Sometimes, several new user accounts will vandalise a wiki, after which the local sysops will apply infinite blocks. In these cases it is very probable that the accounts are sockpuppets of one user and form an "array of vandal sockpuppets" (AOVS). A wiki with local CheckUser users can use CheckUser to check if the vandalism is from an AOVS, and then block the IP address of the AOVS. (see footnote [1]) One such situation occured today at en.wikibooks, which has no local CheckUser users. Thus I decided to try to request some CheckUser information from the stewards. So I went to:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Request_for_CheckUser_information
However, I discovered that there are unhandled requests on that page. At 1 April 2006, there was a request concerning a previous AOVS on en.wikibooks. At 30 March 2006, there was a request concerning an AOVS ("array of vandal sockpuppets") on simple.wikipedia. Neither request is marked has handled or rejected. It is now 14 April 2006, and we are at risk of losing the opportunity for CheckUser, because the databases sometimes forget IPs after one week. [2]
Why has no steward responded to these and many other requests for information made in February, March, and April 2006?
-- [[Wikibooks:en:User:Kernigh]] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Kernigh
Footnote [1]: I have not found good documentation, but I will describe how I believe the blocking to work; please correct me if I am wrong. * A block against a user account blocks only when that user is logged in. * A block against an IP address blocks all user accounts, but only when the accounts edit from that IP. * When a blocked user accesses the wiki, an autoblocker also blocks this IP address. This block expires when the user block expires, or after 24 hours, whichever is earlier. * If a sysop acts quickly and blocks an AOVS user account while the vandal is still active, the autoblocker will block the AOVS ("array of vandal sockpuppets") IP address, but only for 24 hours.
Footnote [2]: I have not yet made my request for CheckUser information. I want to know the answer to this question:
Why has no steward responded to these and many other requests for information made in February, March, and April 2006?
Why has no steward responded to these and many other requests for information made in February, March, and April 2006?
Only three stewards (Anthere, Datrio, and Oscar) have CheckUser access. I don't know if the backlog is because the policy is unclear on when requests can be fulfilled, or whether there just aren't enough people willing to carry out these requests.
Angela.
On 4/14/06, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:
Why has no steward responded to these and many other requests for
information
made in February, March, and April 2006?
Only three stewards (Anthere, Datrio, and Oscar) have CheckUser access. I don't know if the backlog is because the policy is unclear on when requests can be fulfilled, or whether there just aren't enough people willing to carry out these requests.
Not really - we have CheckUser access on Meta, but every Steward can give him CheckUser access on any other wiki.
Personally, I'm taking care of every request that'll get through _to me_. I'm not checking [[Request for CheckUser information]] all the time, I'll confess. I'll try to take care of these requests in a few minutes, I hope someone will be able to help me.
-- Pozdrawiam, Dariusz Siedlecki
Perhaps this would be an appropriate time to say "Maybe we could use a couple more stewards?"
Essjay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia http://www.wikipedia.org/
Dariusz Siedlecki wrote:
On 4/14/06, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:
Why has no steward responded to these and many other requests for
information
made in February, March, and April 2006?
Only three stewards (Anthere, Datrio, and Oscar) have CheckUser access. I don't know if the backlog is because the policy is unclear on when requests can be fulfilled, or whether there just aren't enough people willing to carry out these requests.
Not really - we have CheckUser access on Meta, but every Steward can give him CheckUser access on any other wiki.
Personally, I'm taking care of every request that'll get through _to me_. I'm not checking [[Request for CheckUser information]] all the time, I'll confess. I'll try to take care of these requests in a few minutes, I hope someone will be able to help me.
-- Pozdrawiam, Dariusz Siedlecki _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Essjay wrote:
Perhaps this would be an appropriate time to say "Maybe we could use a couple more stewards?"
Essjay
Or perhaps the minimum requirement for the number of votes for users to get checkuser status on smaller projects like en.wikibooks is unreasonable? We have had a couple of candidates for checkuser status for almost two months now, and we simply can't get the number of votes necessary because of the size of our active user base. Yet we are the target of repeated vandalism, and even sockpuppet voting from die-hard sock puppets. If the concern is that checkuser privileges are going to be abused, it is a smaller user base that can be abused.
Should projects be allowed to set their own standards for people with this status, or is it something that is imutable and only set by the Foundation board? So far, only Wikipedias are seemingly allowed to have somebody with checkuser status at all. And if stewards are overwhelmed with this task of dealing with checkuser scans, perhaps the policy needs to be reviewed.
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
Essjay wrote:
Perhaps this would be an appropriate time to say "Maybe we could use a couple more stewards?"
Essjay
Or perhaps the minimum requirement for the number of votes for users to get checkuser status on smaller projects like en.wikibooks is unreasonable? We have had a couple of candidates for checkuser status for almost two months now, and we simply can't get the number of votes necessary because of the size of our active user base.
The requirements are 25 votes roughly. Has en.wikibooks lesser than 25 active editors ? I would have thought it had more editors...
If there are more than 25 active editors, they may not know about the checkuser job, they may not know they could nominate their own checkuser, they may not know the interest for your project ?
----> advertise the job !
Yet we are the
target of repeated vandalism, and even sockpuppet voting from die-hard sock puppets. If the concern is that checkuser privileges are going to be abused, it is a smaller user base that can be abused.
Should projects be allowed to set their own standards for people with this status, or is it something that is imutable and only set by the Foundation board? So far, only Wikipedias are seemingly allowed to have somebody with checkuser status at all. And if stewards are overwhelmed with this task of dealing with checkuser scans, perhaps the policy needs to be reviewed.
Rahhhh, do not go again on that rant : wikipedia get it all and we have nothing :-)
A policy can always be reviewed. But I sweated enough for that policy so that I feel not very motivated to go through this pain one more time :-)
The reason for the 25 votes limit comes from two reasons * A community with less than 25 users is unlikely to really need frequent checkusers, because it is a project with reduced activity. So, it can not be a heavy load for stewards. * A community with less than 25 users has a rather serious risk to have a rather little known editor become a checkuser, rather than a trusted oldbie. If we start handing out status just as we do for sysop status on small projects, I think there will be abuse. I say this from my experience, as I had to unsysop several sysops on small projects (the guys did not know our basic rules, behaved like dictators with the handful of editors, put advertisements on the main page, controlled povs etc...).
I am perplex that the en.wikibooks does not have a big enough base of editors to vote on a check user... I am quite lazy, so I will not go to the stats page to check. But can you roughly say how many active editors per month the project currently has ? How many very active editors per month ?
ant
I am perplex that the en.wikibooks does not have a big enough base of editors to vote on a check user... I am quite lazy, so I will not go to the stats page to check. But can you roughly say how many active editors per month the project currently has ? How many very active editors per month ?
The last full stats are from November, at which time the project had 263 users making at least 5 edits a month and 22 making 100 or more. (http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikibooks/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm)
English Wikibooks currently has 38 admins and 5 bureaucrats. However, only 14 of those admins have been active in the last month and ten of them haven't edited this year.
Angela.
I am perplex that the en.wikibooks does not have a big enough base of editors to vote on a check user... I am quite lazy, so I will not go to the stats page to check. But can you roughly say how many active editors per month the project currently has ? How many very active editors per month ?
ant
The number of editors who edit a small project, and the number of editors who pay any attention to the community pages are two completely different things. At English Wikisource which has over 3,000 registered users (There is no stats on the languages of Wikisource) often closes consensus deletion with two votes plus the nomination. There are less than 10 people who regularly edit at the Scriptorium, although I hope more read it. There are a lot of editors who come over from Wikipedia to work on a single project, and only pay attention to our policies if that project is up for deletion of a copyright violation. And vandalism is definitely on the rise. We used to have a few vandals that just messed up one page (Macbeth is a favorite). In the past month we have had three attacks that seem to be by a bot. It registered some name with Troll in it and replaces entire pages with Animations of a troll until blocked. It seems each attack has targeted the sames pages. I feel the need of a project for checkuser and ability to gather 25 votes are completely unrelated. Perhaps if everyone still feels this is non-negotiable we could have a steward who is generally available personally assigned to each project that requests one.
When I have needed a checkuser in the past I have had to go through third parties on IRC because no available steward felt comfortable fulfilling my request directly. And that makes it hard on me when my blocks are questioned and I am accused having ulterior motives (this was from outside the project). I feel in my case I alerted and consulted with other administrators and people outside of Wikisource enough to feel confident these accusations cannot taken seriously. However, administrators of small projects are being put in the position of deciding between protecting the project legally or from vandalism or else protecting their reputations from accustions of blocking people on unconfirmed suspicions. If I hadn't been trusted by someone who was trusted by stewards, I would have been put in a very nasty postition. If things continue as they are, sooner or later some one on some project is going to be stripped of adminship because they did what they needed to do to protect the project, and didn't think to cover themselves as well as I did.
Birgitte SB
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
Birgitte Arco wrote:
I am perplex that the en.wikibooks does not have a big enough base of editors to vote on a check user... I am quite lazy, so I will not go to the stats page to check. But can you roughly say how many active editors per month the project currently has ? How many very active editors per month ?
ant
The number of editors who edit a small project, and the number of editors who pay any attention to the community pages are two completely different things. At English Wikisource which has over 3,000 registered users (There is no stats on the languages of Wikisource) often closes consensus deletion with two votes plus the nomination. There are less than 10 people who regularly edit at the Scriptorium, although I hope more read it. There are a lot of editors who come over from Wikipedia to work on a single project, and only pay attention to our policies if that project is up for deletion of a copyright violation. And vandalism is definitely on the rise. We used to have a few vandals that just messed up one page (Macbeth is a favorite). In the past month we have had three attacks that seem to be by a bot. It registered some name with Troll in it and replaces entire pages with Animations of a troll until blocked. It seems each attack has targeted the sames pages. I feel the need of a project for checkuser and ability to gather 25 votes are completely unrelated. Perhaps if everyone still feels this is non-negotiable we could have a steward who is generally available personally assigned to each project that requests one.
I would rather prefer having a checkuser generally available to each project. Again, checkuser requires technical knowledge. And checkuser and stewards are too different jobs. But otherwise, your proposal looks fine.
When I have needed a checkuser in the past I have had to go through third parties on IRC because no available steward felt comfortable fulfilling my request directly. And that makes it hard on me when my blocks are questioned and I am accused having ulterior motives (this was from outside the project). I feel in my case I alerted and consulted with other administrators and people outside of Wikisource enough to feel confident these accusations cannot taken seriously. However, administrators of small projects are being put in the position of deciding between protecting the project legally or from vandalism or else protecting their reputations from accustions of blocking people on unconfirmed suspicions. If I hadn't been trusted by someone who was trusted by stewards, I would have been put in a very nasty postition. If things continue as they are, sooner or later some one on some project is going to be stripped of adminship because they did what they needed to do to protect the project, and didn't think to cover themselves as well as I did.
Birgitte SB
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.
Something that occured to me recently. I got a checkuser from a small language project. A person A, made the request to check if person B did not edit under several accounts. He suspected sockpuppetry. He said he was sysop (I checked, he was). I did the check. The ip was shared by three editors names. Impossible for me to try to see if edits were similar or on similar topics. I gave the information to person A (only the name of the other editor). Then, person B contacted me a few days later, to ask me to check person A, to see if he had a certain ip, which vandalised several articles... and user B own user page. A bit perplex, I checked, and indeed, UserA ip was the one which vandalized the articles (it was really vandalism) and the user page. So, I confirmed person B that person A shared an ip with a vandal. Likely, person A was a vandal. And a sysop...
And I deeply wondered if I had done well to tell UserA that UserB had sockpuppets. And UserB that UserA was a sysop.
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 :-))
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
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
Birgitte SB wrote:
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).
Hi
However, in general the people who are trusted from a Foundation perspective take little interest in the running of the smaller projects.
I would not say this at all. Trust does not come from being a participant in a *big* project, or on a major language. Trust comes from the frequent interaction we have with some editors and from sharing certain tasks, which allow to get to know each other.
How does that happen ? Well, perhaps you start writing on this mailing list and I'll notice what you say sounds wise and interesting and willing to build something. And perhaps others will tell me they feel the same. And perhaps we'll exchange a couple of emails on minor issues (such as a checkuser) and I will find you a cool person. Then, perhaps I will go look at your page to see who you are. I will notice something which suggest you could be interested in a certain project, then I'll invite you to join for that task and you will agree. And we'll have fun doing that and do a good work. Repeat that a bunch of times, and that will be it.
It is totally unrelated to the size or the nature of your favorite project :-)
Do you have kids ?
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.
nod.
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.
nod. Recently, some chinese editors also joined. We need a common ground where to meet each others.
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.
Waitaminutehere. The last approved project... was...wikinews. It was quite a while ago !
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.
All good ideas. But but but, we tried the official liaisons (they were called ambassadors). It failed. Recruitement of people : yes indeed. But this can only happen when we start knowing each other a little bit more. I absolutely agree with you we have a major problem of communication. Actually, this has ALWAYS been the case. Just differently. When I joined, the english wp was on one version of the software and all others on an older version. There was no meta. There was no common mailing list (later, non english were parked on one list). Actually, the miscommunication was SO bad that a language even forked and is still suffering today of that fork. Last year, I tried to work to create Quarto with others interested in communication, such as Sj. It was a place where at least description of projects state could be made. By lack of human help, I gave up. Elian also maintained with Aphaia's help a project-state on meta. I think it is dead now. There are now several wikizines in different languages (plus Walter's global one), I hope they communicate a bit between themselves. But each essentially give news of a specific project. Not cross project
If you have ideas, please, by all means, provide them. Or better, IMPLEMENT them.
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.
Which strongly suggest me that we should rather try to have inter-projects checkusers. Let me see... Karynn for example, is apparently a motivated checkuser, with the full tech knowledge necessary. She may not be an arbitrator, I think she is trusted as a checkuser. Why not having her checkuser on several english speaking projects ?
Would not it be wiser than some inactive editors becoming checkuser on wikibooks just because *there ought to be* a checkuser ? If the user has done less than 50 edits in the past 3 months, it makes no sense that he becomes checkuser really.
In any cases, I fully understand the different nature of editorship.
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.
How are they regarded ?
As far as I am concerned, Wikibooks at least has a life on its own. It knows very well how to keep joke books, remove Wikiversity or wikimania proceedings. And it has a few vocal representatives on its list :-)
Admittedly, I know much less of Wikisource. But you are here now, no ? :-)
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.
Speaking of trust. One suggestion made last summer was that those given checkuser access should provide their real names. What is your opinion about this ? If the Foundation trusts those with checkusers to use it according to policy, would checkusers trust the Foundation enough to provide their real names ?
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.
No. It is worse than this... The Foundation board did not discuss this issue, even less took a decision about copyrights on wikisource. I presume it came from a discussion between Jimbo and legal bodies. I am intentionally vague on your UN resolutions and Crown legislation deletions because I am not aware of it. Sorry.
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.
This is a problem. Have you talked to JImbo for clarification ? You are lucky, you share a language... Imagine japanese editors...
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.
I am a proponent of ignore all rules...
Cheers and thanks for the long email.
ant
PS : do you like mint tea ?
Birgitte SB
Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
This is gotten really long so I going to attempt summaries:
--- Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Birgitte SB wrote:
However, in general the people who are trusted
from a
Foundation perspective take little interest in the running of the smaller projects.
I would not say this at all. Trust does not come from being a participant in a *big* project, or on a major language. Trust comes from the frequent interaction we have with some editors and from sharing certain tasks, which allow to get to know each other.
How does that happen ?
{{Explanation of getting noticed by Foundation
people}}
I completely understand how someone from a project big or small becomes trusted and agree that it can only happen by getting to know a person. What I meant was in the other direction; that the trusted people don't check in on the small projects. Before the copyright issue I always assumed the Foundation knew generally what happened at Wikisource. I certainly thought some one was reading our policy pages and approved of them. That someone made sure we had an active bueraucrat and responsible admistrators. However in reality the Foundation knows very little of how smaller projects are run and makes no effort that I know of to check-in. The only attention such projects recieve is if they come to a Foundation level people with a problem. That is not good. I really believe if a big Wikimedia scandal occurs it will be in one of these small non-English, non-German, non-Japanese, non-French projects. Right now there could be policies in place that expose the Foundation to as much liability as abuse of Checkuser. Who knows?
Do you have kids ?
No.
{{My exeperience needing checkuser an blocking
dicomfort}}
nod.
{{There are small project divested from the
Foundation in all but name}}
nod. Recently, some chinese editors also joined. We need a common ground where to meet each others.
: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.
Waitaminutehere. The last approved project... was...wikinews. It was quite a while ago !
Perhaps project was the wrong word. I mean new community. New languages that don't have adminstrators in place
{{Numerous ideas for better intergration}}
{{Numerous previous attempts at intergration and
stories
of past horrors}}
If you have ideas, please, by all means, provide
them. Or better,
IMPLEMENT them.
{{How Wikisource and other small projects are
different
from Wikipedia}}
Which strongly suggest me that we should rather try
to have
inter-projects checkusers. Let me see... Karynn for example, is apparently a
motivated checkuser,
with the full tech knowledge necessary. She may not
be an arbitrator, I
think she is trusted as a checkuser. Why not having
her checkuser on
several english speaking projects ?
Would not it be wiser than some inactive editors
becoming checkuser on
wikibooks just because *there ought to be* a
checkuser ? If the user
has done less than 50 edits in the past 3 months, it
makes no sense that he
becomes checkuser really.
In any cases, I fully understand the different nature
of editorship.
Inter-project checkusers would be fine. Actually I think that having stewards do checkuser is fine. Except that it doesn't happen. I don't have problem with the denial of local checkusers, so much as the denial of the checkuser information completely. The current system would be fine if it only worked :)
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.
How are they regarded ?
As far as I am concerned, Wikibooks at least has a
life on its own. It
knows very well how to keep joke books, remove
Wikiversity or wikimania
proceedings. And it has a few vocal representatives
on its list :-)
Admittedly, I know much less of Wikisource. But you
are here now, no ?
:-)
They are regarded in this way. They are left alone without guidelines or advice and told to make thier own community; govern themselves. Then when everything seems to be going fine some one steps in and says "Oh you guys are doing *that*. That is no good, you have get rid of that. And you must make up your own rules with the details of what goes and what can stay. Sorry I can't really give advice" And then they make new policies and no one is willing say the new policy actually kosher. So they hold their breath and hope the whole thing doesn't repeat again.
It is not that I don't think we are valued so much as I feel we don't really know where we stand. It as if we want to build something wonderful and strong and proper; then it rains and we find out it was just a sandcastle. And when we ask for new materials we are just given more sand. I know eveyone only wants the best for us, and I do not think there is any lack of respect. I just see these situations repeating and people becoming frustrated if nothing changes. And that is why I am here. Why I joined this list, because maybe that way Wikisource can be better informed in policy decisions. But I am more worried about the other communities that are not currently represented here. I want to speak up for them and say Wikisource was once not plugged into the Foudation and we were unaware of major problems. Some other community is out there is with no idea they will have to destroy their own work when it comes to light. This is not so much about Wikisource as them
{{Intergration and Trust are needed}}
Speaking of trust. One suggestion made last summer
was that those given
checkuser access should provide their real names.
What is your opinion
about this ? If the Foundation trusts those with checkusers to use
it according to
policy, would checkusers trust the Foundation enough
to provide their
real names ?
I am surprised that this is not already required. I think you mean the Board would have access to the real names and not the people who are being checked, right?
{{Old copyright policy problems}}
No. It is worse than this... The Foundation board did not discuss this issue, even
less took a
decision about copyrights on wikisource. I presume it
came from a
discussion between Jimbo and legal bodies. I am
intentionally vague on
your UN resolutions and Crown legislation deletions
because I am not
aware of it. Sorry.
That is worse. Really the discussion happened on this list. We never got any real official ruling just vague comments that GFDL is good everything else is bad. This really not good enough for many reasons I will not get into. It is not simple but I do not want to force answers from people who are not knowledgable, because that is what caused the deletion of UN and Crown in my opinion.
{{Being cautious with copyright waiting for the
other shoe to drop}}
This is a problem. Have you talked to JImbo for
clarification ? You are
lucky, you share a language... Imagine japanese
editors...
See above. Yes I think some other languages are going to have rude shock about these kind of issues in the future. It will be worse because they will be much further along than we were when this happened. Thats why I am bringing this up. I want to find a solution before there is another 6 months of work put into these projects that will have to be deleted. I am thinking of those people most of all.
{{ either too gun-shy to keep contributing, or
decide to just ignore
the rules they feel are arbitrary.}}
I am a proponent of ignore all rules...
Well yes, but we don't want people to go too far out of bounds.
PS : do you like mint tea ?
I really do like all kinds of tea. But I never make it at home I only order it at rrestaurants.
BirgitteSB
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
Hello
{{Explanation of getting noticed by Foundation
people}}
I completely understand how someone from a project big or small becomes trusted and agree that it can only happen by getting to know a person. What I meant was in the other direction; that the trusted people don't check in on the small projects. Before the copyright issue I always assumed the Foundation knew generally what happened at Wikisource. I certainly thought some one was reading our policy pages and approved of them. That someone made sure we had an active bueraucrat and responsible admistrators. However in reality the Foundation knows very little of how smaller projects are run and makes no effort that I know of to check-in. The only attention such projects recieve is if they come to a Foundation level people with a problem.
That is correct. Usually, attention is given when there is a problem. One can not assume the Foundation is aware of everything that is going on on all projects. And one certainly should NOT assume the Foundation knows and approve of local policies. For a simple and good reason. The Foundation is 3 people on the projects (Angela, Jimbo and myself). Whilst the projects are 8 and some are in over 100 languages. So, knowing and approving is simply impossible. Plus, do we really want that ?
That is not
good.
Well. I only half agree.
On one hand, our project is held together by a couple of major rules, which should absolutely be followed by all projects. Hmmm, I see only a few ones 1) general goal of a project should be respected, whatever the language. 2) content should be freely usable, freely reusable and free to modify. 3) content should follow NPOV rule
And that's about it.
On the other hand, our project is not run in a top-down fashion. There is no reason why the Foundation should know or approve local project policies. So, generally, I see not why "this is not good" unless the policy is about the goal, or the licence or the npov.
How are they regarded ?
They are regarded in this way. They are left alone without guidelines or advice and told to make thier own community; govern themselves.
Well, yes... it is great it is this way :-)
Then when
everything seems to be going fine some one steps in and says "Oh you guys are doing *that*. That is no good, you have get rid of that. And you must make up your own rules with the details of what goes and what can stay. Sorry I can't really give advice" And then they make new policies and no one is willing say the new policy actually kosher. So they hold their breath and hope the whole thing doesn't repeat again.
I see what you mean. But again, I have no idea who stepped in and who told you you were doing wrong etc... So, I can't really comment and mostly can not really say who could better help you set up new policies.
{{Intergration and Trust are needed}}
Speaking of trust. One suggestion made last summer
was that those given
checkuser access should provide their real names.
What is your opinion
about this ? If the Foundation trusts those with checkusers to use
it according to
policy, would checkusers trust the Foundation enough
to provide their
real names ?
I am surprised that this is not already required. I think you mean the Board would have access to the real names and not the people who are being checked, right?
Correct
{{Old copyright policy problems}}
No. It is worse than this... The Foundation board did not discuss this issue, even
less took a
decision about copyrights on wikisource. I presume it
came from a
discussion between Jimbo and legal bodies. I am
intentionally vague on
your UN resolutions and Crown legislation deletions
because I am not
aware of it. Sorry.
That is worse. Really the discussion happened on this list. We never got any real official ruling just vague comments that GFDL is good everything else is bad. This really not good enough for many reasons I will not get into. It is not simple but I do not want to force answers from people who are not knowledgable, because that is what caused the deletion of UN and Crown in my opinion.
{{Being cautious with copyright waiting for the
other shoe to drop}}
This is a problem. Have you talked to JImbo for
clarification ? You are
lucky, you share a language... Imagine japanese
editors...
See above. Yes I think some other languages are going to have rude shock about these kind of issues in the future. It will be worse because they will be much further along than we were when this happened. Thats why I am bringing this up. I want to find a solution before there is another 6 months of work put into these projects that will have to be deleted. I am thinking of those people most of all.
Would you be interested to create a group of people whose goals would be * To study which languages should be covered in our projects, or not * To study the wiseness to open a new language of a given project (according to number of interested editors etc...) * To gather a collection of pages of rules and guidelines to mandatorily translate in the future language before any creation of the new wiki * To collect pages to suggest new wikis to help them find their way in the jungle (with recommandations such as "register to foundation-l", "follow requests for permission on meta" etc...)
Do you think that would be interesting ? If so, would you agree to lead the creation of that group ?
Ant
{{ either too gun-shy to keep contributing, or
decide to just ignore
the rules they feel are arbitrary.}}
I am a proponent of ignore all rules...
Well yes, but we don't want people to go too far out of bounds.
PS : do you like mint tea ?
I really do like all kinds of tea. But I never make it at home I only order it at rrestaurants.
BirgitteSB
Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
--- Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
On one hand, our project is held together by a couple of major rules, which should absolutely be followed by all projects. Hmmm, I see only a few ones
- general goal of a project should be respected,
whatever the language. 2) content should be freely usable, freely reusable and free to modify. 3) content should follow NPOV rule
And that's about it.
Although these three rules apply equally to the Wikipedias the same cannot be said of all projects. Wikisource and Wikiquote particularly do not hold a NPOV policy on material. Of course, editorial notes are another story but they make up a very, very small part of our project. Free to modify is also not a consideration on Wikisource as we explicitly forbid it in almost all cases. Also since next nothing in our project is available under GDFL it make the "freeness" very complicated. Even public domain is not straightforward. There are things that are PD in the US bur not in England for example. I could give many more inconsistencies of international copyright.
On the other hand, our project is not run in a top-down fashion. There is no reason why the Foundation should know or approve local project policies. So, generally, I see not why "this is not good" unless the policy is about the goal, or the licence or the npov.
I do not think things should be run completely from the top down. But we should have some basic guidelines similar to what you gave above actually on the wikis somewhere and translated in the correct language at the very least.
Would you be interested to create a group of people whose goals would be
- To study which languages should be covered in our
projects, or not
- To study the wiseness to open a new language of a
given project (according to number of interested editors etc...)
- To gather a collection of pages of rules and
guidelines to mandatorily translate in the future language before any creation of the new wiki
- To collect pages to suggest new wikis to help them
find their way in the jungle (with recommandations such as "register to foundation-l", "follow requests for permission on meta" etc...)
Do you think that would be interesting ? If so, would you agree to lead the creation of that group ?
Ant
I think that is very interesting and would definately want to be involved. I do not know that I have enough conacts amoung people with different language skills to start it up myself. If such group of people can be rounded up I would definately want to see this through. One the first things I feel is needed is updated stats on the current wikis so we can see what worked in the past and what has stalled. Also if the stats page gave numbers of admins and buerucrats (if any) that might be useful.
BirgitteSB
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
Birgitte SB wrote:
--- Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
On one hand, our project is held together by a couple of major rules, which should absolutely be followed by all projects. Hmmm, I see only a few ones
- general goal of a project should be respected,
whatever the language. 2) content should be freely usable, freely reusable and free to modify. 3) content should follow NPOV rule
And that's about it.
Although these three rules apply equally to the Wikipedias the same cannot be said of all projects. Wikisource and Wikiquote particularly do not hold a NPOV policy on material.
Oh, good point. But just because there is no need for such a policy over there.
Of course, editorial notes
are another story but they make up a very, very small part of our project. Free to modify is also not a consideration on Wikisource as we explicitly forbid it in almost all cases.
Good point again.
Also since next nothing in our
project is available under GDFL it make the "freeness" very complicated. Even public domain is not straightforward. There are things that are PD in the US bur not in England for example. I could give many more inconsistencies of international copyright.
Which is why I did not mentionned a specific license. We use several licenses for images. Wikinews is not under GFDL. What we would all agree probably is the freedom to use content.
Actually, I have a question to wikibook editors. Do Wikibooks books follow NPOV, or not at all ?
On the other hand, our project is not run in a top-down fashion. There is no reason why the Foundation should know or approve local project policies. So, generally, I see not why "this is not good" unless the policy is about the goal, or the licence or the npov.
I do not think things should be run completely from the top down. But we should have some basic guidelines similar to what you gave above actually on the wikis somewhere and translated in the correct language at the very least.
Hmmm, true. I think this is particularly missing for the intermediary projects. Wikipedia had this defined very well because Larry Sanger was taking care of it. Wikinews had it quite well defined because we requested a full study and description of the concept before its approval. This never happened for projects such as wikibooks, wikiquote, wiktionary or wikisource.
If wikiquote was proposed today, it would never be accepted for example. But these projects were one day proposed on a mailing list and ... simply started !
And who took care of defining basic *common* guidelines that all projects could inspire of when starting a new language ? No one I guess.
Now, I would say that it would be more logical that a couple of editors of each project do the description of the project and draft basic guidelines, that the Foundation could approve afterwards.
Would you be interested to create a group of people whose goals would be
- To study which languages should be covered in our
projects, or not
- To study the wiseness to open a new language of a
given project (according to number of interested editors etc...)
- To gather a collection of pages of rules and
guidelines to mandatorily translate in the future language before any creation of the new wiki
- To collect pages to suggest new wikis to help them
find their way in the jungle (with recommandations such as "register to foundation-l", "follow requests for permission on meta" etc...)
Do you think that would be interesting ? If so, would you agree to lead the creation of that group ?
Ant
I think that is very interesting and would definately want to be involved. I do not know that I have enough conacts amoung people with different language skills to start it up myself. If such group of people can be rounded up I would definately want to see this through. One the first things I feel is needed is updated stats on the current wikis so we can see what worked in the past and what has stalled. Also if the stats page gave numbers of admins and buerucrats (if any) that might be useful.
We always fall on the same issue Birgitte... many would think it great, but few would agree to lead such a project. At best follow another person doing it.
Okay, so... who is motivated to start such a project ? * which entirely new languages should be accepted or opposed (including constructed languages, dialects...) * when a new language should be allowed to start in a given project * making guidelines for those starting a new language * support to new languages starting (checkuser, sysop etc...)
etc...
who is motivated to start such a project ?
Ant
BirgitteSB
Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
--- Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Birgitte SB wrote:
Also since next nothing in our
project is available under GDFL it make the
"freeness"
very complicated. Even public domain is not straightforward. There are things that are PD in
the
US bur not in England for example. I could give
many
more inconsistencies of international copyright.
Which is why I did not mentionned a specific license. We use several licenses for images. Wikinews is not under GFDL. What we would all agree probably is the freedom to use content.
The main difference as I see is this. Wikipedia is creating content. WP could chose to make it's content free or not; they chose to make it free. Wikisource has no control on whether our content is free or where it is free. We can only choose whether or not to make it available. Downstream users are going to have to evaluate whether they are free to use Wikisource contect individually unless they are in the United States. Our material is under various licenses as well as public domain (as applicable in the US). We cannot give anyone a blanket guarantee the content is free for them to use whether we include non-commercial or not. They are still going to have to evaluate each license category and judge based on the laws they must abide by.
Would you be interested to create a group of
people
whose goals would be
- To study which languages should be covered in
our
projects, or not
- To study the wiseness to open a new language of
a
given project (according to number of interested editors etc...)
- To gather a collection of pages of rules and
guidelines to mandatorily translate in the future language before any
creation
of the new wiki
- To collect pages to suggest new wikis to help
them
find their way in the jungle (with recommandations such as "register to foundation-l", "follow requests for permission on meta" etc...)
Do you think that would be interesting ? If so, would you agree to lead the creation of
that
group ?
Ant
I think that is very interesting and would
definately
want to be involved. I do not know that I have
enough
conacts amoung people with different language
skills
to start it up myself. If such group of people
can be
rounded up I would definately want to see this through. One the first things I feel is needed is updated stats on the current wikis so we can see
what
worked in the past and what has stalled. Also if
the
stats page gave numbers of admins and buerucrats
(if
any) that might be useful.
We always fall on the same issue Birgitte... many would think it great, but few would agree to lead such a project. At best follow another person doing it.
Okay, so... who is motivated to start such a project ?
- which entirely new languages should be accepted or
opposed (including constructed languages, dialects...)
- when a new language should be allowed to start in
a given project
- making guidelines for those starting a new
language
- support to new languages starting (checkuser,
sysop etc...)
etc...
who is motivated to start such a project ?
Ant
I think new languages should be supported if they seem likely to suceed establishing an active community. Before we can judge that or set up any guidelines we really need more information. I would very much like to take the first step in this. Which I believe is analizing what has worked or not in the past. But right now some of the stats pages are months old and Wikisource has none at all for individual languages. I don't know that the information I can get from any updated stats would really tell what makes a community sucessfull. However it should allow us to see what communities have a certain level of activity. Then I think we should ask people from various communities to fill out a survey about the beginings of their community and maybe we can find some indicators we can use to answer your points.
BirgitteSB
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
Birgitte SB wrote:
The main difference as I see is this. Wikipedia is creating content. WP could chose to make it's content free or not; they chose to make it free. Wikisource has no control on whether our content is free or where it is free. We can only choose whether or not to make it available. Downstream users are going to have to evaluate whether they are free to use Wikisource contect individually unless they are in the United States. Our material is under various licenses as well as public domain (as applicable in the US). We cannot give anyone a blanket guarantee the content is free for them to use whether we include non-commercial or not. They are still going to have to evaluate each license category and judge based on the laws they must abide by.
Absolutely. It's important to have broad principles like NPOV to guide all projects, but it's also important to recognize that not all projects will have the same priorities as Wikipedia. For most of Wikisource NPOV is meaningless, as is the ability of downstream users to modify the material. If the material is modified it is no longer the same material. We can permit editing, translating and other commentary, and that will be subject to the usual rules for NPOV and modifiability, but unless there is a clear recognition of an inviolable source text it is all meaningless. When a vandal wanted change a string of digits in the middle of "Pi to 1,000,000 places" on Wikisource I suppose it could be explained in terms of the right to modify, but the result was no longer pi.
It's also important to trust the leadership in each project. Those who have taken on leadership roles in established projects are going to be known quantities who are not going to rush headlong into radical stands. (This may be different in newer or smaller projects, but even there as time goes on trust can be built.) Trusted leaders are not about to allow others to recklessly ignore copyrights, but at the same time they are not going to take such disadvantageously narrow interpretations of copyright that would bar any material with a mere suggestion of a violation. Removing the Security Council Resolutions would be a clear act of copyright paranoia. I have heard of no complaint from the United Nations about it, and I'm sure that an understanding could be reached if they did complain. The concern of governmental or quasi-governmental bodies about the republication of such documents has nothing to do with the loss of revenue, but with a belief that they might be reproduced inaccurately.
Going out of our way to ensure that downstream users will be able to copy this material is ultimately an untenable position. People must accept responsibility for their own actions. We do well to warn them of possible problems, but we should have no obligation to hold their hands in the way that we would hold those of a child. We can say that we have reasonable and supportable grounds for saying that a given document is in the public domain, or that it is covered by fair use (or dealing) in the server jurisdiction, and that we cannot vouch for its legal status in some other jurisdiction. In saying this I make a specific statement that I do not consider public interest alone to be grounds for publishing most documents.
Too little attention has been paid to the perils of Wikipedia's success, a success that has also dragged the rest of the projects along with it. Protecting the Foundation from legal liability is a fine ideal, but the tone of that protection has changed in the 4+ years that I have participated. An operation with a $1,000,000 annual hardware budget is not the same as one with a $10,000 annual hardware budget. The willingness to take risks is replaced by the fear that we really could lose something, and that stiffles innovation. The corporate world often protects itself through a series of corporate structures that would have the effect of creating firewalls between divisions to protect the others from collateral damage when any one of them runs into trouble. Perhaps it's something the Foundation should be thinking about.
I think new languages should be supported if they seem likely to suceed establishing an active community. Before we can judge that or set up any guidelines we really need more information. I would very much like to take the first step in this. Which I believe is analizing what has worked or not in the past. But right now some of the stats pages are months old and Wikisource has none at all for individual languages. I don't know that the information I can get from any updated stats would really tell what makes a community sucessfull. However it should allow us to see what communities have a certain level of activity. Then I think we should ask people from various communities to fill out a survey about the beginings of their community and maybe we can find some indicators we can use to answer your points.
I don't know that a survey will accomplish anything. I still think that dividing Wikisource into separate language communities was a big mistake; that's the one issue that most influenced me to drift away from it and back to where most of my time is now spent dealing with Wiktionary.
The leader in a project, as you now appear to be in Wikisource, needs vision. That person needs an instinct to recognize what would divert the project into unproductive paths. Of course, it takes great skill to shape an army of dilletentes into a productive force.
Formats can be a big time waster. Some people are obsessed with the sense of order that clearly defined formats can bring into a project. For them having the world well ordered brings them a sense of professionalism, forgetting at the same time that we are all amateurs here. For the most part that really doesn't matter. The substantive content and information are what matter; a format is nothing more than a tool for making that information more accessible. If the format fails in that mission it's not much good.
Ec
2006/4/19, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net:
Absolutely. It's important to have broad principles like NPOV to guide all projects, but it's also important to recognize that not all projects will have the same priorities as Wikipedia. For most of Wikisource NPOV is meaningless, as is the ability of downstream users to modify the material. If the material is modified it is no longer the same material. We can permit editing, translating and other commentary, and that will be subject to the usual rules for NPOV and modifiability, but unless there is a clear recognition of an inviolable source text it is all meaningless. When a vandal wanted change a string of digits in the middle of "Pi to 1,000,000 places" on Wikisource I suppose it could be explained in terms of the right to modify, but the result was no longer pi.
I don't think the difference with Wikipedia is as large as you state here. Sure, one can rewrite a Wikipedia article and still have an encyclopedia article, but one can also easily make small changes that are simply incorrect. Someone who changes the digits of pi in wikisource isn't that much different from someone who changes an article on Wikipedia to state that Hitler was born in China. Do they have the right to do that? I'm not sure. But someone is definitely allowed to take a Wikipedia article, change it to say that Hitler was born in China, and publish that under the GNU/FDL. Likewise, they have the right to take the value of Pi from Wikisource, change it, and put that on their website.
Going out of our way to ensure that downstream users will be able to copy this material is ultimately an untenable position. People must accept responsibility for their own actions. We do well to warn them of possible problems, but we should have no obligation to hold their hands in the way that we would hold those of a child. We can say that we have reasonable and supportable grounds for saying that a given document is in the public domain, or that it is covered by fair use (or dealing) in the server jurisdiction, and that we cannot vouch for its legal status in some other jurisdiction. In saying this I make a specific statement that I do not consider public interest alone to be grounds for publishing most documents.
And here I disagree. The right to re-publish is at the heart of the Wikimedia philosophy. It's very nice that you ensure you have the right to republish (although I think "they haven't complained yet" isn't exactly 'ensuring a right' - I strongly advise you to take stricter guidelines), but Wikimedia was made for free material. Which means that others have the right to republish. That that is under different licenses - Wikipedia allows changing, but requires it to be under the same license, Wikisource only requires that it may be copied unchanged - is no problem. But if your material may not be reproduced by others at all, I think you are not following the spirit of Wikimedia.
I don't know that a survey will accomplish anything. I still think that dividing Wikisource into separate language communities was a big mistake; that's the one issue that most influenced me to drift away from it and back to where most of my time is now spent dealing with Wiktionary.
I find this a weird remark, because I think the decision to split Wiktionary was even worse than the one to split Wikisource...
-- Andre Engels, andreengels@gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels
--- Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
2006/4/19, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net:
Going out of our way to ensure that downstream
users will be able to
copy this material is ultimately an untenable
position. People must
accept responsibility for their own actions. We
do well to warn them of
possible problems, but we should have no
obligation to hold their hands
in the way that we would hold those of a child.
We can say that we have
reasonable and supportable grounds for saying that
a given document is
in the public domain, or that it is covered by
fair use (or dealing) in
the server jurisdiction, and that we cannot vouch
for its legal status
in some other jurisdiction. In saying this I make
a specific statement
that I do not consider public interest alone to be
grounds for
publishing most documents.
And here I disagree. The right to re-publish is at the heart of the Wikimedia philosophy. It's very nice that you ensure you have the right to republish (although I think "they haven't complained yet" isn't exactly 'ensuring a right' - I strongly advise you to take stricter guidelines), but Wikimedia was made for free material. Which means that others have the right to republish. That that is under different licenses - Wikipedia allows changing, but requires it to be under the same license, Wikisource only requires that it may be copied unchanged - is no problem. But if your material may not be reproduced by others at all, I think you are not following the spirit of Wikimedia.
First off I want to say that the English Wikisource does not take anything under fair use/dealing. Although I think that making information available is the true heart of Wikimedia, the ability to freely disseminate it right up there. And I would never want to accept material where an author gave permission for publication on Wikisource without giving any distribution rights. However I believe it is not possible to guarantee worldwide that the downstream user can just take Wikimedia information without looking into their local laws. Even with GFDL. Some countries simply do not have provisions for recognising a license like the GFDL. Right now Wikisource only has material that we believe is freely distributable for commercial use somewhere. I cannot guarantee it is freely distributable *everywhere* but I do not believe that would be possible no matter how restrictive we are. I feel we just need to stress the importance of keeping everything properly tagged so downstream users can sort it out. We have been told no non-commercial and we got rid of that. My concern is that the thinking behind non-commercial was that we need to be able to give such a blanket guarantee. Also there are odds and ends that I do not understand where they fit in to copyright at all.
BTW we are not talking about any licenses here that are not used at WP and Commons (mainly various PD reasons). Whether the people there do not see the issues I do or simply never looked very far into it, I do not know.
Birgitte SB
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
On 4/19/06, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
I don't think the difference with Wikipedia is as large as you state here. Sure, one can rewrite a Wikipedia article and still have an encyclopedia article, but one can also easily make small changes that are simply incorrect. Someone who changes the digits of pi in wikisource isn't that much different from someone who changes an article on Wikipedia to state that Hitler was born in China. Do they have the right to do that? I'm not sure. But someone is definitely allowed to take a Wikipedia article, change it to say that Hitler was born in China, and publish that under the GNU/FDL. Likewise, they have the right to take the value of Pi from Wikisource, change it, and put that on their website.
I think the point of Ec's argument was missed. I believe he was getting at a slightly more fundamental point--something more along the lines of the "purpose" (kind of a bad term, I know) of the two projects: the fact that one project's personal goals might not fit another project's personal goals. In the case of Wikipedia, there is always a sense of "incompleteness" about the articles; there's always something that can be added to a Wikipedia article that can make it better. But, at some point in the evolution of a text at Wikisource, there is a point where this completeness is reached: the point in time when the text matches a previously published version of that work. Once this point is reached, there is no need to edit the text anymore, for no more modifications could be made that would leave it the same text that was previously published.
Sure, a person always has the right to edit any work on Wikisource, but the matter at stake is that remodification is not one of our goals, for after a certain point in time, Wikisource would not see anymore modifications necessary. Let's say Wikisource published a few of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Maybe the scrolls have spelling errors in them. How important is it to be able to fix those spelling mistakes? Wikisource would say it's important NOT to fix them, since those mistakes are present in the original text and should be faithfully reproduced for any person who wants to closely study the scrolls without having to handle them in person.
Sorry about the length of this. What I'm trying to say, is that Wikisource's main goal is archiving, which Wikipedia's is not. Because of this difference, Wikipedia's goals will not work with Wikisource and Wikisource's won't work with Wikipedia. This illustrates that fact that a set of broad, kind of vague, group of over-arching goals is needed for every project to follow while each project still has the freedom to custom-tailor its immediate goals to its own aims.
And here I disagree. The right to re-publish is at the heart of the
Wikimedia philosophy. It's very nice that you ensure you have the right to republish (although I think "they haven't complained yet" isn't exactly 'ensuring a right' - I strongly advise you to take stricter guidelines), but Wikimedia was made for free material. Which means that others have the right to republish. That that is under different licenses - Wikipedia allows changing, but requires it to be under the same license, Wikisource only requires that it may be copied unchanged - is no problem. But if your material may not be reproduced by others at all, I think you are not following the spirit of Wikimedia.
This philosophy is one which causes no small amount of grief for many editors and contributors at Wikisource. Many times we've been approached by people who had excellent documents that have great value in and of themselves, but we must turn away those works because of licensing problems (maybe they're released under a non-commercial license or Wikisource could get the permission to display them on the web yet not allow other people to mercilessly copy and redistribute those texts). I will agree, republication is a great idea, but it's come at a fair price, and for the archivists at Wikisource that price is infuriating.
Why couldn't the Wikimedia philosophy be tweaked a bit to allow some works to explicitly not be redistributable? The text would of course be freely accessible to all, but no one can go put it on their own website without proper permission. The blanket statement of ensuring total, absolute freedom drastically cuts down the amount of things that can be presented to the world on the Wikimedia projects. But what's more important: allowing third parties to freely distribute our own works or being able to share valuable information that would have otherwise gone unbeknownst to the rest of the world with the stipulation that it can only be presented on a Wikimedia project?
Birgitte SB wrote:
I think new languages should be supported if they seem likely to suceed establishing an active community. Before we can judge that or set up any guidelines we really need more information. I would very much like to take the first step in this. Which I believe is analizing what has worked or not in the past. But right now some of the stats pages are months old and Wikisource has none at all for individual languages. I don't know that the information I can get from any updated stats would really tell what makes a community sucessfull. However it should allow us to see what communities have a certain level of activity. Then I think we should ask people from various communities to fill out a survey about the beginings of their community and maybe we can find some indicators we can use to answer your points.
BirgitteSB
I wrote something about this, but the mail appeared to get lost. I'll do it again then :-)
I know not if stats might help to define such guidelines, but it is always worth analysing data. It may provide ideas.
The author of these stats is Erik Zachte. What about contacting him to see why stats of down ? Is it because he left the project ? Or did not find the time ? Or did not find the motivation ? Or was his tool broken by a software modification ? Does he need help or can someone else take care of stats from now on ?
... would you explore this Birgitte ?
Ant
Hello all, and welcome Brigitte and other Wikisource folks - take my greetings, from an en/jawikiquote sysop.
Brigitte SB wrote:
However, in general the people who are trusted from a Foundation perspective take little interest in the running of the smaller projects.
As Anthere said, principally there is no causality between project size and involvement to the Foundation level activities. They are many editors who are active on smaller projects, Wiktionary or Wikinews alike, and fairly involved into the Foundation activities, like Amgine or Sabine Cratella. I could add myself to that list as one Wikiquote editor.
And if you - and/or other Wikisource editors - are interested in this sphere - Foundation activities concerning smaller project, "translation & (small projects') promotion subcommittee" will appropriate your interest and expect collaboration with you. If circumstance allows, you would invite to join to it ;-) like just Anthere show a typical course ... if you want to work with someone and he or she does too, then you are getting involved more and more.
On 4/15/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
How does that happen ? Well, perhaps you start writing on this mailing list and I'll notice what you say sounds wise and interesting and willing to build something. And perhaps others will tell me they feel the same. And perhaps we'll exchange a couple of emails on minor issues (such as a checkuser) and I will find you a cool person. Then, perhaps I will go look at your page to see who you are. I will notice something which suggest you could be interested in a certain project, then I'll invite you to join for that task and you will agree. And we'll have fun doing that and do a good work. Repeat that a bunch of times, and that will be it.
It is totally unrelated to the size or the nature of your favorite project :-)
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 think I could share your case - I haven't seen here no other regular of Wikiquote than Essjay, but anyway we haven't discussed about Wikiquote at any rate - Generally it is rare to be involved into the Foundation level activities unless some legal problem arises like on French Wikiquote or English Wikisource.
And as Ant suggested, we don't monopolize this problem within us editors of smaller projects, but with editors whose language is very different from English and hence whose activities are rarely shown on English world (no one has been so bold, at least as far as I know, to send a mail directly to the foundation-l and ask someone to translate into other language; it is in my opinion odd from principal because of stated multilingualism of this mailing list, but as a plain fact it could be - even on meta, I have been accused by someone because I hadn't been submitted in "the language many people can read". It is a strange opinion if someone doesn't speak in English, she doesn't respect multilingualism, but such attitude is not unique)
Same gaps are sometimes observed between the largest project and another in the same language. Some of the former tend to think a way fitting to them are good universally - we know it depends. The former are sometimes troublesome, since they don't intentionally harm anyone and in the worst case, they are raged as if they were mistreated. But, even though in pain, someone needs to realize such things don't go as they think not in every time and place, if their way isn't suitable to solve a particular issue. Happily, not so in many times, but as a Wikiquote/Wikinews editor I felt surely Wikipedia editors put their shoes on my toes in some occasions. On the other hand, such unpleasant but apparent kicks have stimulated our relatively still projects. So we could say here, diversity is sweet, and it is what we always need.
Not only big project editors but of smaller ones are therefore strongly invited to join the Foundation activities.
As for checkuser issues, specially vote for giving trust to certain editors, the current procedure is based on Wikipedia community experiences. Now you pointed out it hasn't worked well on Wikisource. Rules can be revised, but to revise it, we need to share our experience with each other. So again, welcome to foundation-l.
All good ideas. But but but, we tried the official liaisons (they were called ambassadors). It failed. Recruitement of people : yes indeed. But this can only happen when we start knowing each other a little bit more. I absolutely agree with you we have a major problem of communication. Actually, this has ALWAYS been the case. Just differently. When I joined, the english wp was on one version of the software and all others on an older version. There was no meta. There was no common mailing list (later, non english were parked on one list). Actually, the miscommunication was SO bad that a language even forked and is still suffering today of that fork. Last year, I tried to work to create Quarto with others interested in communication, such as Sj. It was a place where at least description of projects state could be made. By lack of human help, I gave up. Elian also maintained with Aphaia's help a project-state on meta. I think it is dead now. There are now several wikizines in different languages (plus Walter's global one), I hope they communicate a bit between themselves. But each essentially give news of a specific project. Not cross project
If you have ideas, please, by all means, provide them. Or better, IMPLEMENT them.
Ahm, as for WMF website, naturally focusing on its linguistic uniformity, now we are talking how we can improve it within wmfcc & translation subcomm. I don't promise it will be a near future, but want to say always new ideas and editors are welcome. Note; to improve the WMF site, you needn't log it on. Most of its content have been drafted and translated on Meta.
-- Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com
Anthere wrote:
The reason for the 25 votes limit comes from two reasons
- A community with less than 25 users is unlikely to really need
frequent checkusers, because it is a project with reduced activity. So, it can not be a heavy load for stewards.
- A community with less than 25 users has a rather serious risk to have
a rather little known editor become a checkuser, rather than a trusted oldbie. If we start handing out status just as we do for sysop status on small projects, I think there will be abuse. I say this from my experience, as I had to unsysop several sysops on small projects (the guys did not know our basic rules, behaved like dictators with the handful of editors, put advertisements on the main page, controlled povs etc...).
I am perplex that the en.wikibooks does not have a big enough base of editors to vote on a check user... I am quite lazy, so I will not go to the stats page to check. But can you roughly say how many active editors per month the project currently has ? How many very active editors per month ?
ant
Since the stats page hasn't been updated since November of last year, it is completely useless to even gague what the current activity is on any Wikimedia project. I can only use the current activity on the Wikibooks staff lounge to even remotely gague what the current user activity level is, but I would guess it is pretty close to about 20 user at the absolute top. Really stretching it perhaps we can get to 25 total at the most.
And as for advertising this, I guess we could put it in bold 40 point type on the project main page with a link to a special page only for this kind of request. I think that is way over the top and something that is not needed in this situation. The advertising was more than adequate, it is just that this is a very unreasonable request.
As for a "community with less than 25 users unlikely needing frequent checkuser scans", I think this is mistaken totally what is going on. en.wikibooks has numerous links from within Wikipedia, and is being hammered by vandals that have moved on from Wikipedia, indeed with excellent training on how to be a vandal on Wikipedia, and taking on other projects as well that don't have quite the same pool of administrators.
As for handing out checkuser status to people who are not trusted oldies, that is totally rediculous as well. There are admins and bureaucrats on en.wikibooks who are also admins on other projects, including meta, wikinews, and even en.wikipedia. Active ones at that. I see absolutely no reason why the standards for giving somebody bureaucrat status when you can't also give them checkuser status.
Furthermore, what abuse could possibly happen with somebody having checkuser scans? Really, at the most extreme? With bureacrat status I could give admin status to a whole team of 'bots that would then in tandem go through and systematically delete every page on a project and block every user. Talk about damage to a project. With checkuser privileges, all you have access to is just the IP address of each user. So the absolute worst damage is that they publish on an external website (making it harder for the board to go after that user) all of the IP addresses of every user. Which is worse? Really, think about it.
More to the point, show me a single user that has been given checkuser rights on any local project besides a Wikipedia and meta. This would be a contrary example to prove me wrong. If not, why not? Because checkuser rights are not needed except on Wikipedia?
Hi
Let me try to address your various points the best I can.
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
Anthere wrote:
The reason for the 25 votes limit comes from two reasons
- A community with less than 25 users is unlikely to really need
frequent checkusers, because it is a project with reduced activity. So, it can not be a heavy load for stewards.
- A community with less than 25 users has a rather serious risk to have
a rather little known editor become a checkuser, rather than a trusted oldbie. If we start handing out status just as we do for sysop status on small projects, I think there will be abuse. I say this from my experience, as I had to unsysop several sysops on small projects (the guys did not know our basic rules, behaved like dictators with the handful of editors, put advertisements on the main page, controlled povs etc...).
I am perplex that the en.wikibooks does not have a big enough base of editors to vote on a check user... I am quite lazy, so I will not go to the stats page to check. But can you roughly say how many active editors per month the project currently has ? How many very active editors per month ?
ant
Since the stats page hasn't been updated since November of last year, it is completely useless to even gague what the current activity is on any Wikimedia project. I can only use the current activity on the Wikibooks staff lounge to even remotely gague what the current user activity level is, but I would guess it is pretty close to about 20 user at the absolute top. Really stretching it perhaps we can get to 25 total at the most.
And as for advertising this, I guess we could put it in bold 40 point type on the project main page with a link to a special page only for this kind of request. I think that is way over the top and something that is not needed in this situation. The advertising was more than adequate, it is just that this is a very unreasonable request.
As for a "community with less than 25 users unlikely needing frequent checkuser scans", I think this is mistaken totally what is going on. en.wikibooks has numerous links from within Wikipedia, and is being hammered by vandals that have moved on from Wikipedia, indeed with excellent training on how to be a vandal on Wikipedia, and taking on other projects as well that don't have quite the same pool of administrators.
I see. Perhaps the number 25 was too high then. That would tend to suggest this. But again, let me explain why we put a minimum limit. We have some small projects with a number of editors of less than 5. What usually happens is that the most active one simply ask sysop status (and even sometimes bureaucrat status) on meta because their project *need* a sysop. Which means the status is given without any community voting whatsoever. Sometimes, when it is a new language in particular, the editor has been on our projects only for a couple of days and have no idea of our basic rules of operating whatsoever (npov in particular). More than once, we had problems later on. And it was not always easy for the very small growing community to have a black sheep unsysoped.
What I think should NOT be allowed to happen, ever, is that the new wikiquote project in maori be created, and a total stranger be given sysop, bureaucrat and checkuser status so that he can start the community. In short, I think that only editors known by a significant number of other editors should ever be given checkuser access. Hence the 25 votes. Which may be too high a value.
So, option 1 : decreasing the number of votes requirements.
Now, there are other options we could follow.
As for handing out checkuser status to people who are not trusted oldies, that is totally rediculous as well. There are admins and bureaucrats on en.wikibooks who are also admins on other projects, including meta, wikinews, and even en.wikipedia. Active ones at that. I see absolutely no reason why the standards for giving somebody bureaucrat status when you can't also give them checkuser status.
I do not know what are the standards for giving bureaucrat status. I think they are not the same at all depending on projects.
I see a **major** reason for the standards for giving bureaucrat status to be different from the standards for giving checkuser status.
The standards for giving bureaucrat status are different in each project and each language. On one project, it will be a vote by all editors of a project. On another project, it will be a vote by administrators only. On another project, it might even be a vote by other bureaucrats. Or it might be no vote at all (just ask on meta). It may be 80% support. It may be 66%. There are no standards.
But if the bureaucrat makes a mess, it is a technical/community issue. Only the projects can be damaged (which is bad enough). So, it is the community business to define its own rules.
If a checkuser makes a mess, the Foundation itself may be concerned. We might have problems with an editor for release of private data. So, the Foundation has a right to have a say in WHO is granted this access. Hence the policy being *more* standard.
Note as well that other access similarly are granted by a limited number of people, according to internal rules which are not the community business. I typically will mention developer status, with shell access; Only a few developers will grant it to you, according to their own rules. And the Foundation can kick you off.
Furthermore, what abuse could possibly happen with somebody having checkuser scans? Really, at the most extreme? With bureacrat status I could give admin status to a whole team of 'bots that would then in tandem go through and systematically delete every page on a project and block every user. Talk about damage to a project. With checkuser privileges, all you have access to is just the IP address of each user. So the absolute worst damage is that they publish on an external website (making it harder for the board to go after that user) all of the IP addresses of every user. Which is worse? Really, think about it.
I really think about it. I agree that practically, the projects are more important. *However*, I was elected on the board of the Foundation, which means that *I* must think as well of the protection of the organisation itself. If the Foundation is sued for lack of respect of privacy, I am concerned. You might be indirectly concerned if less money goes to the servers due to legal requirements (trial costs).
So, yes, you are correct. For 99,99% of you, the projects are more important.
More to the point, show me a single user that has been given checkuser rights on any local project besides a Wikipedia and meta. This would be a contrary example to prove me wrong. If not, why not? Because checkuser rights are not needed except on Wikipedia?
Well, technically, because no requests were done on meta to turn on the status :-)
Here is option 2, which I hesitate to offer, but will nevertheless. CheckUser might be related to a language rather than a project. Which means that all current checkusers on the en.wiki, could be granted checkuser on any other en speaking project automatically, or on their request. Potential pit : en.wikibooks might be unhappy about an unknown person from en.wiki having checkuser on its project. Note : it is a bit complex for stewards to do.
Option 3 (also controversial) : If en.wikibooks holds a vote to grant checkuser status to some of its editors, make it possible that any english editor of any project can vote. Potential pit : en.wikibooks might not be happy that an unknown person from en.wiki comes voting on en.wikibooks while he is not an editor there. Note : the Foundation does not care if you do this. It is internal business.
Option 4 What about a global community approval (todo on meta) for a collection of people who could do checkuser on absolutely any project and absolutely any language. Those would NOT be stewards. Only checkusers.
Option 5 Same than option 4, but for language only. For example, 10 english speaking editors would be checkusers on en.wiki, en. wikibooks, en.wikiquote etc... And a set would have checkuser on commons.
What else ?
Ant
On 4/14/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
In short, I think that only editors known by a significant number of other editors should ever be given checkuser access. Hence the 25 votes. Which may be too high a value.
Yes, I think changing the phrase "25-30 editors approval" to "the approval of 10 active editors" would be a reasonable change that can be made without too much bureaucracy. While it's good to be cautious about these things, specific parameters like this are *meant* to be tuned. Be bold :-)
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
On 4/14/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
In short, I think that only editors known by a significant number of other editors should ever be given checkuser access. Hence the 25 votes. Which may be too high a value.
Yes, I think changing the phrase "25-30 editors approval" to "the approval of 10 active editors" would be a reasonable change that can be made without too much bureaucracy. While it's good to be cautious about these things, specific parameters like this are *meant* to be tuned. Be bold :-)
Erik
I'll ask the board its opinion :-)
ant
Erik Moeller wrote:
On 4/14/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
In short, I think that only editors known by a significant number of other editors should ever be given checkuser access. Hence the 25 votes. Which may be too high a value.
Yes, I think changing the phrase "25-30 editors approval" to "the approval of 10 active editors" would be a reasonable change that can be made without too much bureaucracy. While it's good to be cautious about these things, specific parameters like this are *meant* to be tuned. Be bold :-)
Erik
I would be comfortable with a policy that requires XX% of very active users (defined as 100 edits/month) as an alternative minimum, with a hard minimum of somewhere between 5-10 users. Even very small projects can usually come up with at least five people, or they really are "one-man band" type projects dominated by a single editor. For larger projects like en.wikipedia, the 30 editor minimum approval seems very reasonable or perhaps even a little bit low.
On 4/14/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Option 4 What about a global community approval (todo on meta) for a collection of people who could do checkuser on absolutely any project and absolutely any language. Those would NOT be stewards. Only checkusers.
Option 5 Same than option 4, but for language only. For example, 10 english speaking editors would be checkusers on en.wiki, en. wikibooks, en.wikiquote etc... And a set would have checkuser on commons.
I think both of these has merit. I've previously indicated that I would be willing to serve as a "guest checkuser" on any project where I can either read the language used (en or de) or where someone trustworthy is available to collaborate with me (e.g. a local bureaucrat or a steward with the appropriate language experience). Checkuser requires both (a) technical knowledge of how to use it to get useful results and (b) trustworthiness not to misuse the tool or the results. Most of the checkuser policy is catholic; local policy doesn't come all that much into play, and the checkuser can coordinate with local admins and bureaucrats to resolve questions as to whether, e.g., a local policy violation has occured.
I think option 5 is probably best insofar as translation issues become problematic. However, there are a number of wikis (the gaggle of wikis for the Eastern European languages) that probably need a checkuser and may not be likely to produce one sufficiently trustworthy to meet the Foundation's requirements.
Also, I suspect Brad (based on my conversation with him) would prefer that we avoid proliferating the number of checkusers; using pooled checkusers across projects as much as practical is likely a better solution than having lots of local checkusers, from that standpoint.
Kelly
I agree with Kelly entirely. Additionally, I'm willing to serve in the same capacity; I don't have the length of tenure with checkuser that Kelly does, but I have been quite active in using it for en.wikipedia, and am certainly willing to do so elsewhere as needed.
Essjay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia http://www.wikipedia.org/
Kelly Martin wrote:
On 4/14/06, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Option 4 What about a global community approval (todo on meta) for a collection of people who could do checkuser on absolutely any project and absolutely any language. Those would NOT be stewards. Only checkusers.
Option 5 Same than option 4, but for language only. For example, 10 english speaking editors would be checkusers on en.wiki, en. wikibooks, en.wikiquote etc... And a set would have checkuser on commons.
I think both of these has merit. I've previously indicated that I would be willing to serve as a "guest checkuser" on any project where I can either read the language used (en or de) or where someone trustworthy is available to collaborate with me (e.g. a local bureaucrat or a steward with the appropriate language experience). Checkuser requires both (a) technical knowledge of how to use it to get useful results and (b) trustworthiness not to misuse the tool or the results. Most of the checkuser policy is catholic; local policy doesn't come all that much into play, and the checkuser can coordinate with local admins and bureaucrats to resolve questions as to whether, e.g., a local policy violation has occured.
I think option 5 is probably best insofar as translation issues become problematic. However, there are a number of wikis (the gaggle of wikis for the Eastern European languages) that probably need a checkuser and may not be likely to produce one sufficiently trustworthy to meet the Foundation's requirements.
Also, I suspect Brad (based on my conversation with him) would prefer that we avoid proliferating the number of checkusers; using pooled checkusers across projects as much as practical is likely a better solution than having lots of local checkusers, from that standpoint.
Kelly _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Anthere wrote:
Hi
Let me try to address your various points the best I can.
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
Anthere wrote:
The reason for the 25 votes limit comes from two reasons
- A community with less than 25 users is unlikely to really need
frequent checkusers, because it is a project with reduced activity. So, it can not be a heavy load for stewards.
- A community with less than 25 users has a rather serious risk to have
a rather little known editor become a checkuser, rather than a trusted oldbie. If we start handing out status just as we do for sysop status on small projects, I think there will be abuse. I say this from my experience, as I had to unsysop several sysops on small projects (the guys did not know our basic rules, behaved like dictators with the handful of editors, put advertisements on the main page, controlled povs etc...).
I am perplex that the en.wikibooks does not have a big enough base of editors to vote on a check user... I am quite lazy, so I will not go to the stats page to check. But can you roughly say how many active editors per month the project currently has ? How many very active editors per month ?
ant
Since the stats page hasn't been updated since November of last year, it is completely useless to even gague what the current activity is on any Wikimedia project. I can only use the current activity on the Wikibooks staff lounge to even remotely gague what the current user activity level is, but I would guess it is pretty close to about 20 user at the absolute top. Really stretching it perhaps we can get to 25 total at the most.
And as for advertising this, I guess we could put it in bold 40 point type on the project main page with a link to a special page only for this kind of request. I think that is way over the top and something that is not needed in this situation. The advertising was more than adequate, it is just that this is a very unreasonable request.
As for a "community with less than 25 users unlikely needing frequent checkuser scans", I think this is mistaken totally what is going on. en.wikibooks has numerous links from within Wikipedia, and is being hammered by vandals that have moved on from Wikipedia, indeed with excellent training on how to be a vandal on Wikipedia, and taking on other projects as well that don't have quite the same pool of administrators.
I see. Perhaps the number 25 was too high then. That would tend to suggest this. But again, let me explain why we put a minimum limit. We have some small projects with a number of editors of less than 5. What usually happens is that the most active one simply ask sysop status (and even sometimes bureaucrat status) on meta because their project *need* a sysop. Which means the status is given without any community voting whatsoever. Sometimes, when it is a new language in particular, the editor has been on our projects only for a couple of days and have no idea of our basic rules of operating whatsoever (npov in particular). More than once, we had problems later on. And it was not always easy for the very small growing community to have a black sheep unsysoped.
What I think should NOT be allowed to happen, ever, is that the new wikiquote project in maori be created, and a total stranger be given sysop, bureaucrat and checkuser status so that he can start the community. In short, I think that only editors known by a significant number of other editors should ever be given checkuser access. Hence the 25 votes. Which may be too high a value.
So, option 1 : decreasing the number of votes requirements.
Now, there are other options we could follow.
I would suggest that the standards for becoming a bureaucrat should be much higher for brand new projects in this case, and this is perhaps something that needs to be established on a Wikimedia-wide policy as well and not just on a project by project basis. The point about becoming a bureaucrat is that they have the ability to create other administrators and are presumed to be users trusted enough that they not only have full editorial control over a project to do all of the administrator functions, but they also have the ability to create more administrators. The charges of a cabal in some cases are justified when you grant bureaucratship to somebody when there is no other means of oversight about what they are doing, and they in turn grant adminship to others with their same point of view but refuse to grant it to others that have a different point of view, and for that reason alone. This has happened on some of the smaller projects, especially in languages that Foundation board members don't speak fluently and can't monitor directly.
As for handing out checkuser status to people who are not trusted oldies, that is totally rediculous as well. There are admins and bureaucrats on en.wikibooks who are also admins on other projects, including meta, wikinews, and even en.wikipedia. Active ones at that. I see absolutely no reason why the standards for giving somebody bureaucrat status when you can't also give them checkuser status.
I do not know what are the standards for giving bureaucrat status. I think they are not the same at all depending on projects.
I see a **major** reason for the standards for giving bureaucrat status to be different from the standards for giving checkuser status.
The standards for giving bureaucrat status are different in each project and each language. On one project, it will be a vote by all editors of a project. On another project, it will be a vote by administrators only. On another project, it might even be a vote by other bureaucrats. Or it might be no vote at all (just ask on meta). It may be 80% support. It may be 66%. There are no standards.
But if the bureaucrat makes a mess, it is a technical/community issue. Only the projects can be damaged (which is bad enough). So, it is the community business to define its own rules.
If a checkuser makes a mess, the Foundation itself may be concerned. We might have problems with an editor for release of private data. So, the Foundation has a right to have a say in WHO is granted this access. Hence the policy being *more* standard.
I'm not really understanding this point of view here. Under what area is the Foundation directly threatened when this release of private data occurs? It is still a technical/community issue with the checkuser data, and people with checkuser rights can still only do the scan only on registered users for their individual project. This might be a much bigger concern if they had access to the general Wikimedia user database, such as is being proposed with the common login project. In this situation where somebody with checkuser rights could access the data on not just the users for their individual project but for anybody on any Wikimedia project, you are correct that the standards should be much higher.... indeed IMHO higher than perhaps even becoming a steward. That is not the situation right now, from my understanding.
If I take the presumption that the current process of becoming a registered user is still going to continue for some time, and somebody with local checkuser status can only do a checkuser scan on that much smaller group of users, I fail to see where the Foundation is really going to be hurt if they get out of control. The privacy policy is that reasonable steps are going to happen to protect private data, but you should be aware that if you log onto any website, including Amazon.com, Google, CNN, Microsoft, BBC, or whatever including hackerz.com, that your IP address is going to be logged together with whatever activity that you do on that website. And that information may be released to interested government agencies. All the Foundation is promising is that some sort of due process is going to happen before that information is released, like a supeona, and that the information may also be used internally for the protection of the project, such as performing checkuser scans.
Indeed the current privacy policy doesn't even do that. It is really just a disclaimer that the data is going to be logged, and that if you don't like it, you shouldn't be logging into any Wikimedia server. There are some "policies" that go into more depth about how some of this data is protected, but this is more for how the Foundation is going to respond to outside groups that insist on obtaining this information, including not only legal proceedings but also marketing consultants and outside businesses who want to do data mining on the access logs. I think it is a prudent policy in this regard.
One thing to keep in mind is that the "personally identifying data" isn't protected that well for editors. Every editor has all of their edit information logged, and not only is it logged but the information is actually published in a very public area for all people to see. Indeed for most editors, the information is not only logged, but logged according to IP address as well. Only for those who have bothered to become a registered user is the information partially protected, and it is only on this very limited set of circumstances that the checkuser policy even starts to apply. And for many others (including myself), not only by handle but it is logged by their actual legal name. BTW, this is a conscious decision I made when I created my account, knowing the legal implications.
Furthermore, somebody with checkuser privileges still don't have access to the the full access logs. Having checkuser status, I can't see what pages another user has been looking at or reading. All I can do is just see what pages they have been editing, which doesn't require checkuser status... or even any kind of special status on Wikimedia projects, and if they happen to be a registered user, and if they happened to have done something that looks suspicious, all I get to find out with the increased privilege of the checkuser policy is just a list of IP addresses that they have logged in the local project under. Or just the last IP address depending on the technical side and how far this should go. No other identifying information is given. I can't get the e-mail address of the person, nor can I get any of the information on [[Special:Preferences]], including perhaps even mundane but identifying information like what time zone they live in or what their language preference is.
In short, I fail to see where the liability is to the Foundation is under even the most egregious of abuses, and even that can be dealt with mostly by technical limitation, including perhaps a system that limits somebody with checkuser privileges to only a limited number of checkuser scans per day or some other limiting factor to keep major abuses from happening. I'm also pointing out that smaller projects are going to have proportionally much smaller numbers of users and their ability to damage all of the Wikimedia projects is going to also be proportionally less. Using your example of the Maori Wikibooks user request to become admin, bureaucrat, and checkuser... all they are going to do is find the IP addresses of the five or six people who even bothered to register on that local project. Is that really a problem?
I don't know that the issue that concerns me is the same that concerns the Foundation, but I know what scares the hell out of me about Checkuser is this:
We have users from all over the world. Not all of them live in countries where their safety is guaranteed; there are, most assuredly, editors from regimes where if their personal information was discovered, they could be imprisoned and perhaps even killed. That terrifies me, because I don't want anybody dying over Wikipedia, nor do I want them to end up in prison. If checkuser falls into the wrong hands (I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I don't think it's too hard to imagine foreign governments wanting to hunt down our contributors; after all, at least two have blocked us flat out already), the result could literally be a matter of life and death. *Life and death.*
Some people have advocated granting checkuser liberally, and I disagree strongly with that; I'm not even particularly comfortable with the idea of it being election-based at all, although I trust the Board, and I don't believe they would have allowed for local elections if they weren't convinced it was safe. I do think, however, that it should be kept to as few users as possible, whether that means having guest checkusers as Kelly & I have advocated, or whether it means some other system. I for one am certainly willing to perform checks for other projects (indeed, I offered to do so for Wikisource), and I am sure that some of the others would as well (Kelly has already stated her willingness to do so).
As I said, I can't say that the dire scenario I laid out above is what the Board has in the back of their minds when thinking about checkuser, but I certainly know it is what is in mine. I really don't want to turn on CNN some morning and see "[Insert country here] dissident assassinated after link to Wikipedia discovered."
Essjay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia http://www.wikipedia.org/
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
Anthere wrote:
Hi
Let me try to address your various points the best I can.
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
Anthere wrote:
The reason for the 25 votes limit comes from two reasons
- A community with less than 25 users is unlikely to really need
frequent checkusers, because it is a project with reduced activity. So, it can not be a heavy load for stewards.
- A community with less than 25 users has a rather serious risk to have
a rather little known editor become a checkuser, rather than a trusted oldbie. If we start handing out status just as we do for sysop status on small projects, I think there will be abuse. I say this from my experience, as I had to unsysop several sysops on small projects (the guys did not know our basic rules, behaved like dictators with the handful of editors, put advertisements on the main page, controlled povs etc...).
I am perplex that the en.wikibooks does not have a big enough base of editors to vote on a check user... I am quite lazy, so I will not go to the stats page to check. But can you roughly say how many active editors per month the project currently has ? How many very active editors per month ?
ant
Since the stats page hasn't been updated since November of last year, it is completely useless to even gague what the current activity is on any Wikimedia project. I can only use the current activity on the Wikibooks staff lounge to even remotely gague what the current user activity level is, but I would guess it is pretty close to about 20 user at the absolute top. Really stretching it perhaps we can get to 25 total at the most.
And as for advertising this, I guess we could put it in bold 40 point type on the project main page with a link to a special page only for this kind of request. I think that is way over the top and something that is not needed in this situation. The advertising was more than adequate, it is just that this is a very unreasonable request.
As for a "community with less than 25 users unlikely needing frequent checkuser scans", I think this is mistaken totally what is going on. en.wikibooks has numerous links from within Wikipedia, and is being hammered by vandals that have moved on from Wikipedia, indeed with excellent training on how to be a vandal on Wikipedia, and taking on other projects as well that don't have quite the same pool of administrators.
I see. Perhaps the number 25 was too high then. That would tend to suggest this. But again, let me explain why we put a minimum limit. We have some small projects with a number of editors of less than 5. What usually happens is that the most active one simply ask sysop status (and even sometimes bureaucrat status) on meta because their project *need* a sysop. Which means the status is given without any community voting whatsoever. Sometimes, when it is a new language in particular, the editor has been on our projects only for a couple of days and have no idea of our basic rules of operating whatsoever (npov in particular). More than once, we had problems later on. And it was not always easy for the very small growing community to have a black sheep unsysoped.
What I think should NOT be allowed to happen, ever, is that the new wikiquote project in maori be created, and a total stranger be given sysop, bureaucrat and checkuser status so that he can start the community. In short, I think that only editors known by a significant number of other editors should ever be given checkuser access. Hence the 25 votes. Which may be too high a value.
So, option 1 : decreasing the number of votes requirements.
Now, there are other options we could follow.
I would suggest that the standards for becoming a bureaucrat should be much higher for brand new projects in this case, and this is perhaps something that needs to be established on a Wikimedia-wide policy as well and not just on a project by project basis. The point about becoming a bureaucrat is that they have the ability to create other administrators and are presumed to be users trusted enough that they not only have full editorial control over a project to do all of the administrator functions, but they also have the ability to create more administrators. The charges of a cabal in some cases are justified when you grant bureaucratship to somebody when there is no other means of oversight about what they are doing, and they in turn grant adminship to others with their same point of view but refuse to grant it to others that have a different point of view, and for that reason alone. This has happened on some of the smaller projects, especially in languages that Foundation board members don't speak fluently and can't monitor directly.
As for handing out checkuser status to people who are not trusted oldies, that is totally rediculous as well. There are admins and bureaucrats on en.wikibooks who are also admins on other projects, including meta, wikinews, and even en.wikipedia. Active ones at that. I see absolutely no reason why the standards for giving somebody bureaucrat status when you can't also give them checkuser status.
I do not know what are the standards for giving bureaucrat status. I think they are not the same at all depending on projects.
I see a **major** reason for the standards for giving bureaucrat status to be different from the standards for giving checkuser status.
The standards for giving bureaucrat status are different in each project and each language. On one project, it will be a vote by all editors of a project. On another project, it will be a vote by administrators only. On another project, it might even be a vote by other bureaucrats. Or it might be no vote at all (just ask on meta). It may be 80% support. It may be 66%. There are no standards.
But if the bureaucrat makes a mess, it is a technical/community issue. Only the projects can be damaged (which is bad enough). So, it is the community business to define its own rules.
If a checkuser makes a mess, the Foundation itself may be concerned. We might have problems with an editor for release of private data. So, the Foundation has a right to have a say in WHO is granted this access. Hence the policy being *more* standard.
I'm not really understanding this point of view here. Under what area is the Foundation directly threatened when this release of private data occurs? It is still a technical/community issue with the checkuser data, and people with checkuser rights can still only do the scan only on registered users for their individual project. This might be a much bigger concern if they had access to the general Wikimedia user database, such as is being proposed with the common login project. In this situation where somebody with checkuser rights could access the data on not just the users for their individual project but for anybody on any Wikimedia project, you are correct that the standards should be much higher.... indeed IMHO higher than perhaps even becoming a steward. That is not the situation right now, from my understanding.
If I take the presumption that the current process of becoming a registered user is still going to continue for some time, and somebody with local checkuser status can only do a checkuser scan on that much smaller group of users, I fail to see where the Foundation is really going to be hurt if they get out of control. The privacy policy is that reasonable steps are going to happen to protect private data, but you should be aware that if you log onto any website, including Amazon.com, Google, CNN, Microsoft, BBC, or whatever including hackerz.com, that your IP address is going to be logged together with whatever activity that you do on that website. And that information may be released to interested government agencies. All the Foundation is promising is that some sort of due process is going to happen before that information is released, like a supeona, and that the information may also be used internally for the protection of the project, such as performing checkuser scans.
Indeed the current privacy policy doesn't even do that. It is really just a disclaimer that the data is going to be logged, and that if you don't like it, you shouldn't be logging into any Wikimedia server. There are some "policies" that go into more depth about how some of this data is protected, but this is more for how the Foundation is going to respond to outside groups that insist on obtaining this information, including not only legal proceedings but also marketing consultants and outside businesses who want to do data mining on the access logs. I think it is a prudent policy in this regard.
One thing to keep in mind is that the "personally identifying data" isn't protected that well for editors. Every editor has all of their edit information logged, and not only is it logged but the information is actually published in a very public area for all people to see. Indeed for most editors, the information is not only logged, but logged according to IP address as well. Only for those who have bothered to become a registered user is the information partially protected, and it is only on this very limited set of circumstances that the checkuser policy even starts to apply. And for many others (including myself), not only by handle but it is logged by their actual legal name. BTW, this is a conscious decision I made when I created my account, knowing the legal implications.
Furthermore, somebody with checkuser privileges still don't have access to the the full access logs. Having checkuser status, I can't see what pages another user has been looking at or reading. All I can do is just see what pages they have been editing, which doesn't require checkuser status... or even any kind of special status on Wikimedia projects, and if they happen to be a registered user, and if they happened to have done something that looks suspicious, all I get to find out with the increased privilege of the checkuser policy is just a list of IP addresses that they have logged in the local project under. Or just the last IP address depending on the technical side and how far this should go. No other identifying information is given. I can't get the e-mail address of the person, nor can I get any of the information on [[Special:Preferences]], including perhaps even mundane but identifying information like what time zone they live in or what their language preference is.
In short, I fail to see where the liability is to the Foundation is under even the most egregious of abuses, and even that can be dealt with mostly by technical limitation, including perhaps a system that limits somebody with checkuser privileges to only a limited number of checkuser scans per day or some other limiting factor to keep major abuses from happening. I'm also pointing out that smaller projects are going to have proportionally much smaller numbers of users and their ability to damage all of the Wikimedia projects is going to also be proportionally less. Using your example of the Maori Wikibooks user request to become admin, bureaucrat, and checkuser... all they are going to do is find the IP addresses of the five or six people who even bothered to register on that local project. Is that really a problem?
Many Chinese editors, including me, have the same concern as what Essjay said, and that is why we currently do not have any checkusers local to zhwiki (http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Checkuser). People worry about the possibility that the IP addresses of registered users may be leaked to evil hands or regimes (the currently ruling Chinese Communist Party is exercising more and more control over Internet for its own interests); if that happened, both the individuals and the Foundation would suffer; although the chance is low, one incident would be enough. Currently, we give our trust to the few users appointed by the Foundation, so I think that any new procedures for cross-project checkusers need to put this worry in consideration. (The Chinese community continue to debate whether we really need local checkusers and what more stringent selecting criteria and monitoring procedures for local checkusers should be adopted.)
roc (zh:User:R.O.C) --
2006/4/15, Essjay essjaywiki@gmail.com:
I don't know that the issue that concerns me is the same that concerns the Foundation, but I know what scares the hell out of me about Checkuser is this:
We have users from all over the world. Not all of them live in countries where their safety is guaranteed; there are, most assuredly, editors from regimes where if their personal information was discovered, they could be imprisoned and perhaps even killed. That terrifies me, because I don't want anybody dying over Wikipedia, nor do I want them to end up in prison. If checkuser falls into the wrong hands (I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I don't think it's too hard to imagine foreign governments wanting to hunt down our contributors; after all, at least two have blocked us flat out already), the result could literally be a matter of life and death. *Life and death.*
Some people have advocated granting checkuser liberally, and I disagree strongly with that; I'm not even particularly comfortable with the idea of it being election-based at all, although I trust the Board, and I don't believe they would have allowed for local elections if they weren't convinced it was safe. I do think, however, that it should be kept to as few users as possible, whether that means having guest checkusers as Kelly & I have advocated, or whether it means some other system. I for one am certainly willing to perform checks for other projects (indeed, I offered to do so for Wikisource), and I am sure that some of the others would as well (Kelly has already stated her willingness to do so).
As I said, I can't say that the dire scenario I laid out above is what the Board has in the back of their minds when thinking about checkuser, but I certainly know it is what is in mine. I really don't want to turn on CNN some morning and see "[Insert country here] dissident assassinated after link to Wikipedia discovered."
Essjay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia http://www.wikipedia.org/
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
Anthere wrote:
Hi
Let me try to address your various points the best I can.
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
Anthere wrote:
The reason for the 25 votes limit comes from two reasons
- A community with less than 25 users is unlikely to really need
frequent checkusers, because it is a project with reduced activity. So, it can not be a heavy load for stewards.
- A community with less than 25 users has a rather serious risk to have
a rather little known editor become a checkuser, rather than a trusted oldbie. If we start handing out status just as we do for sysop status on small projects, I think there will be abuse. I say this from my experience, as I had to unsysop several sysops on small projects (the guys did not know our basic rules, behaved like dictators with the handful of editors, put advertisements on the main page, controlled povs etc...).
I am perplex that the en.wikibooks does not have a big enough base of editors to vote on a check user... I am quite lazy, so I will not go to the stats page to check. But can you roughly say how many active editors per month the project currently has ? How many very active editors per month ?
ant
Since the stats page hasn't been updated since November of last year, it is completely useless to even gague what the current activity is on any Wikimedia project. I can only use the current activity on the Wikibooks staff lounge to even remotely gague what the current user activity level is, but I would guess it is pretty close to about 20 user at the absolute top. Really stretching it perhaps we can get to 25 total at the most.
And as for advertising this, I guess we could put it in bold 40 point type on the project main page with a link to a special page only for this kind of request. I think that is way over the top and something that is not needed in this situation. The advertising was more than adequate, it is just that this is a very unreasonable request.
As for a "community with less than 25 users unlikely needing frequent checkuser scans", I think this is mistaken totally what is going on. en.wikibooks has numerous links from within Wikipedia, and is being hammered by vandals that have moved on from Wikipedia, indeed with excellent training on how to be a vandal on Wikipedia, and taking on other projects as well that don't have quite the same pool of administrators.
I see. Perhaps the number 25 was too high then. That would tend to suggest this. But again, let me explain why we put a minimum limit. We have some small projects with a number of editors of less than 5. What usually happens is that the most active one simply ask sysop status (and even sometimes bureaucrat status) on meta because their project *need* a sysop. Which means the status is given without any community voting whatsoever. Sometimes, when it is a new language in particular, the editor has been on our projects only for a couple of days and have no idea of our basic rules of operating whatsoever (npov in particular). More than once, we had problems later on. And it was not always easy for the very small growing community to have a black sheep unsysoped.
What I think should NOT be allowed to happen, ever, is that the new wikiquote project in maori be created, and a total stranger be given sysop, bureaucrat and checkuser status so that he can start the community. In short, I think that only editors known by a significant number of other editors should ever be given checkuser access. Hence the 25 votes. Which may be too high a value.
So, option 1 : decreasing the number of votes requirements.
Now, there are other options we could follow.
I would suggest that the standards for becoming a bureaucrat should be much higher for brand new projects in this case, and this is perhaps something that needs to be established on a Wikimedia-wide policy as well and not just on a project by project basis. The point about becoming a bureaucrat is that they have the ability to create other administrators and are presumed to be users trusted enough that they not only have full editorial control over a project to do all of the administrator functions, but they also have the ability to create more administrators. The charges of a cabal in some cases are justified when you grant bureaucratship to somebody when there is no other means of oversight about what they are doing, and they in turn grant adminship to others with their same point of view but refuse to grant it to others that have a different point of view, and for that reason alone. This has happened on some of the smaller projects, especially in languages that Foundation board members don't speak fluently and can't monitor directly.
As for handing out checkuser status to people who are not trusted oldies, that is totally rediculous as well. There are admins and bureaucrats on en.wikibooks who are also admins on other projects, including meta, wikinews, and even en.wikipedia. Active ones at that. I see absolutely no reason why the standards for giving somebody bureaucrat status when you can't also give them checkuser status.
I do not know what are the standards for giving bureaucrat status. I think they are not the same at all depending on projects.
I see a **major** reason for the standards for giving bureaucrat status to be different from the standards for giving checkuser status.
The standards for giving bureaucrat status are different in each project and each language. On one project, it will be a vote by all editors of a project. On another project, it will be a vote by administrators only. On another project, it might even be a vote by other bureaucrats. Or it might be no vote at all (just ask on meta). It may be 80% support. It may be 66%. There are no standards.
But if the bureaucrat makes a mess, it is a technical/community issue. Only the projects can be damaged (which is bad enough). So, it is the community business to define its own rules.
If a checkuser makes a mess, the Foundation itself may be concerned. We might have problems with an editor for release of private data. So, the Foundation has a right to have a say in WHO is granted this access. Hence the policy being *more* standard.
I'm not really understanding this point of view here. Under what area is the Foundation directly threatened when this release of private data occurs? It is still a technical/community issue with the checkuser data, and people with checkuser rights can still only do the scan only on registered users for their individual project. This might be a much bigger concern if they had access to the general Wikimedia user database, such as is being proposed with the common login project. In this situation where somebody with checkuser rights could access the data on not just the users for their individual project but for anybody on any Wikimedia project, you are correct that the standards should be much higher.... indeed IMHO higher than perhaps even becoming a steward. That is not the situation right now, from my understanding.
If I take the presumption that the current process of becoming a registered user is still going to continue for some time, and somebody with local checkuser status can only do a checkuser scan on that much smaller group of users, I fail to see where the Foundation is really going to be hurt if they get out of control. The privacy policy is that reasonable steps are going to happen to protect private data, but you should be aware that if you log onto any website, including Amazon.com, Google, CNN, Microsoft, BBC, or whatever including hackerz.com, that your IP address is going to be logged together with whatever activity that you do on that website. And that information may be released to interested government agencies. All the Foundation is promising is that some sort of due process is going to happen before that information is released, like a supeona, and that the information may also be used internally for the protection of the project, such as performing checkuser scans.
Indeed the current privacy policy doesn't even do that. It is really just a disclaimer that the data is going to be logged, and that if you don't like it, you shouldn't be logging into any Wikimedia server. There are some "policies" that go into more depth about how some of this data is protected, but this is more for how the Foundation is going to respond to outside groups that insist on obtaining this information, including not only legal proceedings but also marketing consultants and outside businesses who want to do data mining on the access logs. I think it is a prudent policy in this regard.
One thing to keep in mind is that the "personally identifying data" isn't protected that well for editors. Every editor has all of their edit information logged, and not only is it logged but the information is actually published in a very public area for all people to see. Indeed for most editors, the information is not only logged, but logged according to IP address as well. Only for those who have bothered to become a registered user is the information partially protected, and it is only on this very limited set of circumstances that the checkuser policy even starts to apply. And for many others (including myself), not only by handle but it is logged by their actual legal name. BTW, this is a conscious decision I made when I created my account, knowing the legal implications.
Furthermore, somebody with checkuser privileges still don't have access to the the full access logs. Having checkuser status, I can't see what pages another user has been looking at or reading. All I can do is just see what pages they have been editing, which doesn't require checkuser status... or even any kind of special status on Wikimedia projects, and if they happen to be a registered user, and if they happened to have done something that looks suspicious, all I get to find out with the increased privilege of the checkuser policy is just a list of IP addresses that they have logged in the local project under. Or just the last IP address depending on the technical side and how far this should go. No other identifying information is given. I can't get the e-mail address of the person, nor can I get any of the information on [[Special:Preferences]], including perhaps even mundane but identifying information like what time zone they live in or what their language preference is.
In short, I fail to see where the liability is to the Foundation is under even the most egregious of abuses, and even that can be dealt with mostly by technical limitation, including perhaps a system that limits somebody with checkuser privileges to only a limited number of checkuser scans per day or some other limiting factor to keep major abuses from happening. I'm also pointing out that smaller projects are going to have proportionally much smaller numbers of users and their ability to damage all of the Wikimedia projects is going to also be proportionally less. Using your example of the Maori Wikibooks user request to become admin, bureaucrat, and checkuser... all they are going to do is find the IP addresses of the five or six people who even bothered to register on that local project. Is that really a problem?
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
roc wrote:
Many Chinese editors, including me, have the same concern as what Essjay said, and that is why we currently do not have any checkusers local to zhwiki (http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Checkuser). People worry about the possibility that the IP addresses of registered users may be leaked to evil hands or regimes (the currently ruling Chinese Communist Party is exercising more and more control over Internet for its own interests); if that happened, both the individuals and the Foundation would suffer; although the chance is low, one incident would be enough. Currently, we give our trust to the few users appointed by the Foundation, so I think that any new procedures for cross-project checkusers need to put this worry in consideration. (The Chinese community continue to debate whether we really need local checkusers and what more stringent selecting criteria and monitoring procedures for local checkusers should be adopted.)
roc (zh:User:R.O.C)
This is IMHO why such a policy needs to be tailor fit for each individual project. The standards that are applying for zh.wikipedia should not be the same for en.wikibooks, for example. I agree that a certain level of paranoia exists among Chinese speakers... even when they don't necessarily live in or are even citizens of the People's Republic of China. They should have a much higher standard for their own local project. In addition, with over 50,000 registered users on zh.wikipedia, trying to get the minimum number of 30 votes to support checkuser elections isn't going to be a problem. It still doesn't answer my question over how you could stop a government agent from becoming an administrator or somebody with checkuser privileges, or for that matter the PRC government can simply demand this information directly from the Foundation, and the Foundation would be legally powerless to deny the request. They (the government) could even demand access logs and other information that is not given to people with checkuser privileges. Any attempts to deny this information would be just legal roadblocks and just a matter of time before they would get it, and cause further grief for the Foundation board. Futhermore, such formal requests would be made without the knowledge of any Wikimedia user outside of the Foundation legal circle. At least checkuser scans are logged for public review
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
At least checkuser scans are logged for public review
Uh, no. Unless the software has been modified for some projects, only users with checkuser permissions can access the checkuser log. The last time I saw it (it no longer displays automatically each time you load the page, and I rarely have call to review it, so it's been a few weeks) it *did* display all checks on all wikis, but not publicly. And it shouldn't; private information could be worked out from the sequence of checks run.
Essjay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia http://www.wikipedia.org/
Essjay wrote:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
At least checkuser scans are logged for public review
Uh, no. Unless the software has been modified for some projects, only users with checkuser permissions can access the checkuser log. The last time I saw it (it no longer displays automatically each time you load the page, and I rarely have call to review it, so it's been a few weeks) it *did* display all checks on all wikis, but not publicly. And it shouldn't; private information could be worked out from the sequence of checks run.
Essjay
But it is available for review by others "outside" of those who are performing the actions. And the log is available and *may* be up for public review again in the future. My attitude on this is that all actions of project related activities should be transparent where possible, and subject to review by 3rd parties. I know this was something that was being discussed, and I would like to have some sort of general activity log of some sort, even just a checkuser scan count and the last time it was used by the user with checkuser privileges.
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
This is IMHO why such a policy needs to be tailor fit for each individual project. The standards that are applying for zh.wikipedia should not be the same for en.wikibooks, for example. I agree that a certain level of paranoia exists among Chinese speakers... even when they don't necessarily live in or are even citizens of the People's Republic of China. They should have a much higher standard for their own local project. In addition, with over 50,000 registered users on zh.wikipedia, trying to get the minimum number of 30 votes to support checkuser elections isn't going to be a problem. It still doesn't answer my question over how you could stop a government agent from becoming an administrator or somebody with checkuser privileges, or for that matter the PRC government can simply demand this information directly from the Foundation, and the Foundation would be legally powerless to deny the request. They (the government) could even demand access logs and other information that is not given to people with checkuser privileges. Any attempts to deny this information would be just legal roadblocks and just a matter of time before they would get it, and cause further grief for the Foundation board. Futhermore, such formal requests would be made without the knowledge of any Wikimedia user outside of the Foundation legal circle. At least checkuser scans are logged for public review
As much as I believe that we need a good level of privacy to protect us from the nutcases, I also recognize that it takes a high level of openness to protect us from the abuses of governments and the powerful. The hypothetical PRC government agent is still an individual, and as such should have the same right as anyone else to become a Wikipedia administrator. Such a job should be no more of a hurdle to being in that position than which mainstream political party an American Wikipedian supports.
The breach of trust that you suggest could be demanded by the PRC government is already there in the United States under the Patriot Act. We have no way of knowing whether the general trust has been betrayed in that way. We have no way of knowing whether our Arabic speaking colleagues are being thus monitored, or whether a gog order has been issued to keep the rest of us in the dark.
The PRC government may be self-styled communist, but it knows how to dangle a capitalist carrot. Google and the Rolling Stones can attest to that.
Ec
Ec
roc wrote:
Many Chinese editors, including me, have the same concern as what Essjay said, and that is why we currently do not have any checkusers local to zhwiki (http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Checkuser). People worry about the possibility that the IP addresses of registered users may be leaked to evil hands or regimes (the currently ruling Chinese Communist Party is exercising more and more control over Internet for its own interests); if that happened, both the individuals and the Foundation would suffer; although the chance is low, one incident would be enough. Currently, we give our trust to the few users appointed by the Foundation, so I think that any new procedures for cross-project checkusers need to put this worry in consideration. (The Chinese community continue to debate whether we really need local checkusers and what more stringent selecting criteria and monitoring procedures for local checkusers should be adopted.)
roc (zh:User:R.O.C)
Ermmm, Roc... just to clarify...
None of the checkusers have been appointed by the Foundation. They were all chosen by their local communities. None of the stewards (who can do checkuser as well) have been appointed by the Foundation either. They were all elected on meta, by editors.
This said, the Foundation, I believe, know all current stewards and trust them. We only know half of those with checkuser access though.
ant
Essjay wrote:
I don't know that the issue that concerns me is the same that concerns the Foundation, but I know what scares the hell out of me about Checkuser is this:
We have users from all over the world. Not all of them live in countries where their safety is guaranteed; there are, most assuredly, editors from regimes where if their personal information was discovered, they could be imprisoned and perhaps even killed. That terrifies me, because I don't want anybody dying over Wikipedia, nor do I want them to end up in prison. If checkuser falls into the wrong hands (I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I don't think it's too hard to imagine foreign governments wanting to hunt down our contributors; after all, at least two have blocked us flat out already), the result could literally be a matter of life and death. *Life and death.*
Some people have advocated granting checkuser liberally, and I disagree strongly with that; I'm not even particularly comfortable with the idea of it being election-based at all, although I trust the Board, and I don't believe they would have allowed for local elections if they weren't convinced it was safe. I do think, however, that it should be kept to as few users as possible, whether that means having guest checkusers as Kelly & I have advocated, or whether it means some other system. I for one am certainly willing to perform checks for other projects (indeed, I offered to do so for Wikisource), and I am sure that some of the others would as well (Kelly has already stated her willingness to do so).
As I said, I can't say that the dire scenario I laid out above is what the Board has in the back of their minds when thinking about checkuser, but I certainly know it is what is in mine. I really don't want to turn on CNN some morning and see "[Insert country here] dissident assassinated after link to Wikipedia discovered."
Essjay
You mean to tell me that if you are using the internet in China (or Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, or North Korea), that the government of those countries has no clue about not only what IP address you are using, but also what websites you are accessing? I am telling you that regardless of where you are from, the government is going to know not only the activities that you do within that country, but most major governments will be capable of monitoring their citizens that are living outside of their countries as well. It isn't that difficult of a task, and nothing that the Wikimedia Foundation could do, including deliberate deleting of all logs is going to change that. The checkuser information in particular is not going to stop any government (or even corporate monitoring... as in your immediate supervisor could do this as well) from being able to find out what your on-line activites have been.
I fail to see how checkuser information falling into the wrong hands is going to cause a problem in this situation. Really. If a government entity wants to find out that User:Chinese_Protestor who has posted over 2000 edits in zh.wikipedia is actually using a certain internet cafe in downtown Beijing, they don't need to have access to the checkuser facilities to find that information out, nor to even identify exactly who that user is. I don't even need to do that if I really cared to find out who that person is. On top of that, how can you be absolutely sure that some user that is a "trusted user" by whatever standard you are discussing isn't already a steward, but also a government agent who is using the checkuser access to monitor dissidents? And won't be in the future?
Furthermore, as I was pointing out, the information actually given out by checkuser status is practically nothing anyway. It is not giving out "personally identifying information", just an IP address. And not an IP address for what they were looking at, but only what they were doing when they did their last edit. Yes, in theory you could contact the ISP, and if their own logs for IP addresses had personally identifying information, it could be a chain of evidence to link to a particular individual, but even in this situation for most countries it would require going into the legal process to get that information. For governments this is a no-brainer and they would get it even if you tried to block it. Besides, official Wikimedia policy grants access to this information to governments, so you aren't protected anyway.
Show me exactly how having specifically this tool is going to endanger anybody's life where they wouldn't already be in danger before?
And mind you, I'm not advocating that this tool be available to any user under any circumstances. I'm just pointing out that by any reasonable definition of whom you call a trusted user for access to checkuser privileges you are also likely to grant them bureaucratship as well, and possibly adminship only. The only reason why somebody would have checkuser privileges on a local project and not also bureaucratship is because they don't want to deal with the hassles of being an administrator and have repeatedly turned down the nomination when offered to them. I fail to see under what higher standard you are possibly using to justify why somebody should be a checkuser and not be given full bureaucrat privileges, or the other way around. If they can't be trusted with checkuser privileges, why are they given bureaucrat privileges? I'm also pointing out that the issue is scalable as well, and that it is highly unlikely that the chinese protestor given in the above example is going to be editing on the Maori language Wikibooks. On these smaller projects, the potential to do damage is going to be considerably less as well even from this more limited perspective.
BTW, If you are willing to perform a checkuser scan, can you help me out with, and block the IP address of [[b:User:Bruude]]? There is a particularly vicious vandal going through Wikibooks right now, and it would be appreciated if we could get some help trying to track him down and stopping this user. This is one of the kinds of requests that having somebody local with checkuser privileges would be incredibly helpful over, but the apparent policy is such that we can't have the apparent benefits of trying to stop idiots like this particular user who is now deliberately attacking administrators directly, since we've thwarted all of his previous attempts to vandalize the project. By not giving us access to these reasonable and legitimate uses of this tool, it is making our job at helping out the projects all that much harder. The whole point to this thread is that this sort of assistance from users like yourself is not forthcomming and we need to take these matters into our own hands if we want this level of assistance.
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
<snip> BTW, If you are willing to perform a checkuser scan, can you help me out with, and block the IP address of [[b:User:Bruude]]? </snip>
My apologies for not responding at length, but it's 2:30 AM here and I really should be in bed. :-)
To respond to the above, I'm more than happy to do that, but I'll need a steward to grant me checkuser/sysop to do it, as I'm neither a steward, nor do I have checkuser/sysop for that wiki. If a steward (Anglea, Anthere?) is willing, I'm happy to do it. Just let me know.
Essjay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia http://www.wikipedia.org/
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
You mean to tell me that if you are using the internet in China (or Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, or North Korea), that the government of those countries has no clue about not only what IP address you are using, but also what websites you are accessing?
Not North Korea; since it makes internet generally unavailable it doesn't need to worry about monitoring. :-)
Beyond that, it takes considerable manpower, resources and sophistication to sift through masses of internet material to winnow out whatever might be significant to these governments. A great deal of meaningless drivel is communicated on the internet, as any kid with an MSN account will easily prove. How much seriousness does one attach to the goofy plots that might be expressed there.
A friend who is currently teaching in Qatar recently had to seek medical help, and as a result commented that the doctors there are not as good as their equipment. I suspect that this situation is not limited to medicine.
I am telling you that regardless of where you are from, the government is going to know not only the activities that you do within that country, but most major governments will be capable of monitoring their citizens that are living outside of their countries as well. It isn't that difficult of a task, and nothing that the Wikimedia Foundation could do, including deliberate deleting of all logs is going to change that. The checkuser information in particular is not going to stop any government (or even corporate monitoring... as in your immediate supervisor could do this as well) from being able to find out what your on-line activites have been.
I fail to see how checkuser information falling into the wrong hands is going to cause a problem in this situation. Really. If a government entity wants to find out that User:Chinese_Protestor who has posted over 2000 edits in zh.wikipedia is actually using a certain internet cafe in downtown Beijing, they don't need to have access to the checkuser facilities to find that information out, nor to even identify exactly who that user is. I don't even need to do that if I really cared to find out who that person is. On top of that, how can you be absolutely sure that some user that is a "trusted user" by whatever standard you are discussing isn't already a steward, but also a government agent who is using the checkuser access to monitor dissidents? And won't be in the future?
To be effective any such CIA agent is not going too blow his cover by telling everyone. To the rest of us his behaviour will seem perfectly normal, and perhaps even better than average.
And mind you, I'm not advocating that this tool be available to any user under any circumstances. I'm just pointing out that by any reasonable definition of whom you call a trusted user for access to checkuser privileges you are also likely to grant them bureaucratship as well, and possibly adminship only. The only reason why somebody would have checkuser privileges on a local project and not also bureaucratship is because they don't want to deal with the hassles of being an administrator and have repeatedly turned down the nomination when offered to them. I fail to see under what higher standard you are possibly using to justify why somebody should be a checkuser and not be given full bureaucrat privileges, or the other way around. If they can't be trusted with checkuser privileges, why are they given bureaucrat privileges?
There are users with undoubted technical skills but poor social skills who might be granted checkuser tools on an investigate and report basis. If, however, they were in a position to enforce discipline they would likely create a lot of dissension.
I'm also pointing out that the issue is scalable as well, and that it is highly unlikely that the chinese protestor given in the above example is going to be editing on the Maori language Wikibooks. On these smaller projects, the potential to do damage is going to be considerably less as well even from this more limited perspective.
Agreed, but proportionally the checkuser skill is less likely to be needed.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
You mean to tell me that if you are using the internet in China (or Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, or North Korea), that the government of those countries has no clue about not only what IP address you are using, but also what websites you are accessing?
Not North Korea; since it makes internet generally unavailable it doesn't need to worry about monitoring. :-)
Beyond that, it takes considerable manpower, resources and sophistication to sift through masses of internet material to winnow out whatever might be significant to these governments. A great deal of meaningless drivel is communicated on the internet, as any kid with an MSN account will easily prove. How much seriousness does one attach to the goofy plots that might be expressed there.
A friend who is currently teaching in Qatar recently had to seek medical help, and as a result commented that the doctors there are not as good as their equipment. I suspect that this situation is not limited to medicine.
I am not talking goofy communication here and impossible communications resoruces. I am instead talking about a specific person who has contributed to a project like zh.wikipedia, where their activities and writings have been clearly identified as potentially subversive by the government and are the specific target of a formal police investigation. The resources of even a small country can be devoted to tracking down and individual like this... or even a small-town police departpent. More below:
I am telling you that regardless of where you are from, the government is going to know not only the activities that you do within that country, but most major governments will be capable of monitoring their citizens that are living outside of their countries as well. It isn't that difficult of a task, and nothing that the Wikimedia Foundation could do, including deliberate deleting of all logs is going to change that. The checkuser information in particular is not going to stop any government (or even corporate monitoring... as in your immediate supervisor could do this as well)
from being able to find out what your on-line activites have been.
I fail to see how checkuser information falling into the wrong hands is going to cause a problem in this situation. Really. If a government entity wants to find out that User:Chinese_Protestor who has posted over 2000 edits in zh.wikipedia is actually using a certain internet cafe in downtown Beijing, they don't need to have access to the checkuser facilities to find that information out, nor to even identify exactly who that user is. I don't even need to do that if I really cared to find out who that person is. On top of that, how can you be absolutely sure that some user that is a "trusted user" by whatever standard you are discussing isn't already a steward, but also a government agent who is using the checkuser access to monitor dissidents? And won't be in the future?
To be effective any such CIA agent is not going too blow his cover by telling everyone. To the rest of us his behaviour will seem perfectly normal, and perhaps even better than average.
I have absolutely no idea where the CIA comes into this situation. We are not talking foriegn agents but rather domestic police surveilence. And they don't even need to "blow their cover" to get this information.
A polite letter to the Wikimedia Foundation is all that is really needed after the person has been identified. And every edit is clearly linked to a specific registered or unregistered user anyway, and that is up for public display and the scanning of page history logs is not logged other than as a simply page request. The exact legal process to force this information out of the Foundation is irrelevant, and I can think of several ways that even the Chinese government can get this sort of information even though official channels, and be considered "acceptable" by U.S. courts, assuming that users are trying to get some level of protection by having to go through international diplomatic channels to slow down the process. Fine, but the information can still be obtained by a government agency and the Foundation would be powerless to not give this information.
As far as trying to "build a level of trust" on-line, this is something that American police departments do all of the time for fighting some on-line crimes, and I even know personally a local law enforcement agent who has done this recently, and he works for a small-town police department with only 80 officers in the entire department. His goal is to catch would-be child predetors, and to catch them in the process of solicitation of a minor for sex acts. And it works, which is the surprising thing.
The argument as for why this information is kept so private is because some would-be Wikimedia user who posted something as totally innocent as a translation of something on fr.wikipedia or en.wikipedia, that clearly has been vetted for being NPOV, but is contrary to the local political orthodoxy and as a result the user could get arrested for doing that translation or even executed. Obviously this would happen in places where things like free speech rights common in the EU or USA are not respected, and has been expressed as a concern for Chinese speakers in part because of official government actions by the PRC to block all Wikimedia IP addresses for zh.wikipedia.
Assuming that individual citizens can get around web blocks like the great internet wall of China, there is no reason to not also believe that local police officers couldn't do the same thing. And China clearly has the manpower necessary to not only monitor its citizens using zh.wikipedia in all aspects, but this is also something they have a vested interest in looking at because it is a form of political expression, and a very public forum. Because of the way the MediaWiki software works, they don't even have to catch the specific IP packets, but only build a private list of pages to watch, and what users have certain political leanings that may or may not be acceptable to the Party. From this perspective, it would be incredibly stupd on the part of the Chinese government to not have a police officer of some sort or at least a loyal party member who is a current administrator on zh.wikipedia. And it would be impossible for anybody on the Foundation board to distinguish between ordinary Chinese citizens and this government representative, in terms of who gets checkuser privileges.
If in the process of doing legitimate checkuser scans fighting vandalism they also let it slip and do a couple of scans for a political dissident or two, how would anybody else know, even if the scans are logged? That wouldn't even blow the "cover" of the person you are talking about. And if it is uncovered that they work for the government, is that reason to get them de-sysoped? Legally that would really put the Wikimedia Foundation in a bind if they tried to revoke checkuser privileges to official government agents, once discovered, for any government. I'm not even sure if it could be stopped if an official request was made to allow somebody to have this option.
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
Anthere wrote:
The reason for the 25 votes limit comes from two reasons
- A community with less than 25 users is unlikely to really need
frequent checkusers, because it is a project with reduced activity. So, it can not be a heavy load for stewards.
- A community with less than 25 users has a rather serious risk to have
a rather little known editor become a checkuser, rather than a trusted oldbie. If we start handing out status just as we do for sysop status on small projects, I think there will be abuse. I say this from my experience, as I had to unsysop several sysops on small projects (the guys did not know our basic rules, behaved like dictators with the handful of editors, put advertisements on the main page, controlled povs etc...).
I am perplex that the en.wikibooks does not have a big enough base of editors to vote on a check user... I am quite lazy, so I will not go to the stats page to check. But can you roughly say how many active editors per month the project currently has ? How many very active editors per month ?
ant
Since the stats page hasn't been updated since November of last year, it is completely useless to even gague what the current activity is on any Wikimedia project. I can only use the current activity on the Wikibooks staff lounge to even remotely gague what the current user activity level is, but I would guess it is pretty close to about 20 user at the absolute top. Really stretching it perhaps we can get to 25 total at the most.
And as for advertising this, I guess we could put it in bold 40 point type on the project main page with a link to a special page only for this kind of request. I think that is way over the top and something that is not needed in this situation. The advertising was more than adequate, it is just that this is a very unreasonable request.
As for a "community with less than 25 users unlikely needing frequent checkuser scans", I think this is mistaken totally what is going on. en.wikibooks has numerous links from within Wikipedia, and is being hammered by vandals that have moved on from Wikipedia, indeed with excellent training on how to be a vandal on Wikipedia, and taking on other projects as well that don't have quite the same pool of administrators.
As for handing out checkuser status to people who are not trusted oldies, that is totally rediculous as well. There are admins and bureaucrats on en.wikibooks who are also admins on other projects, including meta, wikinews, and even en.wikipedia. Active ones at that. I see absolutely no reason why the standards for giving somebody bureaucrat status when you can't also give them checkuser status.
Furthermore, what abuse could possibly happen with somebody having checkuser scans? Really, at the most extreme? With bureacrat status I could give admin status to a whole team of 'bots that would then in tandem go through and systematically delete every page on a project and block every user. Talk about damage to a project. With checkuser privileges, all you have access to is just the IP address of each user. So the absolute worst damage is that they publish on an external website (making it harder for the board to go after that user) all of the IP addresses of every user. Which is worse? Really, think about it.
More to the point, show me a single user that has been given checkuser rights on any local project besides a Wikipedia and meta. This would be a contrary example to prove me wrong. If not, why not? Because checkuser rights are not needed except on Wikipedia?
I am waiting for your feedback on the various options I have proposed; Even if none please you, please be kind to comment on them.
meanwhile, in case there is an urgent need on wikibooks, I propose to have Karynn be a temporary checkuser on en:wikibooks whilst a solution is found out. She is an experienced checkuser and she has agreed ! (and it is free of charge !)
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Kelly_Martin. See her as the Brion Vibber of the old days (he carried on our requests when necessary).
ant
Anthere wrote:
I am waiting for your feedback on the various options I have proposed; Even if none please you, please be kind to comment on them.
meanwhile, in case there is an urgent need on wikibooks, I propose to have Karynn be a temporary checkuser on en:wikibooks whilst a solution is found out. She is an experienced checkuser and she has agreed ! (and it is free of charge !)
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Kelly_Martin. See her as the Brion Vibber of the old days (he carried on our requests when necessary).
ant
I appreciate the offer. I actually removed one checkuser request from Meta because the request was over three months old and not going anywhere, or even a comment by any of the stewards if it was a proper type of request. If you look at this page on Wikibooks:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks%3AVandalism_in_progress
you will see many comments from several admins that all complain about the lack of somebody with checkuser access locally to help deal with the growing problems of vandalism. This page, BTW, is mainly for non-admins to communicate to admins for potentially blocking a specific user. It is also in turn one of the top 5 most vandalized pages on Wikibooks as well. It also should be an example of the kinds of issues that somebody with checkuser status might be able to help out with on other projects. I especially loved the vandalism done by User:Jimbo wales (lowercase w).
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
Essjay wrote:
Perhaps this would be an appropriate time to say "Maybe we could use a couple more stewards?"
r perhaps the minimum requirement for the number of votes for users to get checkuser status on smaller projects like en.wikibooks is unreasonable? We have had a couple of candidates for checkuser status for almost two months now, and we simply can't get the number of votes necessary because of the size of our active user base. Yet we are the target of repeated vandalism, and even sockpuppet voting from die-hard sock puppets. If the concern is that checkuser privileges are going to be abused, it is a smaller user base that can be abused.
Should projects be allowed to set their own standards for people with this status, or is it something that is imutable and only set by the Foundation board? So far, only Wikipedias are seemingly allowed to have somebody with checkuser status at all. And if stewards are overwhelmed with this task of dealing with checkuser scans, perhaps the policy needs to be reviewed.
I don't think that simply adding more stewards is the solution. Because of the legal privacy issues involved the Foundation needs to retain some control over the process, but this does not mean that projects cannot set application policies within parameters. This is not the kind of tool that is well granted by voting. The risk there is that the process will be taken over by those who are paranoid about sockpuppets, rather than those who will review the problem objectively.
Ec
On 4/14/06, Essjay essjaywiki@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps this would be an appropriate time to say "Maybe we could use a couple more stewards?"
Yes, I'm sure we could use some more.
But perhaps addressing the inadequacies of the privacy policy would also make stewards more confident in handling CheckUser requests without feeling they were in violation of that. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Privacy_policy#Update_to_account_for_Che...
Angela.
Essjay schreef:
Perhaps this would be an appropriate time to say "Maybe we could use a couple more stewards?"
Essjay
There are already a fair number of Stewards; http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards
The problem I find as a steward is that is difficult to know what you are supposed to do. There is no communication platform for the stewards to discuss things. I find that there should be a mailing list for stewards. That would be something. Then at least problems could be discussed with the other stewards. And agreements about how to do thing could be attempted to me made.
Now not all stewards work by the same standards. Some stewards are more easy to give sysop or bureaucrat status then others. The rules of conduct are not clear or not existing.
I find it difficult that I need to say to a user that I do not grand bureaucrat status because I find his home wiki is to small when other stewards do grand bureaucrat status to a similar small wikis.
Walter
Walter Vermeir wrote:
Essjay schreef:
Perhaps this would be an appropriate time to say "Maybe we could use a couple more stewards?"
Essjay
There are already a fair number of Stewards; http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards
The problem I find as a steward is that is difficult to know what you are supposed to do. There is no communication platform for the stewards to discuss things. I find that there should be a mailing list for stewards. That would be something. Then at least problems could be discussed with the other stewards. And agreements about how to do thing could be attempted to me made.
Now not all stewards work by the same standards. Some stewards are more easy to give sysop or bureaucrat status then others. The rules of conduct are not clear or not existing.
I find it difficult that I need to say to a user that I do not grand bureaucrat status because I find his home wiki is to small when other stewards do grand bureaucrat status to a similar small wikis.
Walter
For the record, there is a checkuser mailing list for those who use checkuser rights. (checkuser-l ***at*** wikimedia.org)
Ant
Walter Vermeir wrote:
Essjay schreef:
Perhaps this would be an appropriate time to say "Maybe we could use a couple more stewards?"
Essjay
There are already a fair number of Stewards; http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards
The problem I find as a steward is that is difficult to know what you are supposed to do. There is no communication platform for the stewards to discuss things. I find that there should be a mailing list for stewards. That would be something. Then at least problems could be discussed with the other stewards. And agreements about how to do thing could be attempted to me made.
Now not all stewards work by the same standards. Some stewards are more easy to give sysop or bureaucrat status then others. The rules of conduct are not clear or not existing.
I find it difficult that I need to say to a user that I do not grand bureaucrat status because I find his home wiki is to small when other stewards do grand bureaucrat status to a similar small wikis.
Walter
I would have to agree that the current set of steward policies is rather vague, and even the defintion of what a steward ought to be doing is not really well defined. Stewards do grant adminship and bureaucratship to projects with a small set of users, and I also understand strongly the reluctance for a steward to get involved with a local project squabble, such as one recent fight that happened on en.wikibooks of the deadminship of one user that unfortunately needed a steward to make a decision on limited information, and community support for deadminship was not very clear.
My own experience in dealing with stewards is that they do a very good job of doing the administrative tasks when there is no controversy and the decisions are obvious. It is these border-line cases where perhaps some standards to becomming an admin on a very small project like simple.wikiquote should be a little bit higher than seems to be done right now. Language barriers add still additional levels of misunderstanding to really complicate this issue. Having a clear policy makes deciding these borderline issue much easier, as a codified policy avoids seemingly arbitrary behavior and allows somebody who was turned down to at least have something to be angry about, or possibly fight to try and change the policy.
Futhermore, there is some appearance that perhaps stewards could act as a sort of ad hoc arbitration board for smaller projects, but I havn't see that done either. Is this something that stewards are comfortable with, or should projects with seemingly irreconsilable problems go elsewhere for assistance in this matter... i.e. see Jimbo? Currently the standard is more to simply muddle through the problem and try to work the issues out, which BTW really is the best solution ultimately. Some people do like to appeal to a "higher authority" and stewards seem to be a logical step to take some issues. Unfortunately, this is something I've very seldom if ever seen any steward willing to participate in.
Angela wrote:
Why has no steward responded to these and many other requests for information made in February, March, and April 2006?
Only three stewards (Anthere, Datrio, and Oscar) have CheckUser access. I don't know if the backlog is because the policy is unclear on when requests can be fulfilled, or whether there just aren't enough people willing to carry out these requests.
Angela.
I do not usually answer to requests on that page, but only when they are specifically asked to me. Several reasons : first, I consider I do not have a technical enough knowledge to help best. Second, I already have too much to do :-) So, I only help when people email me or ask me on irc.
Ant
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org