Anthere wrote:
Now, what I think bother Gerard is this : what if a volunteer answers in OTRS and does so in the name of the Foundation, even though he has received no authority/delegation to do so? Will he be protected ? Probably not. He is even liable to the Foundation and should the Foundation be threatened by the answer given by the volunteer, the Foundation could indeed defend itself by suing the volunteer. In that sense, yes, the volunteer is *less* protected than the board member/officer. But here, I think the volunteer must use common sense and not "imply" he is talking in the name of the Foundation when he is not. Or if he does so, it is best he be careful of his answer.
ant
Now this is an interesting situation. Bureaucrats and admins are asked to "speak on behalf of the Foundation" in regards to enforcing policies on each of the seperate projects. Largely they do request community input, but not all of the time. For example, I routinely delete content due to it being offensive or simply inappropriate to the projects I am an admin on. For blatant cases I don't even wait for a VfD or some other community mechanism.. I just delete it without even a second thought. The same with blocking some users who are substantially crossing the line. There are policies that I am governed by, but who is to stop the legal liability for an admin that deleted something which some other 3rd party felt should be there, or worse in the Seigenthaler situation where admins would be held liable and resonsible for allowing inappropriate content to remain, especially if it was illegal to keep that content. Child pornography would be an example of a situation like this, where admins clearly need to get rid of that sort of content from all Wikimedia projects. There shouldn't even be the need to have a vote to remove that sort of content. Yes, I'm using this example as an extreme situation, but there are other similar situations where the line is considerably closer to hesitation on removal.
So are we telling admins that they become an admin on a Wikimedia project at their own legal and financial risk? And in the capacity as an admin I do feel I should be empowered to at least act on behalf of the Foundation so far as the project policies are concerned in this area of controlling site content. The fact that stewards and ultimately the board itself has oversight on the capacity to accept or reject admins (currently through appellate juristiction in most cases) imply some authority has been delegated to admins and bureaucrats, and other special privileges not normally granted to the typical user.
I admit that I can't speak on behalf of the Foundation in regards to accepting grants or buying servers, but in this very limited area I can speak that we don't allow point of view content, or content that violates copyright.