Ray Saintonge (saintonge(a)telus.net) [050413 02:35]:
David Gerard wrote:
>Angela (beesley(a)gmail.com) [050412 13:43]:
>>Currently the only people with the necessary
permissions to use
>>CheckUser are Tim Starling (who wrote the code for this) and David
>>Gerard (who uses it on behalf of the English Wikipedia Arbitration
>>Committee).
>I should also point out that I *barely* use it -
its availability to the Ac
>directly is somewhat controversial, but I've some experience of net-abuse
>tracing and know what the results mean or don't, and I only use it when
>there's clearly some important issue. (Last use was to check on an apparent
>sock of Rienzo. Use before that was to check the zillion abusive socks in
>the Baku Ibne arb com case.) I get a lot of people asking me to check
>something casually and I have to say "no". Although if people on en: think
>it's relevant to an arb com case, the "Requests for clarification"
section
>on WP:RFAr is the right place to suggest. The edit evidence had better be
>there, though, I'm not going on fishing expeditions.
This sounds like a wise approach. Some ultra-zealous
vandal chasers are
much too quick to jump to conclusions when finding fault.
The problem I find in practice is that there is no guideline, and I'm not
quite sure sometimes myself. I've added a question to [[m:CheckUser]]
asking for suggestions on when it's appropriate to look this stuff up.
Then I'll probably take those and see if something that's clearly good
sense emerges from them.
- d.