On 4/19/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On 4/20/06, maru dubshinki
<marudubshinki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
We shouldn't examine that data, however. Very
bad precedent, and poor
for privacy, especially since we aren't dealing with out-and-out
vandals here, but merely critics.
If the circumstantial evidence provided is valid, this is far worse
than vandalism. This is people in a position of trust abusing it and
possibly exposing Wikipedia to liability for copyright infringement or
defamation by causing such material to be published.
I disagree. Vandalism is direct actual damage to our content and our
reputation, as opposed to possible theoretical damages caused by those
iages. The abuse of trust is sad, and possibly a moral lapse (do we
expect admins to never take screenshots of deleted pages, and to hold
close to their chest any information declared verboten?), but the
legal argument I'm not sure I buy- the guilty one is the one
retrieving it and publishing it. We removed it, in good faith. While I
am not a lawyer, our responsibility seems minimal.
Vandalism is also much easier to fix, of course.
But the question is not one of admins innocently taking screenshots of
deleted pages. It's one thing to fail to properly safeguard
information that shouldn't be getting distributed; it's quite another
to use admin abilities within Wikipedia in order to pass sensitive
information to an openly anti-Wikipedia site.
Kirill Lokshin