[Foundation-l] CheckUser (thoughts)

Sat Apr 22 14:18:59 UTC 2006

James D. Forrester wrote:
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> Anthere wrote:
> 
> [Snip "CheckUser is a bit of a mess"]
> 
> 
>>I plead guilty for part of this.
> 
> 
> I don't think that it's fair to blame anyone in particular for a
> possibly non-optimal situation;

No. The issue is absolutely not to *blame* anyone. We all tried to find 
a solution at that time, and we may just not have found the best 
solution. I wanted to insist that I was part of that bad choice because 
I think it is more honest and because I do not want anyone jumping on 
this and saying "but it is your fault, so why do you bug us today ?".
We did what we thought best. It is worth analysing (imho) where and why 
we chose directions which were not the best so that we can now modify this.

>>What that suggest me is this
>>
>>We should not have checkusers with the tool access on a one project/one 
>>language, but a POOL of COMMON checkusers. Those should all have good 
>>technical abilities. Those would have access everywhere. They would be 
>>listed on meta with their language ability. The biggest projects would 
>>be used to always ask to their favorites. The small languages will try 
>>to find the one with a basic knowledge of their language if they wish.
>>
>>But all in all, checkusers should be a common good, just as our 
>>developers right now are (and, hell, just as your board members are).
> 
> 
> I think that this solution has some merit, but there exists the tricky
> problem of language - if one does not read Russian, then no matter how
> accurate and wide one's technical knowledge is, there is no point being
> asked to carry out CheckUser checks on people. It isn't merely about
> technical proficiency, but about judgement of editing patterns, of
> style, and of content. This is something that is definitely
> language-specific.
> 
> Yours sincerely,
> - --
> James D. Forrester

Yup. But this is no different of what developers were doing for us 
before. For example, when Tim Starling made a check for us, he was not 
alone. It was rather an exchange where userA explained the issue, Tim 
gave a couple of answers, depending on the answers userA explored and 
possibly ask more information from Tim.

It is interesting though, that you give the example of a russian 
problem. We currently have standing in the board queue on OTRS, a 
request from a russian editor, asking that we investigate the case of a 
sysop abuse over there. The request travelled back and fro between the 
info en queue and the board queue. And since no one on either queue 
reads russian... well nothing happens. The *good* solution would be to 
know a trusted russian editor, who could be asked to give information.

Similarly, the investigation could be carried by a team made of the 
checkuser and a trusted russian editor.

I absolutely agree that there is a language issue. Which suggests that 
we should do our best to have at least one russian-speaking checkuser. 
But would it be more reasonable to have one russian-speaking checkuser 
with overall activity over all russian-speaking projects plus the 
serbian ones because he would also speak serbian

or one checkuser in ru.wikipedia, one in ru.wikibooks, one in 
ru.wiktionary, one in sr.wikipedia etc...

ant