Brian McNeil wrote:
I have CheckUser on the English Wikinews, and I am glad to say I have never been pressured to carry out a check in secret. My opinion is that no undocumented CheckUser should be performed.
I disagree. CheckUser should be used liberally with absolutely no implication that the user being checked is suspected of wrongdoing. Indeed, in many cases, the purpose of CheckUser is to *clear people*.
A checkuser who has confirmed that nothing is going wrong, need not mention it. This is just routine work.
Had this been done in secret then all the average user would have seen in RC was a months long block on an IP without knowing it had been verified to be a source of vandalism.
That's about giving an appropriate justification for a block, as opposed to being about doing CheckUser quietly.