In the US, section 230 protects Wikipedia from defamation lawsuits. A victim of defamation via Wikipedia would have to sue the people who wrote the page, and that's unlikely to be worth the trouble.

Whether Wikipedia is fully protected by Section 230 is unclear. While they do host user-generated content, they also exert a substantial amount of editorial control over it, which could potentially nullify those protections. I suspect we'll never know without an actual court case, and it's in Wikipedia's interest to avoid that happening. And Wikipedia has operations and staff outside the US, including in some countries with significantly stricter defamation laws (like the UK), so relying on Section 230 protections wouldn't be sufficient anyway.

Besides, it's the right thing to do. There's a very real potential for harm by hosting authoritative-looking but false information about real people. Wikipedia can prevent that harm by refusing to host those articles.

> In the US

What about the rest of the world?

I remember the hoax that led to that policy. I think it was as much about embarrassment and trying to improve the integrity of wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Seigenthaler_biograp...

It was definitely a CYA move at first, no argument there. 17 years later, though, it's held up surprisingly well.