Anthere wrote:
This, I admit, is also a completely different kind of a position than the one originally suggested by Angela and worthy of a seperate thread, having nothing to do with the checkuser issue.
Anthere. Not Angela. We are two different people.
I apologize on this issue. I tried to look in the e-mail stack (there has been a bunch of stuff here on this topic) and I thought it was Angela who proposed this based on some earlier comments. I should have dug a little deeper here on this issue before I named names.
If you come to Wikimania (I hope you do),
I would love to come, but time and money are going to make it difficult for me this year. Perhaps next year? Being in North America helps for me, but it is in the wrong end of North America for me to make it easily. Like the distance from Siberia to Paris if you want to compare to Europe.
Please note that I was trying to explain what an ombudsman was, and perhaps what a board-appointed one would be like, although admittedly in a very different area from the proposal related to check user status.
I have had the checkuser status since its beginning. I received several complaints for abuse (generally not justified). I studied these complaints, as confronted to the Foundation privacy policy. I am today trying to delegate this to others (thus proposing the creation of an ombudsman commission).
The benefits would be
- complaints explored by neutral people (rather than a party)
- complaints hopefully handled in a more timely fashion
- more free time for me :-)
I really think we need this to be "independant" party.
I think in this situation, if you want to encourage independence, you need to change it to a broader issue than just checkuser issues. The whole reason for the parnoia over being really stingy regarding checkuser issues is mainly dealing with the Wikimedia Foundation privacy policy and potential violations of that policy. It is indeed in these violations, and other privacy issues unrelated to checkuser scans, that is the main concern about why such an ombudsman would be necessary. And this should be something board appointed if we are talking somebody who understands throughally both the meaning and intent of the privacy policy, as well as the legal implications if people with access to private information violate this policy.
The Privacy Policy Ombudsman would also be a good point of contact if there is a legal issue that comes up that requires disclosure of private user information, covered in the privacy policy. This would be like in a libel lawsuit involving a Wikimedia user where there is a court order to disclose the IP address and other information about a user who made an edit. Also, if some user thinks information about themselves is improperly being disclosed, either through a check user scan or like has been done on Wikibooks for publishing author information, that user can seek an independent and authoritative legal opinion about the issue and even recommend to project admins or stewards to take action correcting the problem.
Because this is a legal position, there are obviously specific requirements that somebody must meet before they can be in this position. For that reason alone, I think it would be better to be an appointed position through the Wikimedia Foundation. The fact that the privacy policy is also a Wikimedia Foundation policy rather than an individual project policy also reinforces this aspect of being an appointed position.