This page documents an official English Wikipedia policy, a widely accepted standard that should normally be followed by all editors. Any edit to this page should reflect consensus. If in doubt, consider discussing changes on the talk page.

Shortcuts: WP:NLT WP:LEGAL WP:THREAT

This page in a nutshell: If you have a dispute with the community or its members, use dispute resolution. If you do choose to use legal action or threats of legal action to resolve disputes, you will not be allowed to continue editing until it is resolved and your user account or IP address may be blocked. A polite report of a legal problem such as defamation or copyright infringement is not a threat and will be acted on quickly.

Use dispute resolution rather than legal threats, for everyone's sake!

Rather than immediately threatening to employ litigation, you should always first attempt to resolve disputes using Wikipedia's dispute resolution procedures.

If you must take legal action, we cannot prevent you from doing so. However, it is required that you do not edit Wikipedia until the legal matter has been resolved to ensure that all legal processes happen via proper legal channels. You should instead contact the person or people involved directly. If your issue involves Wikipedia itself, you should contact Wikipedia's parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation. Do not issue legal threats on or through Wikipedia.

If you make legal threats or take legal action over a Wikipedia dispute, you may be blocked from editing so that the matter is not exacerbated through other channels. Users who make legal threats will typically be blocked from editing indefinitely while legal threats are outstanding.

Legal threats should be reported to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents or an administrator.

What is not a legal threat

A polite, coherent complaint in cases of copyright infringement or attacks is not a "legal threat".

If you are the owner of copyrighted material which has been inappropriately added to Wikipedia, a clear statement about whether it is licensed for such use is welcome and appropriate. You may contact the information team, contact the Wikimedia Foundation's designated agent, or use the procedures at Wikipedia:Copyright problems.

Wikipedia's policy on defamation is to immediately delete libelous material when it has been identified. If you believe that you are the subject of a libelous statement on Wikipedia, please contact the information team.

Perceived legal threats

It is important to refrain from making comments that others may reasonably understand as legal threats, even if the comments are not intended in that fashion. For example, if you repeatedly assert that another editor's comments are "defamatory" or "libelous", that editor might interpret this as a threat to sue for defamation, even if this is not intended. To avoid this frequent misunderstanding, use less charged wording (such as “you have made a statement about me that is not true and I hope you will retract it for the following reasons...”) to avoid the perception that you are threatening legal action for defamation.

Rather than blocking immediately, administrators should seek to clarify the user's meaning and make sure that a mere misunderstanding is not involved. For example, a user might assert another editor's comments are "defamatory" because they are unaware of certain policies (such as harassment, personal attacks, incivility, etc.) and require assistance in dealing with such comments. While such comments may not be per se legal threats, they may fall under the scope of the aforementioned policies and repeated or disruptive usage can result in the user being blocked.

Background to the policy

Rationale for the policy

A court of law in Trenton, New Jersey. Whilst you may sue in a court of law, Wikipedia is not the place for legal disputes.

Making legal threats is uncivil and causes a number of serious problems:

• It severely inhibits free editing of pages, a concept that is absolutely necessary to ensure that Wikipedia remains neutral. Without this freedom, we risk one side of a dispute intimidating the other, thus causing a systematic bias in our articles.
• It creates bad feelings and a lack of trust amongst the community, damaging our ability to proceed quickly and efficiently with an assumption of mutual good faith.
• We have had bad experiences with users who have made legal threats in the past. By making legal threats, you may damage your reputation on Wikipedia.

Attempting to resolve disputes using the dispute resolution procedures will often lead to a solution without resorting to the law. If the dispute resolution procedures do not resolve your problem, and you then choose to take legal action, you do so in the knowledge that you took all reasonable steps to resolve the situation amicably.

Conclusion of legal threat

The Wikipedia community has a long-standing general principle that (almost) anyone is capable of reform. Accordingly, statements made in anger or misjudgment should not always be held against people for the rest of their lives once genuinely and credibly withdrawn.

This policy removes an editor who makes legal threats to prevent damage or deterioration to the project. The editor is not blocked just because "it's a legal threat", but rather because:

1. It reduces scope for escalation of a bad situation,
2. It reduces stress and administrative burden on the wiki,
3. It reduces disruption to articles and the editorial environment,
4. It prevents the difficult situation where a person is both seeking to be collaborative partner and also setting themselves up as litigatious adversary (in general those two roles are mutually exclusive).

If these conflicts are in fact resolved (or a consensus is reached to test if they are resolved), then involved editors should be unblocked if there are no other issues that warrant a block.

See also

• Wikipedia:Don't overlook legal threats
• meatball:LegalThreat

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