[Foundation-l] Note regarding status of privacy policy

Sun Aug 10 00:10:22 UTC 2008

On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 5:11 PM, Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> > Hoi,
> > When someone accepts the function to checkuser, he accepts a role that is
> > clearly with the community. Calling such a person a  "third party" is in
> my
> > opinion wrong. The person doing the check user has accepted the rules
> that
> > allows for executing this function.
> > Thanks,
> >       GerardM
>
> This is an extremely important point. As you can imagine, it was
> challenging for Mike to construct a policy that made it clear that there
> are roles in the projects such as checkuser which are inside the
> community (and therefore, as per Gerard, not considered 'external'), and
> yet whose behaviour is not controlled/controllable by the Foundation.
>
> It's an unusual situation, and we tried to be extremely clear, here:
>

There's a good reason it's unusual.  It's a recipe for disaster.  Did you
know that Kelly Martin (alleged "attack site" proprietor) has printed copies
of checkuser results sitting around the house?  The privacy policy might
explain how thing are done, but that doesn't mean it's a sane thing to do.