futurejournalismproject:

As the Italian government considers a law that would require Web sites to remove any content any person finds libelous, Wikipedia has shut dow the Italian version of its site.

The law requires publishers to remove content “within 48 hours of the request and without any comment, a correction of any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image.”

Via a notice currently up at it.wikipedia.org:

Unfortunately, the law does not require an evaluation of the claim by an impartial third judge - the opinion of the person allegedly injured is all that is required, in order to impose such correction to any website.

Hence, anyone who feels offended by any content published on a blog, an online newspaper and, most likely, even on Wikipedia can directly request to publish a “corrected” version, aimed to contradict and disprove the allegedly harmful contents, regardless of the truthfulness of the information deemed as offensive, and its sources…

…The obligation to publish on our site the correction as is, provided by the named paragraph 29, without even the right to discuss and verify the claim, is an unacceptable restriction of the freedom and independence of Wikipedia, to the point of distorting the principles on which the Free Encyclopedia is based and this would bring to a paralysis of the “horizontal” method of access and editing, putting - in fact - an end to its existence as we have known until today.