User talk:Darkoneko
write to me at fr:User Talk:Darkoneko, NOT here
CheckUser on de.wikipedia
Hello Darkoneko, could you please explain, why you checked an IP on de.wikipedia two hours ago? Even if you thought that this was in some way urgent, you (or the requester) had the option to ask me or one of the other local users with CU access. I was online on IRC at this time, and there has been no such request on the CU mailing list or elsewhere. Reading the given reason in the log, I 'm pretty unsure if the actual CU query you ran was legitimate under the CheckUser policy (meaning: was there any real need for it?).
Stewards should only act as CheckUsers on Wikipedias with local users with access in fery few special cases, afaik.
Regards, --:Bdk: 20:33, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
- It was a perfectly legitimate check to determine the source for cross-wiki imprsonation attack on on one of ruwiki's users. Because of the urgentness, requesting checks from local checkusers and coordinating their efforts would have been quite a task. MaxSem 21:34, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
- Hi MaxSem. Thanks for your comment, but an explanation by Darkoneko himself on this page would be nice.
- Well, as said before: I was on IRC and available exactly at that time. And as far as I can see, there was no adequate reason to run CheckUser on de.wikipedia, as we usually handle such "impersonations" by simply blocking and, if needed (e.g. because of real name usage), by renaming the accounts in question. There has not been any vandalism by the account in question (no edits at all have been made) on the German Wikipedia (only the pure registration of an account). Additionally, the account name itself does not include any offensive words or so. And CheckUser does not give any relevant information if it is already well known that an account has not been made by the "original user". According to the CheckUser policy CU queries should only be run if there's a real need for. – I can't see this need in this case.
- Sorry for being insisting, but this is a general issue (how Checkuser is handled: with caution or without, with respect for local privacy conventions or without …).
- --:Bdk: 22:01, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
- We already discussed this over IRC. Do I realy need to repeat everything here too ? (maybe copying that part of the log ?)
- DarkoNeko 22:41, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
- On IRC, you didn't give a sufficient explanation for running CU on de.wikipedia by yourself, just some rather general hints, and that you "hoped to find another account sharing the ip". Please explain the case also on-wiki for German Wikipedians; your explanation will be linked from our central CheckUser page as we request that all CU queries are publically announced. (Please don't give names or IPs, but comprehensible reasons.)
- Note: This was the third CU query ran by a steward without any notice to the local community since we have local users with CU access on de.wikipedia (since July 2006). And in both other cases there was no urgency given, and – more important – there would have no CU query been run – according to the CU policy – if the request had been made and decided locally. So this sort of lax handling of CheckUser is regarded as problematic by many users and by me (as one of the local users with CU access).
- Well, perhaps not everyone is aware of the specific characteristics of the different projects regarding privacy and data protection. Please keep in mind, that it is common on the German Wikipedia (which is the second biggest Wikimedia project as you probably know) to handle such issues with much more caution according to German, Austrian and Swiss law (and possibly according to history and culture) than it is done e.g. on English projects.
- Please take this request for explanation seriously. Thanks in advance --:Bdk: 08:23, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
- +1 @Darkoneko As a regular user in de: I propose an agreement to respect our way to act in a clear and predictable wise, well documented at a near 1:1 level according to the CU policy. How you are using the cu-flag in other projects does not belong to us. But we in our case likes this way better: Clear rules as a precondition for a strong working community. CFT -- 212.23.126.20 22:35, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
- (please wait until tonight, I've been kinda busy these last few days) DarkoNeko 07:39, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
- Darkoneko is a steward and therefore has the right to perform a checkuser on any project. I suggest that he offer the results to the German checkusers, but when it comes to cross-wiki issues, it's unecessary for a steward to have to wait and go hunting a checkuser on a specific project. He has the blessing of the foundation in policies. Cary Bass demandez 21:29, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
- What happened
There is an user, which I'll call user:X, which is a sysop on one big wiki.
A vandal, apparently for revenge purpose, suddenly started to create account with his name on various wikis and languages (including, as you'll guess, de.wikipedia) and started vandalizing with them.
I Cued the various wikis the account's name was created on recently to do 2 things
- verify wether it was the act on one person or a group
- check for sockpuppets (and there was some) and possibly find the "original" account of the vandal.
In the end, I couldn't find the source account but the inquire did lead to an anomiser's /19 IP range block on most of the wikis the vandal was seen.
- Explanations
For urgency, there was none, apart the risk of that vandal continuing to use that anonmiser and creating others accounts to vandalize with. But if I had to ask every project's CU to make the requests locally, there would have been
- many hours lost for me in organization, writing to each language's checkuser (and hoping they'd understand english or french), checking answers, giving way to get the result in a private manner, possibly request a 2nd things (list of accounts using a specific IP for example) depending of the first results, etc...
- and it the end, at least a week would have passed before anything was done.
In my case, we were 2 stewards online (although since the other one was a bit busy, I did most of them myself), we "rented" a invite-only channel to exchange informations in a secure way, and everything, blocking included, was done within an hour or two.
On a side note, how could I possibly know there was a German CU ML, or whether one of them was using IRC ?
- About privacy and data protection
As you may know, as I steward, the foundation is in possession of my ID's scan. It's been that way even before the same was asked from CU. So, are we steward be not reliable enough to access informations local CU does and keep them as private as the foundation's projects protection permit ?