On Sun, 2004-05-12 at 15:43 -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
Technically, it's probably not that kosher even to make the works available to admins.
They're "available" only in the same way that you can scrounge things out of the trash bin before it's emptied.
I realize this is kind of complicated, but: if admins and Wikimedia had some more formal relationship, keeping around archived versions would be roughly equivalent to having employees in a company handle books that couldn't legally be published. They're not being "published" -- they're just archived until the company can figure out what to do with them.
But I think it would be hard to argue that admins have that tight a relationship with the Foundation, and that it's qualitatively different from the relationship non-admins have.
~ESP