[WikiEN-l] expunging copyright violations (Was: Re: Admin burnout)

[John Vandenberg]

On 2/10/07, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> There are a lot of reasons not to give people admin powers after just 50
> edits.  I'm guessing that one of them is copyright.  Right now there are a
> lot of deleted copyvios.  If anyone who registers (just about) has access to
> those copyvios, then aren't we back to publishing the copyvios?  It would
> also create a lot more need for oversight - we'd be opening up a huge amount
> of personal information to the public.
>
> ...
> While we probably need lots more admins, we don't need automatic admins.

Agreed, automatic admins, or granting it people with fewer than 1000s
of productive edits isn't the solution.

However, the issue of access to copyvios increases with the number of
admins.  In my opinion this isnt solved with less admins, but by
expunging copyvios completely or further restricting access to them.
In this, I am more thinking about copies of articles from other
encyclopedias, as opposed to the snippets taken from a website.  These
copyvios are of limited usefulness to admins after a few days and
should be inaccessible, both in the article history and the deletion
log; instead a boilerplate page should alert the reader that the
version they have requested is a copyvio and provide the details, such
as source, contributors name, etc.  All access to these copyright
violations after it has been removed should be restricted to case by
case needs.

I expect that this would require an "Request for Expunction" process,
which amounts to more bureaucracy, but if its creation allows for more
admins, the net effect is fewer backlogs.

Is something like this possible with the current MediaWiki and dump
creation software?

--
John