[WikiEN-l] Indefinite block and desysopping by User:Danny

[Kirill Lokshin]

On 4/19/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/19/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 4/20/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > We shouldn't examine that data, however. Very bad precedent, and poor
> > > for privacy, especially since we aren't dealing with out-and-out
> > > vandals here, but merely critics.
> >
> > If the circumstantial evidence provided is valid, this is far worse
> > than vandalism. This is people in a position of trust abusing it and
> > possibly exposing Wikipedia to liability for copyright infringement or
> > defamation by causing such material to be published.
>
> I disagree. Vandalism is direct actual damage to our content and our
> reputation, as opposed to possible theoretical damages caused by those
> iages. The abuse of trust is sad, and possibly a moral lapse (do we
> expect admins to never take screenshots of deleted pages, and to hold
> close to their chest any information declared verboten?), but the
> legal argument I'm not sure I buy- the guilty one is the one
> retrieving it and publishing it. We removed it, in good faith. While I
> am not a lawyer, our responsibility seems minimal.

Vandalism is also much easier to fix, of course.

But the question is not one of admins innocently taking screenshots of
deleted pages.  It's one thing to fail to properly safeguard
information that shouldn't be getting distributed; it's quite another
to use admin abilities within Wikipedia in order to pass sensitive
information to an openly anti-Wikipedia site.

Kirill Lokshin