Sydney aka FloNight wrote: or viewers of radio and television stations about accuracy, fairness, balance and good taste in news coverage. He or she recommends appropriate remedies or responses to correct or clarify news reports.* Looking at individual serious problems that exist because of fixable flaws in the system. This should keep these same type of problems from reoccuring. Uh ? Wait a moment. The description you give above is the description of ... all Wikipedia editors ! We collectively receive the complains and investigates the complaints of reader, for accuracy, fairness, balance, good taste etc... We receive them in articles themselves, in talk page, on mailing lists, on irc, on otrs queue, and as far as I am concerned, even by phone. We all do this, so we all are ombuds-wo-man in that sense. There is no way the Foundation will go into that. This is NOT the Foundation business Sydney. Let me paste here the description I wrote in the resolution. You will immediately understand (hopefully :-(). -------- Whereas the board of Trustees of Wikimedia Foundation regularly receives some complaints related to abuse of its privacy policy, associated to checkuser activity or not. It is hereby resolved that: The board creates an "ombudsman commission". The ombudsman commission will offer a sympathetic ear to those reporting an abuse of the Wikimedia Foundation privacy policy on any of Wikimedia project. The ombudsman will take charge of investigating cases of privacy policy breach or checkuser abuse for the board in an official manner. He will mediate between the complainant and the respondant (checkuser, arbcom member, bureaucrat or sysop). When legally necessary, the ombudsman will assist the legal commmittee or the legal officer or the executive director to handle the case. When the case is litigious, the ombudsman will be in charge to educate checkusers or others about the Foundation privacy policy. When the privacy policy has been breached, the commission should report to the Executive Director and recommand a course of action (such as removal of checkuser status). Additionnaly, the commission might have a sort of "overview" over the way the checkuser system works and should offer suggestions of suitable modifications of policies or recommandations of software changes. An Ombudsman's Investigation shall be conducted in a manner determined by the Ombudsman and which will be fair and impartial .

On 7/21/06, Oldak Quill <oldakquill(a)gmail.com> wrote: No, it is not a "user advocate" though. It is an independent investigator (or group of investigators), assigned to check into cases of reported abuse. It is my understanding that these reports can come from anyone, user or not. And in fact, the ombudsman committee may be more important to the WMF when the report of abuse _does_ come from outside the Wikimedia projects. Anthere, is this close? --LV