[WikiEN-l] The problem with flagging things with {{office}}

[Ilmari Karonen]

Kirill Lokshin wrote:
> On 4/20/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>>On 20/04/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>You can't hide WP:OFFICE actions because then people could just watch
>>>danny's protection and deletion log.
>>
>>IMHO, you can hide absolutely anything, until an admin attempts to
>>unprotect the page. But anyone watching the page will probably notice
>>that it went from 5 pages down to a stub without so much as a whisper.
> 
> How would that matter, though?  It's the content being removed that's
> sensitive, not the fact that *something* is gone; and if the offending
> revisions are deleted/hidden/whatever, there's no way for someone to
> get at that content (at least not directly from us).

One word: mirrors.

Pretty much any Wikipedia content that has been around for more than a 
day or two has leaked to mirror sites and search engine archives.  It's 
out there for anyone, admin or not, to grab even after it has been 
deleted from Wikipedia proper.

In short, Jdforrester's argument breaks down, since potentially _any_ 
deletion, protection or reversion of Wikipedia content may increase the 
risk of it being copied to sites like WikiTruth, regardless of whether 
they have admins helping them or not.  Given that, we can either stop 
worrying ourselves sick about it, or give up and shut down the project.

-- 
Ilmari Karonen