --Andreas JN466 15:51, 8 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]


The Signpost: doing it for free since 2005.
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