On 4/19/06, maru dubshinki marudubshinki@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/19/06, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/20/06, maru dubshinki marudubshinki@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