Bryan Derksen wrote:
Fastfission wrote:
Wikipedia is a forum where anybody could contribute information, even anonymously. Let's say I was an employee at Vandenberg Air Force Base (my errors on a number of missile related pages ought to prove that I am not!) who decides that US nuclear secrecy is preventing adequate public debate on current US nuclear policies. I anonymously log in and upload a picture of a working W-88 warhead to the page on [[MIRV]]. Ha ha, says I, I have secretly subverted secrecy.
You've also posted a classified image in a forum where your IP address is logged and widely available. You'd have to first find a proxy to do this through, and we block proxies so I don't know how easy that would be. You'd also be posting it on a single centralized server where it could be removed at any time by admins. Why not just post it to Usenet, a much less easily undone means of distribution?
Anyhoo, let's say you did it anyway, and now there's this photo that some anon uploaded. Someone else who knows this subject matter comes along and sees it and says "interesting, I've never seen that before. Hey, anon, where did you find this?" What can the anon possibly say in response that wouldn't violate either the "no original research" policy or our verifiability requirements? If this design is classified and there have been no leaks of it before, there's no way to determine whether this is for real or if it's just some movie prop that a guy built in his garage and took photos of. So it doesn't belong in Wikipedia, and it will probably wind up being removed by Wikipedia's existing processes.
How would having a policy specifically against classified information speed this up in any way? You'd still need to show that it _was_ classified, which amounts to the same sort of effort it would take to attempt to verify the photo (possibly moreso, since failing to verify it is enough to qualify it for removal whereas failing to determine if it's classified would leave the issue up in the air). And if we did have such a policy, and if I was an Evil Foreign Agent who for some reason thought Wikipedia was a good source of such information, I'd simply watchlist Votes for Classified Information Removal and copy everything as it came up for discussion there. Wikipedia would be doing half my work for me.
Images of classified information can't be public domain - if they were, they can't be classified. They can't be {{copyrightedusefwithpermission}} (or whatever it is) since the image has been *stolen* by the uploader, and is breaking the law. Not GFDL or CC either; possibly could be {{PDUSGovernment}} (or whatever it is, depending on where it came from), but in summary: Images of classified material would be removed by the Image Sleuthing team, because they lack source info.