[WikiEN-l] Will the WMF protect admins acting as their agents to enforce policies?

[Thomas Dalton]

> > I can't see anything an admin could do within the policies of any
> > Wikimedia project that would put them at risk legally.
>
> In addition to everything a Wikipedia editor could do which would
> place him or her at risk legally, an administrator could also run a
> risk by undeleting defamatory material previously hidden, failing to
> act in a reasonable manner when notified of defamatory material,
> making defamatory blocking summaries, blocking an editor who attempts
> to remove defamatory material, protecting articles to prevent attempts
> to remove defamatory material, placing defamatory material on
> protected pages, and abusing his administrator privileges to copy
> defamatory material and publish it elsewhere.  And that isn't by any
> means an exhaustive list.
>
> I'll leave the reader to extrapolate to copyright law and the like.

I think only about 2 or 3 of the things you list are both illegal and
significantly related to admin abilities, and even those would not be
within established policy. An admin doing the kind of things you list
would be a rogue admin - why would the WMF protect rogue admins?