[announcement] Ombudsman commission wider scope - Wikimedia-l

14 Jan 2016

hi,

I'm writing to you to bring the news that, after a while of work and
discussion, the Board has finally addressed the need to amend the scope of
our Ombudsman Commission, following the community consensus from a while
back [1]
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Scope_of_Ombudsman_Commission>
.

The resolution was approved in November [2]
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Amending_the_Scope_of_the_Ombudsman_Commission>
and
has been just published.

As a former ombudsman, as well as an endorser of the proposal, I can say
that while this may not be a huge thing, it still is important and will,
hopefully, make our work easier :)

best,

dj

The Ombudsman Commission is currently the body which investigates
complaints about violations of the privacy and access to nonpublic
information policies established by Wikimedia Foundation and which apply to
all Wikimedia wiki projects. The Ombudsman Commission was appointed on 23
July 2006 by the Wikimedia Foundation Board with the generally narrow scope
of investigating potential privacy violations performed by users having
access to the CheckUser interface (namely CheckUsers and Stewards).

Over time, the Ombudsman Commission has received a growing number of
requests to investigate cases which are not clearly complaints about
individual CheckUser actions but may be potential or real violations of the
privacy policy. Following the 2006 Board Resolution's definition of the
scope, the Ombudsman Commission has consistently rejected these requests,
and the applicants remain unsatisfied as there is no other body in the
Wikimedia movement tasked to resolve these problems. Therefore, the members
of Ombudsman Commission, with help of the WMF legal team, asked the WMF
Board to redefine the scope of the Ombudsman Commission.
The Board of Trustees of the Foundation has accepted the community's
consensus and has authorized an expansion of the Ombudsman Commission's
scope to include two more tasks:
To review, upon request, local project CheckUser and Oversight policies to
ensure that they do not violate the respective global policies.

To investigate, upon request, potential violations of the appropriate
global policies by local CheckUsers and Oversighters.

Investigation of potential violations of local policies which are not
violations of the global polices remain the responsibility of the local
project and not within the scope of the Ombudsman Commission at this time.

[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Scope_of_Ombudsman_Com…
[2]
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Amending_the_Scope_of_the_O…