There is a world of difference between telling another contributor the content of a deleted page and, say, passing it to ValleyWag or Wikileaks. In the cases I have in mind, the "breach" was passing the information to a third party which would publicly promote it.
There is the possibility someone could have saved the content prior to its deletion, or retrieved a version from their browser cache. However, it seems more likely that someone used administrative privileges to retrieve the content to pass on to Wikileaks.
Of the two articles on Wikinews that I am referring to, one was likely libel and could perhaps have been oversighted. The other should be restored in the course of time and brought up to date. The restoration is dependent on the conclusion of a court case, and as was stressed to me, the publication on Wikinews potentially put WMF staff in the position of having given misleading information to the court.
Brian McNeil
-----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andre Engels Sent: 12 June 2008 02:17 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Policy proposal: Anti-vandal fighter role
2008/6/11 Brian McNeil brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org:
There is one issue from the GRU policy proposal I have ported from Wikipedia. It specifies that those with the right to view deleted contributions should not do so in order to disseminate the content of the deleted contributions to third parties.
What are 'third parties' here? Surely if you cannot tell anyone what content a deleted page has, there is little point in looking.