>consider themselves responsible and therefore accountable for the content.

There is /plenty/ of precedent for authors owning their posts, and service providers not being liable for them.

>the popular online encyclopedia WikiPedia."

There is no encyclopedia named WikiPedia that I am aware of.

>Recover substantial monetary damages, on behalf of those who have suffered as a direct result of Wikimedia's flaw business model.

[[Gaudere's Law]] aside, the Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organization.

>was eventually removed by Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales, but only after more than four months anguish and hard work by Seigenthaler.

It was removed (visibly) from Wikipedia nearly immediately after Seigenthaler found out about it. It is currently still available in the database, which is (or will be soon) publicly downloadable.

I don't like talking about people I don't know behind there backs, so I decided to see who put this site up. Although this web site has put up a pseudo-anonymous facade, Netcraft reveals the nameserver is at baou.com [1]. Wikipediaclassaction.org contains a link to news.baou.com near the bottom. Baou.com is also known as OfficialWire: "OfficialWire is dedicated to the perpetuation of a free press as the cornerstone of our liberty." Just to ensure they are the same folks, I checked the client ID for the Google ads on both places. `Both are pub-2783803752434922'

The so-called `editor-in-chief' of OfficialWire is Greg Lloyd Smith. Clicking on his `home page' brings you to [3], where you learn that `Greg Lloyd Smith ® is a corporate and media consultancy'.

I noticed all of the addresses they post are in Long Beach, NY at a P.O. Box. But I also noticed that Greg Lloyd Smith is a trademark, registered to `Baou Trust, 244 Fifth Avenue, 2nd Floor, Suite 2003, New York, NY 10001-7604' [4] (Google Map [5])

Thanks to archive.org, I can see the baou.com was for sale in July of '04 [6] (that's an amazing link, you should click it), and that it was taken over by these folks in September [7]. You can see various links to many of their projects there. Ironically, some of them, such as the `Internet Hall of Fame' and `QuakeAID', are supposedly non-profit.

Using the IRS Charity search [8] (a non-profit is equally called a charity), you can query for both `QuakeAID' and `Wikimedia' and see they are both registered.

At this point, the irony is too thick for me to continue. A registered non-profit filing a class action against another. I'd like to hear about other similar situations.

To get an idea of just how many of the fronts the Baou Trust has put up, check out [9]

[1] http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://wikipediaclassaction.org
[2] http://news.baou.com/main.php3?action=search&s_news=wikipedia
[3] http://greg.baou.com/
[4] http://webdb4.patent.gov.uk/tm/number?detailsrequested=C&trademark=2296694
[5] http://maps.google.com/maps?q=244+Fifth+Avenue,2nd+Floor,Suite+2003,New+York,NY+10001-7604&t=h&iwloc=A&hl=en
[6] http://web.archive.org/web/20040714054644/http://www.baou.com/
[7] http://web.archive.org/web/20040910025651/http://www.baou.com/
[8] http://apps.irs.gov/app/pub78
[9] http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Abaou.com&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

Wow. Good detective work. From what you say, I strongly assume it's no prank then, though.

[6] makes me sick :)

[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuakeAID
[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:QuakeAID

Not a prank, but not a credible threat if directed by these people, I'd say.

Which isn't to say Wikipedia won't face such an action one day ...

I emailed lawsuitwikipediaclassaction.org and got some strange responses, about 10 in all.

I would suggest that everyone use caution here, because the replies I got to my emails were hardly professional and quite libelous, with an accusation of a well known wikipedia person as being a "pedophile" of all things.

So be careful.

lawsuitwikipediaclassaction.org also forwarded my emails to wikipedia founder JW. That was a bad idea. I said nothing wrong in my emails and I would not be afraid to see them published. However, I was shocked to see my emails had been sent to others by lawsuitwikipediaclassaction.org without my permission. I smell a rat and I smell a scam. Just my opinion.

Thanks for the tips. I'll check it out.