information 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.

Perhaps this would be an appropriate time to say "Maybe we could use a couple more stewards?" Essjay

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 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

. . . 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.

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.

are other problems we haven't yet imagined already out there. Things need to be handled differently. Perhaps new projects are approved to easily.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

good.

>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.

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.

was that those given What is your opinion it according to to provide their 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?

less took a came from a intentionally vague on because I am not 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. other shoe to drop}} clarification ? You are 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.

decide to just ignore Well yes, but we don't want people to go too far out of bounds. 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(a)yahoo.com> wrote: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

2006/4/19, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>et>:

users will be able to position. People must do well to warn them of obligation to hold their hands We can say that we have a given document is fair use (or dealing) in for its legal status a specific statement grounds for 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 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

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

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.

On 4/14/06, Anthere <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: 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

On 4/14/06, Anthere <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: 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(a)wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Anthere wrote: 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. 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) --

Robert Scott Horning wrote: 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

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)

Robert Scott Horning wrote: 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.

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 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

Perhaps this would be an appropriate time to say "Maybe we could use a couple more stewards?"

Essjay schreef: 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

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.