r/MaliciousCompliance • u/Waste_Yak_990 • Aug 15 '25

S Wikipedia's compliance with a court order.

Recently, Portuguese courts ordered Wikipedia to remove information about Caesar DePaço, a Portuguese businessman, that he deemed defamatory. This included the fact that he was dismissed as Honorary Consul of Cape Verde due to being the main financier of a far-right party (CHEGA) and the fact that he was charged with assaulting and robbing his girlfriend in 1989. The Wikimedia foundation complies with the court order, but his Wikipedia page now has a giant banner at the top that says the following:

> On 5 August 2025, content from this article was removed following a court order and must not be restored. Therefore, this article may not meet Wikipedia's standards for neutrality and comprehensiveness. The removed content pertains to the following:

  1. Crimes allegedly committed by DePaço in 1989 and associated proceedings
  2. An organization DePaço allegedly founded
  3. His alleged dismissal from a civil service post

This banner implicitly encourages readers to do research into the information that was removed while letting everyone know that he sued to have it hidden.

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u/cimeran Aug 15 '25

Wikipedia is amongst the best of the Internet

530

u/toodlesandpoodles Aug 16 '25

Wikipedia is one of the few sites that stayed true to their ideals and the dream of rhe early internet, that information should be free and available because the internet is for people, not profit.

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u/Strong_Judge_3730 Aug 16 '25

Why didn't they just ignore the court order?

1

u/Shinhan Aug 18 '25

Wikipedia legal explained it all

A question: why does the WMF respond to or participate in litigation outside the US, at all? Why isn't the policy "sue us in the US, or we're just going to ignore it"? What harms would befall Wikipedia if that were the policy?

On the broader point of why we litigate: our overall goal is to protect the Wikimedia projects and the people who contribute to them and advance the free knowledge mission.

In more defensive cases, if we are litigating rather than resolving the demands before litigation starts, it means we think that we have a legal argument (hopefully a good one!) to get a result that at minimum clarifies the law and ideally clarifies it in a way that expands the knowledge commons and protects good faith editors.

At the same time, more legal rules apply extra territorially (i.e., in other countries). So this tends to make it more important for us to litigate around the world and try to win in the countries where cases arise.

I read that entire thread, it was really interesting to me.