[Foundation-l] Data retention

[Joe Szilagyi]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 5:33 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org>wrote:

> Joe Szilagyi wrote:
> > That is what has been said around the chatter lines. Was this documented
> in
> > the SVN somewhere if so, and approved? For all Wikis? Just some?
>
> Are you implying that this change could somehow be controversial? If so,
> can you explain how that might be?
>

Not inherently controversial, but I'm not clear on if the CU data retention
is the same on each project, or different on each--does Chinese Wikipedia
save as long as English Wikipedia? Does Commons save as long as Wikinews,
etc.? If there is any change to the actual length in data retention, who
makes that decision? The WMF board? Sue? The checkuser mail list? Shouldn't
that sort of matter be decided with community input?

I've just been thinking aloud and wondering if the debatable value of any
obfuscation of the retention length of Checkuser data, rather than clearly
articulating it in public, outweighs the risk and harm to some users given
that in the wake of the Poetlister incident we've seen that Checkuser data
is not compromise-proof.

- Joe