On 17/10/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam(a)inbox.org> wrote:
On 10/17/05,
Anthony DiPierro <wikispam(a)inbox.org> wrote:
1) allow
any user to view the content of deleted pages
Not legal.
It is fair use. Otherwise, explain why it is legal to allow an admin to see
something but illegal to allow me to see it.
Besides, I was referring to articles deleted under AFD et. al. anyway.
Articles which are illegal to distribute shouldn't be viewable by anyone,
including admins.
This is where we hit a problem.
In order to ensure that they are effectively cleansed, snd that we're
not just redistributing protected content, we have to make them
not-viewable - it sort of defeats the point if someone can say "huh,
just look at [revision] for the content".
However, for the benefit of the project, we need some way of
overseeing this process - some way of looking at deleted material to
confirm that it was a copyvio, or to see if it should be undeleted, or
whatever.
And we can't split things into "deleted because crap" and "deleted
because copyvio", allowing people to look at one and not the other -
because we'd still need someone to be able to assess the deleted
"copyvio material", check that the process wasn't being abused, &c
&c.
So, someone has to have this access capacity. It's a big and diffuse
job, so it can't really be handled efficiently by palming it off on
the handful of developers. Admins are the rational next layer of
people to give the right to - there's enough of them that they can do
the necessary, but not so many of them that the ability to access the
information is being handed out all over the place.
Giving the right of access only to admins is a way of saying "we
intend to limit this capacity to the sole amount needed by the
project", thus showing that we believe we are using this copyrighted
material in an acceptable manner. Giving it to everyone, or even every
registered user, would be far les so - the project doesn't need four
hundred thousand people to be able to review deleted material, meaning
there's no defensible reason for handing out the power to everyone.
On other threads, recently, we've been discussing Special:Checkuser
(and associated database work); there, we're all agreed that
IP-username information is strictly private, could lead to bad things
if thrown around, and so on. But we have a pressing and valid reason,
integral to the project, to use that information. The solution is to
give it to a limited number of users - it's been suggested for them to
be chosen on a case-by-case basis, or to give it to all bureaucrats or
stewards, as they're the largest group of people we would need to have
the right in order to attend to the problem. The analogy here should
be clearish.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk