Noam Cohen in today's New York Times: "Before Mike Godwin became general counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation last month, he was the subject of a Wikipedia article. And years before he was the subject of a Wikipedia article, his most famous insight — Godwin’s Law — had been given the Wikipedia treatment.
Mr. Godwin’s law is simply stated: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”
As anyone who has read an unfiltered comment page of a favorite Web site can attest, this neat summation has the advantage of ringing true. But its genial, three-steps-removed attitude toward the rough-and-tumble of Internet debate also seems ideal for this lawyer hopping into the legal thicket that is the Wikipedia project.
His task is to defend an online encyclopedia created by tens of thousands of (often anonymous) contributors who comment freely on living people and businesses, armed with decades of scholarship, no knowledge at all, or something in between. Besides the potential for defamation, there is the question of copyright infringement, among other legal traps.
Given the circumstances, it is probably better to be the kind of person who, when someone calls an opponent a Nazi, thinks “hey, it was only a matter of time,” as opposed to, “someone is going to pay for this.”
I also like this quote: “the best answer for bad speech is more speech.”