All,
Over the past few months a number of individuals have asked for some,
many, or all e-mails they have written to be removed from the
archives. In general, our answer has been a holding 'no', but the
mailing list's archives were nevertheless temporarily hidden from
view. This was unsatisfactory in a number of ways, and we regret our
failure to communicate to the list what was happening. On behalf of
all of the UK Wikimedia mailing list's administrators, I would like to
apologise, and explain.
As a public mailing list, there is no reasonable expectation of
privacy on WikimediaUK-l or any other public Wikimedia-hosted list.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is misleading themselves and those to whom
they communicate these views. As has been noted before, the act of
deletion is very much "blowing up the stable after the horse has
bolted": deleting e-mails from the WMF-hosted archives will at best
flag them to certain individuals as containing information that is
worth ferreting out from the many other archives that are not under
our control in any way.
Indeed, deleting e-mails is problematic in a number of ways:
* it hides the institutional knowledge that the mailing list's archives contain;
* it gives an utterly false sense of security to people concerned
about their privacy;
* it turns an open forum into one where users are unsure about what to
expect in terms of repeatability; and
* it is difficult and resource-expensive to achieve, and risks
breaking the mailing list server for all of the hundreds of WMF-hosted
lists.
We will not agree to keeping the lists pseudo-private, or to the
mass-deletion of content. We understand that this may concern some
users, but we cannot wave a magic wand and fix what is broken. If some
users find that this means that they are unable or unwilling to
continue to contribute to this list, we are saddened, but would note
that similar (and often far stronger) privacy issues are involved in
other forms of online engagement, such as visiting most commercial
websites, using instant messaging or editing Wikipedia.
The sign-up page for this mailing list[0] is not as clear as it could
be as to the general nature of a mailing list, hailing as it does from
the days when this was expected prior knowledge of anyone stumbling
over the page. We will adjust it to be more explicit about the instant
public dissemination and (in practical terms) irrevocable,
distributed, permanent public archiving of all messages sent to a
public list; this e-mail is also part of that user education work.
For the WikimediaUK-l volunteer mailing list admins,
James F.
[0] -
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
--
James D. Forrester
jdforrester(a)gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] (speaking purely in a personal capacity)