[Wikimedia-l] CheckUser openness

[Martijn Hoekstra]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 11:18 AM, Stephanie Daugherty
<sdaugherty at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 4:52 AM, Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra at gmail.com
>> wrote:
>
>> Two points that might help bring people on different sides of the
>> issue closer together.
>>
>> 1. How about notifying people that they have been check-usered 2
>> months after the fact? By that time I hope all investigations are
>> complete, and is the risk of tipping off the nefarious should be over.
>>
>> That's an interesting concept, and I'd think this would be the only way to
> notify users without compromising the effectiveness of the tool, but I
> still have serious reservations about disclosure here for reasons
> previously cited and below. Also, there are conceivably complex abuse cases
> where an investigation would take longer than 2 months, particularly in the
> sort of cases that eventually end up before en.wiki's arbcom.
>
>
>
>> 2. Though the strategies of when to checkuser and how to interpret the
>> results are private, the workings of CheckUser are not. It is free
>> software, and its useage described at
>> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CheckUser I would imagine any
>> tech-savy user with malicioius intent will check how CheckUser can be
>> used to detect their malicious editing, and what means they have to
>> avoid detection. Notifying someone they have been checkusered does not
>> give them any information they didn't have already, apart from being
>> under investigation.
>
>
> The privacy rules surrounding it are very much public as well. That makes
> the effectiveness of checkuser as a tool very much dependent on
> carelessness or ignorance of person targeted, things we want to preserve as
> much as possible lest checkuser stop being effective or massive relaxation
> of privacy policies become necessary to preserve its effectiveness.


Am I correct to summorise here than that CU works because people don't
know it doesn't?