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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Callanecc (talk | contribs) at 10:33, 23 November 2014 (→Motion granting temporary local CheckUser permission to Arbitration Committee Election Scrutineers: Motion enacted). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Currently, there are no requests for arbitration.

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Motion name Date posted
Motion granting temporary local CheckUser permission to Arbitration Committee Election Scrutineers 23 November 2014
Motion for a standing procedure on arbitrator requests for self-assignment of CheckUser or Oversight permissions 19 November 2014

Motions

Motion granting temporary local CheckUser permission to Arbitration Committee Election Scrutineers

For the purpose of scrutineering the 2014 Arbitration Committee elections, stewards User:Matanya, User:Barras, and User:Trijnstel, appointed as scrutineers, are granted temporary local CheckUser permissions effective from the time of the passage of this motion until the certification of the election results.

Enacted - Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 10:33, 23 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

For this motion there are 12 active arbitrators, not counting 1 recused. With 0 arbitrators abstaining, 7 support or oppose votes are a majority.

Support
  1. GorillaWarfare (talk) 04:24, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Newyorkbrad (talk) 04:25, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  3. LFaraone 04:30, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Beeblebrox (talk) 05:57, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  5.  Roger Davies talk 08:02, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  6. T. Canens (talk) 09:25, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  7. WormTT(talk) 13:55, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  8. Carcharoth (talk) 23:49, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  9. Seraphimblade Talk to me 07:24, 20 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  10. AGK [•] 13:10, 20 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose
Abstain
Recuse
  1. Salvio giuliano (presumed)

Discussion by arbitrators

Motion for a standing procedure on arbitrator requests for self-assignment of CheckUser or Oversight permissions

Any current member in good standing[a] of the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee may at any time receive access to the CheckUser and Oversight tools after making a request on the appropriate page, even if the member had not held one or both permissions previously. Such a request is to be considered authorised by the Arbitration Committee, within the scope of AP §1.1(5).

  1. ^ "good standing" is here defined as not suspended and not the subject of a current vote for suspension or removal from the Arbitration Committee, as discussed in AP §1.3.
For this motion there are 13 active arbitrators. With 0 arbitrators abstaining, 7 support or oppose votes are a majority.

Support
  1. As proposer. LFaraone 11:17, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Personally, I'd add, just to be on the safe side, "after making a request on the appropriate page" and without the need for any further formalities, but yes, this is a sound idea. Salvio Let's talk about it! 11:20, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    I assume the Stewards would interpret "[…]request is […] authorized by the Arbitration Committee[…]" as "no additional questions or formalities are required. But if there's a way to refactor this to make it more clear, I'm all ears. LFaraone 14:48, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Yes, fine. (With a minor tweak from "policy" to "procedure" in the title),  Roger Davies talk 11:45, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    Well, technically we can modify our "internal rules and procedures" (elsewhere called "processes") by motion, but casting this as "policy" speaks to me as something that would require modification to the Arbitration Policy, which is a very different process. LFaraone 14:48, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  4. This has the potential to blow up in spectacular fashion in ways we have not tried to foresee, but I still cannot bring myself to vote against something that will dispense with more of the higher permissions bureaucracy that has creeped in during recent years. AGK [•] 13:10, 20 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Beeblebrox (talk) 04:52, 21 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose
  1. Not sure about this. There are technical reasons why non-administrators cannot access the oversight tool, and I'm similarly not sure about non-administrators on the checkuser tool. That said, if a non-administrator has passed community muster to be elected to arbcom, they should be allowed the administrator flag for the duration of the time on the committee. As such, I cannot support as written - I would support the same with administrator flag (though I don't know how the community would feel about that), but otherwise it's not too onerous to work on a case by case basis. WormTT(talk) 14:01, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    If there are technical restrictions to the utility of these tools to non-administrator arbitrators, I believe they can be worked around through requesting changes to the rights given by a group to include the minimum rights needed to use the tool. Specifically:
    • Oversight: Grant the delete, deletedhistory, deletedtext, deletelogentryt, undelete, suppressrevision, and viewsuppressed permissions to the Oversight group or create a new group for it.
    • Checkuser: Apart from not being able to block, I'm not convinced a change here would win anything.
    That said, there is a real justification for considering adminship proper for the duration of a non-Administrator, perhaps with AUSC-esque limits that they are discouraged from taking actions unrelated to functionary or committee work. LFaraone 14:48, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    Definitely not keen on changing Oversight just for this hypothetical (for the time being) usercase. But thanks for the reply, I'll think on the matter. WormTT(talk) 15:04, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  2. I understand why this is proposed and will not be upset if it passes. Routine motions and "paperwork" to approve routine things are annoying, as we were reminded this week. Moreover, if at any time the Arbitration Committee had reservations about one of its members' having the checkuser and/or oversight rights, that would be a bad situation because it would imply reservations about that member's having access to all the other non-public information that the arbitrators are privy to as well. Thus, in voting on candidates, the community should operate on the assumption that the elected arbitrators will receive these permissions on request, and that most of the arbitrators will request them. Nonetheless, although it's a close call, I'm opposing this blanket grant for three reasons. First, it is at least theoretically possible that a future Committee might not want to confer the permissions on each and every arbitrator. Second, we have the uncertainty about whether non-administrator arbitrators could be granted oversight as a technical matter without also being granted adminship (which they should be, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion). And third, it's not 100% clear to me that the stewards would click the button in (say) 2015 to grant CU and OS to a group of newly elected arbitrators whose identity was not yet known to the Committee that passed this motion in 2014. If they require additional confirmations at that time, the result would be greater bureaucracy rather than less. Thus, while I'm open to persuasion, my instinct is to leave things the way they are now. Newyorkbrad (talk) 14:41, 20 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Abstain
Recuse

Discussion by arbitrators

Community comments

  • A few thoughts: I'm not sure that a steward who is unfamilar with enwiki politics wants to figure out whether an ArbCom member is in "good standing" or not. It's probably best to just explicitly say "X is granted CU/OS" each year like has been done in the past. Also, this would mean that CU/OS could not be handed out until January 1, which would be a problem if you were planning on handing it out soon after the elections like last year. (Yes, I know I'm being annoying, but stewards have to be careful on enwiki, or they risk being yelled at for their mistake by Wikimedia's largest wiki). --Rschen7754 03:17, 20 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    • (For clarity, I don't act on enwiki rights requests, as enwiki is a home wiki per the m:Stewards policy). --Rschen7754 06:20, 20 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
      • I think the definition in point (a) is unambiguous and easy enough to determine that this won't be a big problem. I am sure that any arb who gets themselves into enough trouble to no longer be "in good standing" will be being watched, closely, by a crowd of people, who will be only too happy to explain the situation to any steward. Lankiveil (speak to me) 11:30, 20 November 2014 (UTC).[reply]
        • I was under the impression that all Arbcom members, both current and former, had both permissions automatically? And I don't mean "unquestioningly granted upon request"; I thought that both permissions were given to you as soon as you joined the committee. Nyttend (talk) 12:09, 20 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
          • No, the permissions are granted upon request. Although most arbitrators do choose to ask for the tools and it is routine for ArbCom to make a cumulative request to the stewards at the beginning of each term, some other arbs, for whatever reason, choose not to ask. After all, they are not strictly necessary, especially when an editor does not have any previous experience with it. Take CU, for instance, an arbitrator who has never used the tool may rely on his more experienced colleagues (which is something we generally do anyway; we don't run 15 independent checks, when someone appeals) and, so, consider access to the tool superfluous. Salvio Let's talk about it! 12:35, 20 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
There are a number of issues here:
  1. Is this a policy change? The Committee is charged with the responsibility to approve and remove access to (i) CheckUser and Oversight tools, a blanket approval does not, in my view, fit with this.
  2. Consider, for example, we currently have a Wikipediocracy member standing. Even if he gets in there may be considerable concerns with him having CheckUser and/or Oversight. Remember the poll is predicated on existing policy.
  3. There is value in having to say to the committee "I want these bits". Arbitrators may in general prefer not to have them, but if it is automatically granted on request to 'Crats, tend to get them enabled for a particular problem, and keep them through inertia.
  4. Note also that if there is a committee process there is scope for community objection.
All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 00:54, 21 November 2014 (UTC).
There's no policy against a Wikipedia member using any other web forum, including Wikipediocracy. Lacking specific evidence of off-wiki conduct by an specific individual, such guilt-by-innuendo statements are not appropriate here. NE Ent 01:15, 21 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Support per nom. NE Ent 01:15, 21 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Aggre with that, and I would add that there is already community scrutiny and input in the form of the arbcom elections. The community has therefore already said that any sitting arb is entitled to these tools. The committee should not even be considering overiding the election results, so even though we are technically the gatekeepers of CU/OS any arb asking for it has to be granted itm making the whole motion we just did a pointless rubber stamp. Beeblebrox (talk) 04:51, 21 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
If the arb was already suspended there would certainly be an announcement on the noticeboard, and they would be removed from the list of committee members on the main arbcom page. Otherwise I should think a simple ping to our mailing list pointiong out the request would be more than enough. Frankly an arb being suspended is a vanishingly rare event and probably not worth much worry. Beeblebrox (talk) 22:05, 21 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
If stewards are supposed to privately contact the Arbitration Committee to verify that a member is not undergoing suspension proceedings, then we should stick to the current system where the Arbitration Committee sorts these things about before the stewards being poked. Otherwise, you should make a public announcement somewhere when proceeding starts. Snowolf How can I help? 01:18, 23 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
@Newyorkbrad: In response to your third concern, I think the only way to know would be asking at m:SN, for the opinion of some non-enwiki stewards. I certainly have an opinion on the matter, but then I am also certainly not neutral in the matter. --Rschen7754 02:20, 22 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Given that there have been votes to suspend Arbcom members, but not all of them have been public, how would stewards know that there was not a private suspension vote occurring? From my experience of stewards, I think they will be expecting confirmation from Arbcom that the user meets the requirements to be of good standing. Also, as NYB points out, a future Arbitration Committee (or even the community, as is contemplated by the Checkuser and Oversight global policies) may decide to move to a different method of determining who should have access to these tools. Arbcom might also want to consider, historically, the problems associated with people coming and going with advanced permissions, and even more seriously might want to consider how many cases they have worked on in the past year that genuinely required the use of checkuser or oversight tools. Risker (talk) 01:36, 23 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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