Dealing With Wikipedia Libel: Why A ‘Self-Help’ Remedy Is Often The Best Solution

"The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom" - Jon Stewart

Wikipedia is a vast repository of knowledge and information that spans from the trivial to the practical, and includes everything in between. It contains an astonishing amount of information. But the fact that Wikipedia is user-generated, user-edited and a go-to source of information for many creates the potential for troubling and damaging inaccuracies. If the Internet is a classroom, when a note gets passed onto Wikipedia, every other kid in school gets an opportunity to see it. What is the best course of action to stop someone from using Wikipedia as a platform to make unfair, inaccurate, misleading or defamatory statements? The answer, of course, depends. In many cases, the best solution will be to attempt to resolve the problem through Wikipedia's internal mechanisms, rather than through litigation.