Birgitte Arco wrote:
I am perplex that the en.wikibooks does not have a big enough base of editors to vote on a check user... I am quite lazy, so I will not go to the stats page to check. But can you roughly say how many active editors per month the project currently has ? How many very active editors per month ?
ant
The number of editors who edit a small project, and the number of editors who pay any attention to the community pages are two completely different things. At English Wikisource which has over 3,000 registered users (There is no stats on the languages of Wikisource) often closes consensus deletion with two votes plus the nomination. There are less than 10 people who regularly edit at the Scriptorium, although I hope more read it. There are a lot of editors who come over from Wikipedia to work on a single project, and only pay attention to our policies if that project is up for deletion of a copyright violation. And vandalism is definitely on the rise. We used to have a few vandals that just messed up one page (Macbeth is a favorite). In the past month we have had three attacks that seem to be by a bot. It registered some name with Troll in it and replaces entire pages with Animations of a troll until blocked. It seems each attack has targeted the sames pages. I feel the need of a project for checkuser and ability to gather 25 votes are completely unrelated. Perhaps if everyone still feels this is non-negotiable we could have a steward who is generally available personally assigned to each project that requests one.
I would rather prefer having a checkuser generally available to each project. Again, checkuser requires technical knowledge. And checkuser and stewards are too different jobs. But otherwise, your proposal looks fine.
When I have needed a checkuser in the past I have had to go through third parties on IRC because no available steward felt comfortable fulfilling my request directly. And that makes it hard on me when my blocks are questioned and I am accused having ulterior motives (this was from outside the project). I feel in my case I alerted and consulted with other administrators and people outside of Wikisource enough to feel confident these accusations cannot taken seriously. However, administrators of small projects are being put in the position of deciding between protecting the project legally or from vandalism or else protecting their reputations from accustions of blocking people on unconfirmed suspicions. If I hadn't been trusted by someone who was trusted by stewards, I would have been put in a very nasty postition. If things continue as they are, sooner or later some one on some project is going to be stripped of adminship because they did what they needed to do to protect the project, and didn't think to cover themselves as well as I did.
Birgitte SB
Nod. I understand what you say. Unfortunately, absolutely *any* editor may be attacked anytime and have his/her reputation attacked. If you doubt that, check out the recent emails between David Gerard, Aurevilly and myself :-(
Now, I must also say that it is quite unconfortable to do checkuser on a project you absolutely do not know and in a language you do not know either.
Something that occured to me recently. I got a checkuser from a small language project. A person A, made the request to check if person B did not edit under several accounts. He suspected sockpuppetry. He said he was sysop (I checked, he was). I did the check. The ip was shared by three editors names. Impossible for me to try to see if edits were similar or on similar topics. I gave the information to person A (only the name of the other editor). Then, person B contacted me a few days later, to ask me to check person A, to see if he had a certain ip, which vandalised several articles... and user B own user page. A bit perplex, I checked, and indeed, UserA ip was the one which vandalized the articles (it was really vandalism) and the user page. So, I confirmed person B that person A shared an ip with a vandal. Likely, person A was a vandal. And a sysop...
And I deeply wondered if I had done well to tell UserA that UserB had sockpuppets. And UserB that UserA was a sysop.
Requests may be done by *good* editors and by *bad* editors. Stewards have no way to know. I am not sure it is good.
ant (who heard you were a good person :-))