On 4/20/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but if Wikimedia were found liable for Wikitruth's deliberate and purposeful attempt to re-spread material we removed at request of someone else, wouldn't Wikimedia have standing for suing Wikitruth as attempting to defraud Wikimedia or something like that?
FF
This is a very good point. I would also strongly suggest that admins be required to agree to a EULA prohibiting them from copying and redistributing information. Give us all ten days to sign it, de-sysop anyone who doesn't, and require all new admins to agree. Any new content posted on Wikitruth that's clearly from admin-only Wikipedia screens would be a clear violation of that EULA. IANAL, but I imagine this would help protect Wikimedia even more, non?
OFFICE-protected articles should have their content locked from view from anyone, including from admins. And I have no problem with a hidden OFFICE block. Let's dump the OFFICE tag. Let the page simply appear as "protected" to non-admins, and un-unlockable to admins. You could potentially even set it up such that Danny does an unlogged OFFICE block of the page, and then requests via email that an administrator block the page in the log. Thus ([[WP:BEANS]]....) it's not possible to simply monitor Danny's contributions to find out what pages are WP:OFFICE locked.
Yes, this is, ostensibly, censorship creep. But I would also argue that these steps are apparently becoming necessary. Concealing WP:OFFICE actions conspiracy style is not necessary, but simply being quiet about it is appropriate. So long as admins don't loudly kvetch about not being in the know on why an OFFICE action has been implemented, and quietly assume that the article will be available for edit at some later point, the profile of this whole thing can be lowered a bit.
It might not be as catchy a tag line, but Wikipedia being "the encyclopedia anyone can edit except in those rare cases where the subjects of articles legitimately threaten to sue because of libelous content posted about them, in which case the article is temporarily unavailable to edit until such problems can be resolved " is fine by me.
Ben
On 4/20/06, James D. Forrester james@jdforrester.org wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Using the {{office}} template to tag problem content is a nice idea, but, I would imagine, has a rather serious drawback: Wikitruth.infohttp://wikitruth.info/ (amongst other 'helpful' critics) seems to have a sysop working for them. Were we to flag an article that was libellous with {{office}}, you can bet that they would go and dig out the deleted sections, and repost it to their wonderful service. Now Wikimedia has been informed that they are likely to be sued, and in response has done something knowing that it would increase the publication and spread of this libel. - we're then
liable for their reposting of the content, and "utterly screwed". I know, I know, "that's not what was intended". Well, tough, that's the way the Real World(tm) works.
So, what does this mean? Well, flagging articles as Office-protected is a legal no-no in that kind of case, and something significantly less high profile has to be done - and, possibly, the existence of this action would be buried for all eternity (or, certainly, several decades, which on the Internet is much the same thing).
This is something that we have to deal with /now/ - the Foundation could
possibly be sued out of existence tomorrow. There is no time for us to have a nice chat, or wring our hands about whether it's properly the "wiki way". We're here to build an encyclopædia, above all things, and if you don't care that the Foundation is here to keep everything working, then possibly you need to re-evaluate your priorities and commitment to this project; Distributed Proofreaders could always do with a few more volunteers, for instance.
Please note that this is all conjecture on my part, I'm not the one who makes {{office}} decisions.
Yours sincerely,
James D. Forrester Wikimedia : [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]] E-Mail : james@jdforrester.org IM (MSN) : jamesdforrester@hotmail.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
iD8DBQFER6p3d7WnstdBQBkRAt9RAJ40jzTONmoihwNtnrd6mbL/yhveQwCfSWfF 2PwGkHMpPru3l7Giy+h6Sh0= =edGT -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l