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

Fri Apr 14 18:57:36 UTC 2006

Birgitte Arco wrote:
> 
>>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.  

I would rather prefer having a checkuser generally available to each 
project. Again, checkuser requires technical knowledge. And checkuser 
and stewards are too different jobs. But otherwise, your proposal looks 
fine.

> 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

Nod. I understand what you say.
Unfortunately, absolutely *any* editor may be attacked anytime and have 
his/her reputation attacked. If you doubt that, check out the recent 
emails between David Gerard, Aurevilly and myself :-(

Now, I must also say that it is quite unconfortable to do checkuser on a 
project you absolutely do not know and in a language you do not know either.

Something that occured to me recently. I got a checkuser from a small 
language project. A person A, made the request to check if person B did 
not edit under several accounts. He suspected sockpuppetry. He said he 
was sysop (I checked, he was). I did the check. The ip was shared by 
three editors names. Impossible for me to try to see if edits were 
similar or on similar topics. I gave the information to person A (only 
the name of the other editor).
Then, person B contacted me a few days later, to ask me to check person 
A, to see if he had a certain ip, which vandalised several articles... 
and user B own user page. A bit perplex, I checked, and indeed, UserA ip 
was the one which vandalized the articles (it was really vandalism) and 
the user page. So, I confirmed person B that person A shared an ip with 
a vandal. Likely, person A was a vandal. And a sysop...

And I deeply wondered if I had done well to tell UserA that UserB had 
sockpuppets. And UserB that UserA was a sysop.

Requests may be done by *good* editors and by *bad* editors. Stewards 
have no way to know. I am not sure it is good.

ant (who heard you were a good person :-))