[Foundation-l] Stewards are ignoring requests for CheckUser information?

Fri Apr 14 15:09:29 UTC 2006

> 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
>

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

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