https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38642
--- Comment #7 from Nathan Larson <[email protected]> --- (In reply to comment #6) > From a Wikipedia perspective, I would be worried about things that are > deleted > because we want them gone (e.g. Things that borderline should have been > oversighted.) I'm not sure we really would want such things emailed around. I guess it depends on how you (and the law, and the WMF) look at it. Do we consider Wikipedia to be like a newspaper or book, whose publisher is responsible for what goes out? Or do we consider it to be like an email service, where the owner is not all that responsible for what goes out? Gmail, for instance, imposes virtually no standards on who can sign up for an account and start sending emails out. Those emails could contain all sorts of libelous and copyrighted material. Should we blame Gmail? It's somewhat the same way with Wikipedia. The users sign up without any screening process, and the sysops are chosen by the community in a process managed by bureaucrats who are also chosen by the community. "The community" is not the WMF; the board of trustees and the community are two separate entities, and you can't sue the WMF for what the community does, can you? So, if a sysop acting on behalf of the community causes an email to be sent out, is that much different than a Gmail user causing an email to be sent out? All of the content originated in the community, by users acting on their own initiative and without edits being cleared in advance by WMF staff; none of the content was created or specifically authorized by WMF. WMF only provided the resources, in the same way that Gmail does. The difference would be, if there's an abuse report and WMF feels the need to intervene to remove a sysop, it's a lot harder to start from scratch and become a sysop again than it would be to start a new Gmail account. So there is more accountability, in that respect. Maybe in that sense, Wikipedia is more like a newspaper or book. If stuff needs to be oversighted, shouldn't it be oversighted, rather than merely deleted? If this is a concern, then maybe it's a sign that we need more oversighters to handle the workload, because we're improperly deleting material that should have been oversighted. Whether this change would be a net gain or loss for transparency, I'm not sure. There are inherent problems with holding oversighters accountability because of the fact that their whole role is to limit transparency -- and transparency is usually a prerequisite to accountability. We see the same problem arising with the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Currently, people say "It's no big deal that you can't view deleted articles, because sysops will provide copies upon request." If that's the case, then what is the harm of automating the emailing process? So sysops actually exercise much caution or restraint in deciding what requests for emailing deleted articles to grant? -- You are receiving this mail because: You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Wikibugs-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l
