[Foundation-l] Fwd: [WL-News] Wikimedia Foundation in danger of losing immunity under the Communications Decency Act

[Delirium]

Mike Godwin wrote:
> This is, if you think about it, a false dichotomy. There are choices  
> between OFFICE action and doing nothing. Those choices include   
> "giving advice" or "making a request." It depends on whether you think  
> the community should be empowered to make its own decisions but still  
> be able to hear advice or requests from the Foundation.  I happen to  
> think that we're sufficiently unintimidating (witness this list, for  
> example) that advice or a request can be rejected.
>   
Is that actually true? In the past, when "advice" or "a request" was 
rejected, the parties doing the rejecting were later informed that the 
"request" had in fact been binding (though that hadn't been stated 
up-front), and some people were de-sysopped as a result. In one notable 
incident, a current member of the board (Erik) was de-sysopped by Jimmy 
in April 2006 for unprotecting an article that a Foundation 
representative had protected, though that protection had not been 
labeled as an official Foundation action.

There have been several of these incidents of 
unofficial-but-really-we-mean-binding Foundation actions that I don't 
believe it is actually true that "we're sufficiently unintimidating that 
advice or a request can be rejected". For that to be true, the 
Foundation needs to be *much* clearer about when it is giving advice 
that can be rejected, versus orders that it will use its ownership over 
the servers to enforce.

-Mark