On 17/10/05, Anthony DiPierro wikispam@inbox.org wrote:
On 10/17/05, Anthony DiPierro wikispam@inbox.org wrote:
- allow
any user to view the content of deleted pages
Not legal.
It is fair use. Otherwise, explain why it is legal to allow an admin to see something but illegal to allow me to see it. Besides, I was referring to articles deleted under AFD et. al. anyway. Articles which are illegal to distribute shouldn't be viewable by anyone, including admins.
This is where we hit a problem.
In order to ensure that they are effectively cleansed, snd that we're not just redistributing protected content, we have to make them not-viewable - it sort of defeats the point if someone can say "huh, just look at [revision] for the content".
However, for the benefit of the project, we need some way of overseeing this process - some way of looking at deleted material to confirm that it was a copyvio, or to see if it should be undeleted, or whatever.
And we can't split things into "deleted because crap" and "deleted because copyvio", allowing people to look at one and not the other - because we'd still need someone to be able to assess the deleted "copyvio material", check that the process wasn't being abused, &c &c.
So, someone has to have this access capacity. It's a big and diffuse job, so it can't really be handled efficiently by palming it off on the handful of developers. Admins are the rational next layer of people to give the right to - there's enough of them that they can do the necessary, but not so many of them that the ability to access the information is being handed out all over the place.
Giving the right of access only to admins is a way of saying "we intend to limit this capacity to the sole amount needed by the project", thus showing that we believe we are using this copyrighted material in an acceptable manner. Giving it to everyone, or even every registered user, would be far les so - the project doesn't need four hundred thousand people to be able to review deleted material, meaning there's no defensible reason for handing out the power to everyone.
On other threads, recently, we've been discussing Special:Checkuser (and associated database work); there, we're all agreed that IP-username information is strictly private, could lead to bad things if thrown around, and so on. But we have a pressing and valid reason, integral to the project, to use that information. The solution is to give it to a limited number of users - it's been suggested for them to be chosen on a case-by-case basis, or to give it to all bureaucrats or stewards, as they're the largest group of people we would need to have the right in order to attend to the problem. The analogy here should be clearish.
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk