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 | This page in a nutshell: The Wikimedia Foundation's legal department has explicitly instructed us not to allow non-administrators to view deleted pages. |
| “ | On behalf of the OTRS legal queue, this is the reasoning [that deleted pages must not be viewable]. In response to many tickets we get, where a very upset or irate person has been subject to defamation, the appropriate solution is to remove the offending section and delete the revisions containing it from the history. Often times these requests come from the subject's attorney, typically in the form of "My client is horribly upset...Make it go away, or we'll sue you to make it go away." The reason that we don't get sued by a lot more people than we do now, is because we can simply delete these revisions immediately. By modifying the present procedures to allow, even in a limited form (or with varying user rights levels) people to view these revisions, we now put the OTRS team's ability to respond to these complaints in jeopardy, because now we can no longer say "We hid this stuff from the public eye, and only trusted administrators will be able to see it". And that's just the limited version. If we open deleted revisions up to everyone, now anybody can see it, and thus there's no way to effectively solve these tickets that we get daily. On top of that, we'd then have to massively increase the amount of oversighter's we have, as well as expand the scope of the oversight policy beyond it's original form. This further hinders the legal queue especially, in that we would then require oversight access in order to ensure that we're effectively complying with subpoenas, because the number of oversighted edits would rise. Finally, there's the legal argument that can be made that by allowing the community to do this (or by having the developers implement this) the foundation is not doing all that they reasonably can do to protect those harmed by negative edits. There are just too many reasons why from a legal standpoint this is a dangerous move to make. For the OTRS legal queue, ⇒SWATJester Son of the Defender 14:32, 28 September 2008 (UTC) | ” |
| “ | I've been asked to step in and give the Foundation's legal view on this question. My view as the Foundation's general counsel is essentially the same as that outlined by Swatjester. Allowing non-administrator users to have access to deleted pages would vastly increase the frequency and volume of legal complaints. (It could have even worse consequences than that in the long term, up to and including corrective legislation by Congress, which would be a disaster.) It is difficult to overstate how much legal and practical difficulty this would cause the Foundation. To be frank, community adoption of such a disastrous policy would create an actual emergency that would likely require Board intervention. I normally favor and support community-driven initiatives, so please believe me when I say I am not raising this set of concerns lightly. The current system is not broken -- so the best advice is 'don't fix it.' MikeGodwin (talk) 13:47, 1 October 2008 (UTC) | ” |
| — 13:47, 1 October 2008 (UTC) Mike Godwin, legal counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation | ||
| “ | I have been asked a couple of times whether, as WMF's present general counsel, I share Mike's view as expressed above. I can confirm that I fully agree with Mike's assessment. Geoffbrigham (talk) 02:18, 27 August 2011 (UTC) | ” |
| — 02:18, 27 August 2011 (UTC) Geoff Brigham, general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation | ||