[Foundation-l] video presentation on explicit images on WMF projects

[Andrew Garrett]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 2:23 AM, K. Peachey <p858snake at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 11:39 AM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> iirc, there is already a mediawiki capability for images to be
>> completely removed from the servers.
>>
>> I can't see this capability in the sysop tools, so maybe I only imagined it.
>>
>> Is that capability still available?  Which users have access to it?
>>
>> If it is part of the software, I think oversighters should have access to it.

> That was rewritten ages ago to allow the files to be kept and
> undeleted and need be (so in theory they are now only removed from
> accessible part of the software, not the file system), they would need
> to be kept and not destroyed if they were brought you in
> court/criminal proceedings because they would become evidence.

It's possible for system administrators to delete files entirely from
the servers for legal reasons, but because it is quite
labour-intensive, I for one have only ever performed such a deletion
when it is real child pornography (hint: a 16-year-old masturbating is
not "real" child pornography, and is in fact legal, though explicit,
in New South Wales, Australia).

We don't really want to be handling any more than a request or two
each week/month under this system, and it's done mostly in the
interest of taste – the images that I've had to delete have made me
extremely uncomfortable, and deleting them is mostly about protecting
innocent snooping administrators from seeing them.

If there are legal issues involved, they should be discussed directly
with our General Counsel, and not speculated about by volunteers who
may lack the requisite legal expertise to make a decision on the
Foundation's behalf. The community should be discussing editorial and
administrative reasons for dealing with these images, not legal ones.

-- 
Andrew Garrett
agarrett at wikimedia.org
http://werdn.us/
Sent from London, Eng, United Kingdom