Simetrical wrote: Re-reading Florence's original comment, I can now see that she was talking about something else: I was referring to the removal of IP addresses from the served article pages themselves, rather than the information in the history. Mea culpa. -- Neil

Tim Starling wrote: Well, I remember quite well the previous feature, as the french wikipedia was switched to the new mediawiki 8 months after my arrival. During 8 months, we saw the "private" data. I wonder if we might not argue that making this data private made somewhat more damages to the tissu of the community than if the data had been kept public. Legally speaking, it weakens our case. It goes against the principles of transparency and responsibility that we like to put upfront. It simplifies defense strategy against vandals and sockpuppets. It avoids power grabs (or perception there of) by the few members who succeed to get access to the data. I am looking for some arguments to keep it private. Others than "well, this is the default behavior". I did not find the past discussion. What happened ? ant

On 12/12/07, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: If you have a fixed IP address that can be relatively easily linked to your personal identity or your employer, I could see why you wouldn't want it to be publicly known that you've been pushing the article about gay midget pornography to featured article status. Or the one about Scientology. Yes, there are anonymizer tools, but * most of them are quite slow * they are not always built to be used on a per-page basis * they may cost money, or contain spyware, etc. Basically - it would mean that quite a few users would have to go through substantial pain in order to have any degree of privacy at all. -- Toward Peace, Love & Progress: Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.

Jared Williams wrote: It would be meaningless inside Wikipedia as well, as has been repeatedly discussed. Very few of our users have a non-shared static IP. -- Tim Starling

On 12/12/07, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: And: * they're all anonymous proxies and therefore banned from editing (generally). The counterargument is that to gain transparency for the project, participants should be willing to sacrifice some privacy, and that if they aren't willing to publicly admit to their efforts, they're immediately suspect. Needless to say, this counterargument becomes more questionable when it gets to sensitive issues like gay midget pornography and Scientology. I like the idea of transparency, but on some topics at least we need some anonymity to get people to participate, I suspect. On 12/12/07, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: I think this would be a nice compromise, with one proviso: the log is made public as far as is possible without posting IP addresses. One straightforward proposition would be to blank out IP addresses in the log for non-admins, but leave usernames intact, and leave a record of the IP address examination (just not which IP was examined). This would give reasonable but not total protection to advocates of gay midget pornography. Any admin could get their IP addresses on a pretext, but if the pretext isn't good enough they risk getting sacked (hopefully, although enwiki at least has a pretty poor track record here). The downside is it would require superficially radical privacy-policy changes, and might alienate some users. I suspect the latter effect would be temporary, though: as Tim says, if anything had been that way all along, it would probably cause little complaint. As for the former, I say "superficially" because in practice, it's not like the privacy policy protects most editors anyway, given that they're anonymous. Then people start banning sockpuppets on random suspicion when the response time for checkuser gets too long. Transparency is the right direction to head in.

Anthony wrote: I would not support that. However, I can not help thinking that the rather ugly atmosphere that developped on enwiki is largely due to the very large and uncontrolled use of the checkuser tool by a minority. When one gives specific tools to a person, that's creates a power lever which may be used to grab bits of power. Which is more or less what is happening, much to the dismay of those who do not have that power. There are several possibilities to fix that. Either the use of the tool is much more widely made possible, increasing the check and balances (and thus reducing risks of abuse). Eg, giving the tool to all admins. Or on the contrary, limiting the use of the tool by reducing number of people with access, strengthening the rules, and applying the rules strictly (in short, in case of abuse, removing access rather than simply whining). Or dividing strategy (which seems a good idea anyway), to flatten the roles and responsabilities (eg, a checkuser can not be oversight; an arbcom member can not be steward; or even a checkuser can not be arbcom) Removing the tool entirely and making ip of registered users, public info Making it mandatory to publicly log checkusers actions Other options ? Ant

Anthony wrote: I am tired of long trolls on other lists :-) yes, but very unpractical due to language limitations true... but look, in real life, the law is decided by some, the judgement using legal information and past history is done by others, and last the application of the judgement is applied by a third group. For example, parliament, judges and cops. Right now, it seems the community left in part the parliament in the hands of the arbcom. The investigators are the checkusers. Judges are arbcom. Arbcom are also checkusers, so investigation and judgement are done by the same. Cops are the admins (for ban) or oversight (for clean up). Arbcom is frequently playing the admin and oversight role. In short, the principles of separation are very weakly implemented. There ought to be a reason why most democracies decided to separate those, don't you think ? True. German wikipedia does that. Not sure what the impacts are with regards to privacy policy. ant

On Dec 12, 2007 9:55 AM, elisabeth bauer <eflebeth(a)googlemail.com> wrote: Ah, I misunderstood. I thought the suggestion was to make the raw logs public. Doing something like this, where the requests and results had to be made public, and anyone caught making a checkuser request outside this procedure had her privileges removed, wouldn't reveal the particular private information. OTOH, I don't think promoting public accusations of sockpuppetry is a good thing, at least not on a Wikipedia like the English Wikipedia where mean-spirited accusations run rampant. Maybe the Germans can play nicely, but I don't think it'd be pretty on en.wp.

On 12/12/2007, elisabeth bauer <eflebeth(a)googlemail.com> wrote: On en:wp, there was no public request mechanism for checkuser at all other than the checkers' user talk pages. Kelly Martin created WP:RFCU specifically to get the noise off our talk pages to somewhere we could ignore it. WP:RFCU tends to be a troll-feeding exercise in practice. - d.

On 12/12/2007, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: I understand governance is a lot tighter on de:wp. I don't know this from personal experience, of course. en:wp suffers from being the biggest wiki and, to a large extent, the international edition of Wikipedia (English being the current lingua franca). I suspect it's a case of English being first to get problems. - d.

On 12/12/07, Monahon, Peter B. <Peter.Monahon(a)uspto.gov> wrote: I'm sure that's often been suggested before, but you know, that's the best damn idea I've heard all month (although it's only the twelfth, to be fair). Eliminate blocking, and replace it with moderation; eliminate protection, and replace it with flagged revisions; then you just have to find something to replace deletion with, and adminship becomes meaningless and can all but be tossed out, since all this stuff can be given to autoconfirmed users. It's just a matter of coming up with a good interface and mechanism for the various rights -- that's the rub.