UTRS was created because handling ip unblock requests on OTRS would violate our privacy policy On Sep 12, 2012 6:17 PM, "Thomas Morton" <morton.thomas(a)googlemail.com> wrote:

I have no idea, but legal was sure. On Sep 12, 2012 6:28 PM, "Thomas Morton" <morton.thomas(a)googlemail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 10:19 AM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote: Right. UTRS is what was formerly unblock-en-l (now automated / ticketed). I am no longer active there or OTRS, but was for some yeas on both. OTRS did not as a rule get IP address / personal identifying information about editors. The unblock-en-l folks did, routinely, get personal name / IP / email account troikas, which are within the community and in the privacy policy treated as especially sensitive. None of the non-legal stuff on OTRS seemed to be - within the community and internal privacy policy - that sensitive, though OTRS does see personal identifying info of those filing complaints or requests. As Fred points out, Checkuser checks were also routinely if rarely applied for questionable issues / incidents, though the non-CU approved unblock-en-l folks were only given the same public "results" info that gets posted on-wiki for sock checks. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

(Disclaimer - I'm a UTRS Developer) OTRS is not allowed to handle unblocks because of a statement from the WMF legal team. It involves the issue of private data retention, and how OTRS does not have the measures to handle removal of private data. Your right in the fact that we haven't told administrators specifically to pass anything not related to unblock to OTRS (not that there is an easy way for doing this, the interface is not setup to reply except to anyone but the appealing, plus administrators are not shown the appealing users email address because it's toolserver which is subject to European laws and private data + identification to the foundation. Besides that though, do we really need to tell administrators to ONLY handle the unblock part and forward ALL unrelated requests to OTRS? Seems excessive, redundant, and more work on us programmers...something that I might have been able to help with a few weeks ago, but it's hard now that i'm in school. ------ DeltaQuad English Wikipedia Administrator and Checkuser On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 12:16 PM, Thomas Morton < morton.thomas(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote:

On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 12:15 PM, Fred Bauder &lt;fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net&gt;wrote;wrote: For what it's worth, this is not just a VIP behavior. Most people assume that Wikipedia has centralized control over content, and they want Someone In Charge to fix things for them. (cf. all the people who e-mail Jimbo asking him to make changes, or the people who volunteer for OTRS because they want to fix errors on pages) It's difficult to correct these assumptions, even after pointing out the big "edit" tab at the top of nearly every page. -- Jim Redmond [[User:Jredmond]]

On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Charles Matthews < charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com&gt; wrote: Of course, we'd first have to establish that the message legitimately was from said household name, either directly or via an assistant or publicist. Even for legitimate VIPs, though, OTRS volunteers aren't going to change content without good reason (and "but it's my article" is not a good reason). -- Jim Redmond jredmond(a)gmail.com

Courtesy and taking complaints seriously (initially, at least) should be standard practice, not "VIP treatment". On Sep 12, 2012 7:17 PM, "Fred Bauder" &lt;fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net&gt; wrote:

Re Fred's comments about giving VIPs VIP treatment. We can't simply assume that everyone we encounter on the Internet is who they claim to be. Doing that would be a recipe for abuse of a lot of VIPs and just as worryingly lots of other people as well. We should treat everyone with courtesy, and treat every serious complaint seriously. But no we should not give preferential treatment to "VIPs" over others. If anyone is entitled to preferential treatment it is the people we have seriously maligned, that includes VIPs like Siegenthaler and some very ordinary people as well. By contrast no-one is arguing that Mr Roth's complaint is about something similarly damaging to him or to others. If anything by giving him a quick and fairly easy way to correct a meme that was widely circulated beyond Wikipedia we have given him better service than the print media. If we were a commercial outfit selling high end products to those who could afford them then I would understand and expect a strategy of giving VIPs better treatment than others. But we are volunteers helping a charity with a mission to make the world's knowledge freely available to everyone. If our clients are "everyone" why would we want to give a differential service level by status rather than seriousness? WSC On 12 September 2012 22:11, Martijn Hoekstra &lt;martijnhoekstra(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote:

On 12 September 2012 18:32, Jim Redmond &lt;jim(a)scrubnugget.com&gt; wrote: And when they *do* see the edit tab, we get a Grant Shapps incident ... - d.

procedures, and I really think the simplest solution would be for Adminship to no longer be a lifetime appointment. Make it for terms of one or two years, with no limit on the number of terms, and no requirement to re-apply. It simply means that admins remain accountable to the community, giving them an incentive to remain polite and fair, to the best of their ability. I don't buy the arguments that "good admins will never be re-appointed", as good admins may make a few enemies, but they'll gain even more supporters. I also believe that the community could easily adapt to manage the increase in RfAs. To be clear, there is no perfect solution, but I think that instituting admin terms would be a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, I also don't think the community will ever accept such a major change, as it's become far to conservative regarding policy. Sxeptomaniac

Re Matthew Jacobs and the periodic reconfirmation idea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/RFA_reform#Periodic_rec… There's also the point that some of us don't like the idea of admins becoming a small elite group within the community. OK we are already quite a way from the "no big deal" idea of adminship, but one of the downsides of reducing the admin cadre to a small number of fixed term admins is that the vast majority of our current 1400 or so admins have insufficient activity to get through an RFA. Many of the rest are unlikely to want to put themselves through the RFA hoops again, especially if remaining an admin means taking on a significantly larger share of the admin workload. We need to remember that admins are unpaid volunteers doing a bunch of essential chores on the site. We also need to remember that the fewer admins there are the more their scarcity value increases. So fixed terms might be of interest to status seekers and those exhibitionists who rather enjoy the opportunity of an RFA to have a public confrontation with their critics. But we'd lose most of the quiet and uncontentious admins who are active editors who have the tools and use them as and when they come across a situation that requires them. Of course periodic reconfirmation would work if we made adminship a salaried position. But I'm hoping that we can find other ways to fix the RFA problem long before that starts to look necessary. That said RFA is continuing to decline, this year, maybe even this month, may well see the first month without a new admin since October 2002. With 20 new admins so far this year compared to 52 last year we will be doing very well in the rest of the year if we manage to kepp the year on year decline at only one third. There is a real risk that 2012 could see the rate of decline steepen and only half as many new admins be appointed as the previous year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/RFA_stats WSC