Am Mittwoch, 21. Juni 2006 16:07 schrieb Robert Scott Horning:
I've heard a lot of fear mongering and what I percieve to be unwarrented fears about abuses to checkuser actions. Can you give some clear examples of what have been percieved as abuses of those with checkuser privileges, at least types of problems that have happened as a matter or practice?
I did never take the time investigating the background of any checkuser of others. I just noticed some statistics:
en.wikipedia (and some other smaller projects as well) have overproportional heavy use of CheckUser. de.wikipedia (the second largest one, which has like en.wikipedia many trolls but probably has different approaches keeping them down, which naturally also have their specific positive and negative side effects) has no checkuser trace in the logfiles (a developer can make a Checkuser directly at the servers without Checkuser logfile traces but nonetheless it were only a few in case of de.wikipedia).
I know I am speaking from an apparent minority opinion on this mailing list, but I fail to see what real damage is happening from simply looking up the IP address of a user.
My concerns are as follows: A Checkuser of an IP from let us say China or Saudi Arabia can have *serious* impact if these informations come into the wrong hands although the probability of a worst case scenario is quite low.
So if en.wp makes heavy regular use of checkuser why shouldn't zh.wp and ar.wp do the same as well (and logfile data of a palestinian on he.wp is also a potentially serious matter for example)? It is a question of caution and role model function of en.wp.
So I don't suggest to en.wp stop checkuser but use it more seriously. Just block an IP or recently created vandal account unilaterally if you think it's a sock puppet without investigating deeper (hey you're admin you have to *be bold* sometimes) and only perform a checkuser afterwards in case there was a real demand from several third persons.
That way you also avoid creating a large bueraucracy on blocking of small fishes like IPs and short lived accounts and have more time for far more important matters.
Checkuser should mainly be a weapon against sock puppets of people that are involved deeper in the project (let's say several accounts of a single person that abuses them for quite some time in a sophisticated way with a mixture out of valid and POV edits).
Just my 2 cents...
Arnomane