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.
. . .
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 :-))
I realize there is fine line here. And I am confident that no one will take the accusations against me seriously. However I was very cautious about things, thinking of how everything would look once all the evidence was deleted. All history of any contributions made by the editor at Wikisource have of course disappeared. And especially as the person was nuked on another project which destroyed most of the history there, which I could have used to back up my actions. I kept records of what I could and trusted that people would speak up for me if it came that (as Brad has done).
However, in general the people who are trusted from a Foundation perspective take little interest in the running of the smaller projects. At the same time, those that keep these projects running smoothly are told they are not trusted enough to have the tools they need. And then people with access, such as yourself, feel uncomfortable even using the tools to pass info on. And I understand why you feel that way of course. Because I feel uncomfortable blocking someone indefinitely without being 100% sure he was the same person who had caused problems before. It is not just that I worry about what others may accuse me of, but I take the responsibility seriously. In the end it is my action, whoever else advised me on it. But am convinced the risk of legal exposure is a great enough problem that I can overcome the discomfort.
This is really a larger and mor far reaching problem. No one at Wikisource subscribed to this list until someone told us that it had been decided here that our copyright policy was not restrictive enough. That is when a few of the regular editors signed up. I imagine there are a great number of active projects out there running their own little worlds, divested from the Foundation in all but name. I believe there are other problems we haven't yet imagined already out there. Things need to be handled differently. Perhaps new projects are approved to easily. It might be a good idea to assign official liaisons. Or maybe there should be a mentorship program for bureaucrats. Perhaps the Foundation should randomly run a detailed assesment of the smaller but active projects. Or maybe there should be a recruitment of the people who run these projects to become more active within the Foundation. I do not know the answer, but I can see symptoms that this is a larger problem than stewards ignoring requests for Checkuser.
I will say this, projects like Wikisource are very different from Wikipedia. They are also very different from Wikipedia was when it as small as Wikisource is now. What worked then and now for WP will not work for Wikisource or Wikibooks. I can see this just from that expectations there are of how X voters should be gotten from X active editors. When people were active at Wikipedia years ago, they joined the community. Now these editors are either fed up with community from WP experiences, or else they devote all their "community" time to WP, but they still come edit regularly on places like Wikisource. I see many names I recognize from WP community discussions in the Recent Changes at Wikisource. But they never join in on any WS general disscussions. I am not saying this is either good or bad; it is just makes a different animal entirely. Also as Robert Horning said, we attract vandals of a sophisticaton WP never even imagined when there were only 12 administrators. I feel that if projects like Wikisource and Wikibooks are continually regarded by the Foundation the way they are now, they will become like difficult step-childrem. I do not believe anyone wants that to happen. I certainly don't and that is why I encouraging for something to change. There must be more intergration and trust on all levels. And I mean trust that our work will be supported as well as trust that we act responsibly in the running our projects.
Although this is old news, I will say this also because it regards trust running the other way. It was very hard on us to have to delete all the UN resolutions and Crown legislation. We truly believed (trusted) our copyright policy was supported. And even now we have never gotten a straight answer on the thinking behind the copyrights. Any disscussion I read about it, leaves me newly aware of the lack of understanding people have about the basics of Wikisource. Or else I get the impression that everyone from the Foundation is being intentionally vague. So we are being very cautious, and I worry every day someone will come down and say we have get rid of X also. And that is the worst part of being and admin, when the rules suddenly change on you and you are left to enforce them on very unhappy people. And on top of it all I do not understand why they changed or even if my current interpration of the rules is correct. Things like this can only happen so many times before everyone becomes too gun-shy to keep contributing, or else decides to just ignore the rules they feel are arbitrary. Either of those would be a bad thing. Sorry this was so long.
Birgitte SB
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