Anthere wrote:
Now, what I think bother Gerard is this : what if a
volunteer answers
in OTRS and does so in the name of the Foundation, even though he has
received no authority/delegation to do so? Will he be protected ?
Probably not. He is even liable to the Foundation and should the
Foundation be threatened by the answer given by the volunteer, the
Foundation could indeed defend itself by suing the volunteer. In that
sense, yes, the volunteer is *less* protected than the board
member/officer. But here, I think the volunteer must use common sense
and not "imply" he is talking in the name of the Foundation when he is
not. Or if he does so, it is best he be careful of his answer.
ant
Now this is an interesting situation. Bureaucrats and admins are asked
to "speak on behalf of the Foundation" in regards to enforcing policies
on each of the seperate projects. Largely they do request community
input, but not all of the time. For example, I routinely delete content
due to it being offensive or simply inappropriate to the projects I am
an admin on. For blatant cases I don't even wait for a VfD or some
other community mechanism.. I just delete it without even a second
thought. The same with blocking some users who are substantially
crossing the line. There are policies that I am governed by, but who is
to stop the legal liability for an admin that deleted something which
some other 3rd party felt should be there, or worse in the Seigenthaler
situation where admins would be held liable and resonsible for allowing
inappropriate content to remain, especially if it was illegal to keep
that content. Child pornography would be an example of a situation like
this, where admins clearly need to get rid of that sort of content from
all Wikimedia projects. There shouldn't even be the need to have a vote
to remove that sort of content. Yes, I'm using this example as an
extreme situation, but there are other similar situations where the line
is considerably closer to hesitation on removal.
So are we telling admins that they become an admin on a Wikimedia
project at their own legal and financial risk? And in the capacity as
an admin I do feel I should be empowered to at least act on behalf of
the Foundation so far as the project policies are concerned in this area
of controlling site content. The fact that stewards and ultimately the
board itself has oversight on the capacity to accept or reject admins
(currently through appellate juristiction in most cases) imply some
authority has been delegated to admins and bureaucrats, and other
special privileges not normally granted to the typical user.
I admit that I can't speak on behalf of the Foundation in regards to
accepting grants or buying servers, but in this very limited area I can
speak that we don't allow point of view content, or content that
violates copyright.
--
Robert Scott Horning