On 4/19/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
I can't see anything an admin could do within the policies of any Wikimedia project that would put them at risk legally.
In addition to everything a Wikipedia editor could do which would place him or her at risk legally, an administrator could also run a risk by undeleting defamatory material previously hidden, failing to act in a reasonable manner when notified of defamatory material, making defamatory blocking summaries, blocking an editor who attempts to remove defamatory material, protecting articles to prevent attempts to remove defamatory material, placing defamatory material on protected pages, and abusing his administrator privileges to copy defamatory material and publish it elsewhere. And that isn't by any means an exhaustive list.
I think only about 2 or 3 of the things you list are both illegal and significantly related to admin abilities, and even those would not be within established policy. An admin doing the kind of things you list would be a rogue admin - why would the WMF protect rogue admins?
There's the inadvertent restoration of previously deleted material; that's a very real problem when deleting and restoring. There's the inadvertent failure to remove defamatory material from an article we're taking admin action in relation to, or the inadvertent protection of a page containing defamation. There are quite a few genuine legal pitfalls.
Sarah