German court shuts down Wikipedia.de

A German court has ordered the shutdown of the German-language version of Wikipedia, the multilingual open-access encyclopedia available on the Internet, after the family of a deceased hacker filed a lawsuit against Wikimedia Deutschland eV for using the young man"s full name in an entry.

Earlier this week, a judge at the Berlin-Charlottenburg administrative court sided with the family of the hacker known as Tron and ruled that the Web site http://www.wikipedia.de be taken down until the offending content is removed.

Tron, who spent many of his teen years hacking, developed working clones of German phone cards, among other things. He was sentenced to 15 months in jail for theft of a public phone, but the sentence was later suspended on probation, according to the Wikipedia entry. In 1998, he died under mysterious circumstances.

Read more... (Computerworld.com.au)

Wouldn"t it be easier to remove one page instead of shutting down the whole site?

yesinschnouzen

I think that is illegal under european law...human rights legislation and freedom of expression...

The only grounds for site closure would be National defence...

Well a judge can't actually physically "shut it down", he can issue a "ruling" and a ruling would have to give them SOME TIME to comply with it. So theoretically the people at Wiki would simply delete the page and be "in compliance" without ever actually taking down the site.

Arthur

adoucette's right...if the page was edited to remove the name, the court would have no grounds for the ruling.

Wikipedia; this site is just trouble. The idea that anybody can add their opinions and that there is no real way to know if it is right or wrong, is just scary. They should do the same thing in U.S.:

This is a good example why this kind of webpage are nothing but trouble in making:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/edito...edia-edit_x.htm

but then on the other hand, Wikipedia is an awesome idea that could bring knowledge to millions of children worldwide with no access to fine printed books and etc, but at what price? I think the thing that worries most people is the potential for rumors to become facts and for facts to turn into rumors. Some pages in Wikipedia are spammed so frequently that they are permanently locked at times.

Still like the article by Neutorn a few weeks ago said Wikipedia is turning into a true crisis where you want to shut it down, but you dont know if you should; the ambivalence is truely bothersome.

I think wikipedia is very useful for technologists, like us, however there will be areas where facts are supplanted by opinion, or hearsay, or may come into conflict with legal ruling. So there should always be some controls and now, as my astro-dodging friend says, we only have to antagonise over our censorship.

I have been reading Wiki's scientific articles...if they can even be called that...I notice a consistant pattern of obscuring and omitting information of any functional nature. In addition to this, most of the articles relating to material on nuclear physics, is nothing more than complete waffle, over-complicating even the simplist of processes...

For example, try to find an explanation as to why heat is produced, or what exactly is boiling the water, you will quickly see that this aspect is completely overlooked...it just states that it is...

With information of such LOW quality, is it any wonder that fundementalism is on the rise in the west?

For those who feel that the efforts to defeat terrorism warrant such actions, may I remind them that terrorists already have this information...it is the general public that is being manipulated...

If you don't like something on Wiki change it. That is the whole point. If you write a very good article it will stay. No one is going to delete your entire article. Yes there are some who vandalize it, but when you have 99.99% of the people really trying to make it better and citing references, it becomes better and better everyday. I would ask anyone who thinks they have a more accurate understanding of any subject than the current posting on Wiki, to add it to the site, and cite your references. Give the public more accurate information. Sure that is a little bit of work, but Wiki is such a great thing. Don't take everything you read as fact, but what source is always true? Wikipedia has been found to be as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britanica.

Yeah MMC,

Add a neat section on how you think EXPLOSIVES work.
Make sure you describe how they SUCK the oxygen into them during their initial CHEMICAL DECOMPOSITION creating an IMPLOSION.



Glad Wiki's got editors now.

Arthur

I don't know how people would react to technical material of a highly specific nature to the operation of nuclear power plant...boron decay, plus the formulas that go behind it are not available on any site I have seen...

References could prove difficult.

Why is boron decay so important to the operation of a nuclear power plant anyway? Are you talking about boron poisoning? That would be neutron absorption not decay. Fission product decay is important and that could be referenced many places. Besides Wiki is not for highly technical information, it is for general overview. It is an encyclopedia not a nuclear power plant operation manual.

Apparently, adoucette can make explosives function without oxygen and he knows better than Red Adair...

hahahahahahahahaha...

Boron decays to Lithium...which reacts with water...heating it...a boiling water reactor...its a balance of sort between absorbing neutrons and decay rate...

Take the RBMK design at Chernobyl, they had only 8 control rods (boron) in the system...so it was flooded with neutrons, as they lowered the rods into the water (scram), the boron decayed to Lithium in vast quantities. It then underwent an exothermic reaction in the water and generated steam...which blew the lid off...

If they had kept in more rods, or inserted them at a slower rate, then there would not have been a single incidence of high pressure...

Oh... ok. Sorry I'm unfamiliar with boiling water reactors. I'm a pressurized water reactor guy. But your explanation would imply that all boiling water reactors that use boron control rods would have a positive void coefficient of reactivity, this I know to be untrue. Chernobyl had a positive void coefficient because it used graphite as a moderator, a much more effective moderator with a slight drawback. I also know that Chernobyl had many more than 8 control rods, though if I remember right they had about 8 scram banks. Besides how does the heat generated by a lithium/water reaction of a decay product of boron significantly add to the heat generation of an operating nuclear reactor?