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

Sun Apr 16 14:27:04 UTC 2006

roc wrote:

>Many Chinese editors, including me, have the same concern as what
>Essjay said, and that is why we currently do not have any checkusers
>local to zhwiki
>(http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Checkuser). People worry
>about the possibility that the IP addresses of registered users may be
>leaked to evil hands or regimes (the currently ruling Chinese
>Communist Party is exercising more and more control over Internet for
>its own interests); if that happened, both the individuals and the
>Foundation would suffer; although the chance is low, one incident
>would be enough. Currently, we give our trust to the few users
>appointed by the Foundation, so I think that any new procedures for
>cross-project checkusers need to put this worry in consideration. (The
>Chinese community continue to debate whether we really need local
>checkusers and what more stringent selecting criteria and monitoring
>procedures for local checkusers should be adopted.)
>
>roc (zh:User:R.O.C)
>--
>  
>
This is IMHO why such a policy needs to be tailor fit for each 
individual project.  The standards that are applying for zh.wikipedia 
should not be the same for en.wikibooks, for example.  I agree that a 
certain level of paranoia exists among Chinese speakers... even when 
they don't necessarily live in or are even citizens of the People's 
Republic of China.  They should have a much higher standard for their 
own local project.  In addition, with over 50,000 registered users on 
zh.wikipedia, trying to get the minimum number of 30 votes to support 
checkuser elections isn't going to be a problem.  It still doesn't 
answer my question over how you could stop a government agent from 
becoming an administrator or somebody with checkuser privileges, or for 
that matter the PRC government can simply demand this information 
directly from the Foundation, and the Foundation would be legally 
powerless to deny the request.  They (the government) could even demand 
access logs and other information that is not given to people with 
checkuser privileges.  Any attempts to deny this information would be 
just legal roadblocks and just a matter of time before they would get 
it, and cause further grief for the Foundation board.  Futhermore, such 
formal requests would be made without the knowledge of any Wikimedia 
user outside of the Foundation legal circle.  At least checkuser scans 
are logged for public review

-- 
Robert Scott Horning