To add to Anne's comment. We also know that requests for checkuser can be used to harass and troll. It is too often the response of someone who is perturbed about being reported to escalate the dispute. Sometimes by requesting sockpuppet investigations on the person who reported them. 

Requests for checks can be done to out people who want to edit privately. It is pretty easy to troll someone to the point that they respond with poor conduct and then take them to dispute resolution and ask for check user on them for one reason or another. 

Sydney




Sydney Poore
User:FloNight
Wikipedian in Residence
at Cochrane Collaboration


On Mon, Jul 7, 2014 at 11:32 AM, Risker <risker.wp@gmail.com> wrote:


On 7 July 2014 11:12, Janine Starykowicz <jrstark@barntowire.com> wrote:
Risker wrote:
I also have a real problem with the idea of anonymous reporting

What issues do you have with anonymous reporting? On my forum I have reporting wide open to the world, no login/membership needed. Aside from spambots that can find any link, mostly what I've seen is more biased reporting: Posters will report transgressions by someone they don't like. In most cases, it is a real transgression and something that needs cleaning up. There are a few who narrowly interpret the rules (or make up their own), but those are usually pretty obvious.

The only question on seeing obvious bias would be could it scale. You might need a database of notes from prior decisions, or maybe a trial period of watching other decisions for new adjudicators.
 
 
My problem with it is that it is quite frequently agenda-driven.  It's also creepy to think that we'd permit anonymous reporting and assessment to hold identifiable users accountable on a broad scale.  There may be a few exceptions (paedophilia advocacy is the one pretty much at the top of my list), but often that is as much to prevent unsupportable potentially libelous accusations from being made publicly.   
 
 
Many of our most seriously problematic sockpuppeting accounts are people who've been blocked for behavioural reasons - and we waste a huge amount of time trying to keep them off the site.

I definitely agree with this. Is there any way to track cellphone users? Their variable IP addresses are as bad as the old AOL days.
 
It would be a major violation of the Wikimedia privacy policy to "track" anyone without there being a legitimate and documentable belief that they have violated the terms of use.  Remember that any practice that can be used against 'bad' users can also be turned against 'good' users - because bad and good is in the eye of the  beholder.  I think this is an area where there is a massive split in the international community about its value and appropriateness - particularly in Europe the personal privacy of users takes precedence over just about everything else.  It's relatively easy to persuade an English Wikipedia checkuser to do a check provided there are reasonable grounds, and we can do so without a formal public request and discussion.  On some other projects, the rules are extremely strict, checking cannot be done absent a public request, and every check that is done is documented publicly (that is "Checkuser A checked Account B for sockpuppetry on DMY, result was xxxx"  - private info not publicly posted). This is very much a cultural thing. 
 
Risker/Anne
 
 


Janine




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