On 4/22/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
We should not have checkusers with the tool access on a one project/one language, but a POOL of COMMON checkusers. Those should all have good technical abilities. Those would have access everywhere. They would be listed on meta with their language ability. The biggest projects would be used to always ask to their favorites. The small languages will try to find the one with a basic knowledge of their language if they wish.
But all in all, checkusers should be a common good, just as our developers right now are (and, hell, just as your board members are).
Ant
I agree with this; making checkuser a global permission would be absolutely fine with me.
Jesse Martin wrote:
I agree with this proposal.
The smaller wikis cannot benefit from checks because there are far too few users with global CheckUser access; on the other hand, they cannot have local checks because their candidates are unknown to and not trusted by the wider community. Local CheckUser access furthermore causes previously discussed confidentiality problems, since the number of users required would be disproportionately high in order to serve every project in need.
Having a relatively small number of users with global CheckUser access, perhaps combined with the proposed 'Guest' CheckUser process, will much better serve a middle ground between access and confidentiality. These users would probably be most active on projects they participate most in, serving as the de facto local CheckUser agents. Projects without such local agents would likely still be forced to wait, but the larger number of CheckUser agents may help alleviate waiting times on the Meta request page.
I can't speak for other checkers, I can only speak for myself, but I guarantee that I will not make any project wait an undue amount of time (I don't consider 24 hours or so to be undue, unless it is an absolute emergency [e.g., a mass vandal attack that needs checkuser to pull the IP and rangeblock]; even checkusers have to venture into the offline world once in a while :-D ).
However, I can say that the amount of time you wait will be dramatically reduced by pointing out your request somewhere I look frequently, i.e., my en.wiki talk page, email, or on IRC. I check my meta watchlist once, maybe twice a day, because there just isn't enough activity on Meta to require checking it every fifteen minutes. I check my en.wiki talk page whenever the little bar pops up on my page; I never ignore it (as it drives me crazy until I do check it. I get an alert whenever I get a new email, and a new private message forces itself to the front of my screen. My point: Mediums that notify me of new activity immediately get checked more frequently.
As I understand it, requests are made and will continue to be made on a page on Meta; rather than expecting stewards or checkusers to put the page on autorefresh and check it every ten seconds, it would be helpful for users who want a check done right away to call our attention to it. I think others can testify that whenever they point a request out to me directly, rather than just waiting for the next time someone checks the page, I get it taken care of right away; I think this is a pretty standard practice, really: pointing a developer to the bugzilla report you filed gets it noticed more quickly, pointing a steward to your permissions request gets it done right away, etc.
Essjay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia http://www.wikipedia.org/