Regarding Brion's point that there should be a good policy or monitoring
system of deletion/undeletion - I think that's right. But I am not sure if
all wikipedias became tolerant of unilateral deletion by admins. Have en.,
fr. and eo. all gone through that kind of change?
For one, admins on Japanese wikipedia don't delete pages uniliterally.
Stubs, testing (like "Hi there!"), pure junks (like falkjdslkjas) are turned
to blank, but people don't list them on Votes for Deletion unless the page
titles are really meaningless. There was once a discussion that we might
start deleting these stuff, but the idea was to create an expedite process
for those limited types of pages to be deleted, not uniliteral deletion.
Not that Japanese wikipedians cannot wait until others become ready, nor am
I suggesting that other wikipedias should do that (my impression is there
are really too many testing and junks at en. to be kept as blank pages), but
at least some Wikipedia is/are more or less free from that problem, I
imagine.
(Or maybe there is a tendency that wikipedia becomes tolerant of uniliteral
deletion over time, and japanese wikipedia will go down the path?)
Regarding Toby's point that DMCA protects the project - I am not very sure
about the implication of that to admins living elsewhere. There is a
japanese law defining legal responsibilities of BBS admins, etc. The law
seems to hold admins responsible if they know that illegal contents
(defamation, obscenity, copyright violation, etc.) are there, and they do
not delete illegal contents in a timely manner. And the fact that admins are
just volunteers do not seem to free from liability - there are cases where
volunteer BBS admins are found to be guilty in the court (that was a
defamation case).
The location of server is also said to be irrelevant at least in certain
cases that I looked at, when the contents are there mainly for japanese
users.
Now, my knowledge about these laws and issues of international jurisdiction
are so limited that I need more advice than stating my opinion here, but if
I have to choose now, I would not bet on the possibility that DMCA protects
all admins at Japanese wikipedia regarding copyright violations.
Regards,
Tomos
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