Robert Scott Horning wrote:
Oldak Quill wrote:
PS : is it a good idea to have a user named ombudsman ?
I don't think the name "User:Ombudsman" instantly strikes someone as an official position. In Britain, the position "Ombudsman" tends to be reserved as a governmental complaints mechanism and watchdog on trading standards and banking.
An alternative usage for this term that I've seen is for somebody who offers legal advise, often free or pro-bono, to members of a community or organization. Usually this is something that is often topic-specific, for example this use here:
where the U.S. Dept. of Education has a legal team to help cut through the red tape on student loan and aid programs for U.S. citizens.
Nod. And my question to Andrew (who implied an ombudsman would be a good thing for the Foundation) still is "what would be the role of that ombudsman".
I think something like this would be useful to help cut through the red tape of copyright and trademark issues that keep coming up for Wikimedia projects. The problem here would be who would be willing to serve in this capacity. And this is also something that simply should not be elected, as you would have specific legal qualification that would be necessary to do something like this effectively.
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. If you come to Wikimania (I hope you do), you'll see we are two different bodies, with different opinions and different focus. After two years, I am still not used to see my job being gathered under "what Jimbo is doing" or under "Angela has said/Angela has done/Angela has suggested". I know it is not meant to belittle me, but still, I would prefer that you give to Cesar, Cesar's pants and to Cleopatre, Cleopatre's dress.
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 1) complaints explored by neutral people (rather than a party) 2) complaints hopefully handled in a more timely fashion 3) more free time for me :-)
Angela has never been involved in checkuser issues.
I really think we need this to be "independant" party.
Some might argue that a party can not be fully independant if appointed by the board, which is kinda correct. But I believe the people chosen for now are rather uncontroversial people. IF this resolution ever pass and IF the community has a complain with the people chosen, I'll be fine with you guys voting/nominating new names. I mostly want for now the concept to be validated by the board and the thing to get running.
ant