[Foundation-l] Update on ombudsman issue

Fri Jul 21 07:57:56 UTC 2006

Oldak Quill wrote:

>>PS : is it a good idea to have a user named ombudsman ?
>>    
>>
>
>I don't think the name "User:Ombudsman" instantly strikes someone as
>an official position. In Britain, the position "Ombudsman" tends to be
>reserved as a governmental complaints mechanism and watchdog on
>trading standards and banking.
>
>  
>
An alternative usage for this term that I've seen is for somebody who 
offers legal advise, often free or pro-bono, to members of a community 
or organization.  Usually this is something that is often 
topic-specific, for example this use here:

http://www.ombudsman.ed.gov/

where the U.S. Dept. of Education has a legal team to help cut through 
the red tape on student loan and aid programs for U.S. citizens.

I think something like this would be useful to help cut through the red 
tape of copyright and trademark issues that keep coming up for Wikimedia 
projects.  The problem here would be who would be willing to serve in 
this capacity.  And this is also something that simply should not be 
elected, as you would have specific legal qualification that would be 
necessary to do something like this effectively.

This, I admit, is also a completely different kind of a position than 
the one originally suggested by Angela and worthy of a seperate thread, 
having nothing to do with the checkuser issue.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning