[Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] The Signpost -- Volume 10, Issue 24 -- 25 June 2014
Exclusive: Foundation's new executive director speaks to the ''Signpost'' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-06-25/Exclusive News and notes: US National Archives enshrines Wikipedia in Open Government Plan, plans to upload all holdings to Commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-06-25/News_and_notes Featured content: Showing our ''Wörth'' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-06-25/Featured_content WikiProject report: The world where dreams come true http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-06-25/WikiProject_report Discussion report: Media Viewer, old HTML tags http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-06-25/Discussion_report Traffic report: Fake war, or real sport? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-06-25/Traffic_report Recent research: Power users and diversity in WikiProjects, the network of cultures in multilingual Wikipedia biographies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-06-25/Recent_research Single page view http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signpost/Single PDF version http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-06-25 https://www.facebook.com/wikisignpost / https://twitter.com/wikisignpost -- Wikipedia Signpost Staff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open Letter to Lila Regarding Access to Non-Public Information Policy
Trillium, I am having difficulty understanding how retaining copies of possibly forged identification documents helps anyone with holding accountable any rogue functionary or OTRS user. Can you explain that please? Surely someone who intends to misuse the tools will be smart enough to forge an identification document. Even in the United States, forging identification documents is not impossible, and the police occasionally catch people creating such documents. Pine On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 7:42 AM, Trillium Corsage trillium2...@yandex.com wrote: @Nathan You said so if you want to argue that such users should be positively identified, then please make some practical suggestions (which you have conspicuously avoided doing so far). How should identities be confirmed? In what circumstances should the ID information be disclosed, and to whom? What, fundamentally, is the usefulness in collecting this information to begin with? What are the use cases in which it is necessary? It would be a good faith evaluation of the copy of the identification document provided. There's no need to be quarrelsome about the practical suggestions I've conspicuously avoided. I did at least suggest a secure filing cabinet and making use of a removable hard-drive. As to the precise criteria by which an identification document is deemed good enough, I'd suppose those would be developed on a good faith basis by the action officer. Nobody is depending on perfection by that individual. The principle would be that the document appears genuine, has the minimum elements settled on by the policy (name, age, address, possibly other elements). If the document is in a foreign language, say Swahili, and the WMF person can't read that, I would think it would be a do the best you can and file it by respective Wikipedia and username. None of these are insurmountable obstacles. The answer to this is hard is not well, let's just stop doing it. The answer is this is important, let's just do the best we can. I have called for a basic examination of the document, not any verification process. I'd suppose if the document looked suspect in some way, then a telephone call or follow-up could be done, and that would be a verification, but I would expect that to be the exception, not the rule. Again, these details would be settled by the hands-on person, not by me attempting to write a ten-page standard operating procedure while Nathan zings me with what are your specifics on the mailing list. What is the usefulness in collecting this information to begin with? Well, I thought the premise here was obvious. It was obvious enough to those that crafted the previous policy in the first place. It establishes some level of accountability to those individuals accorded access to the personally-identifying information of editors. Personal accountability encourages acting with self-control and restraint. With apologies to the other person that responded, anonymity encourages a care-free and unrestricted handling of that data, and in fact to some of these people it indeed yields a MMORPG (multimedia online roleplaying game) environment, and they will do whatever they want, because they are free from accountability. The other key aspect of usefulness is to the rank and file editors. They will feel better knowing that if some creepazoid or cyberbully starts going over their IPs, and of course Googling and otherwise sleuthing for more on them, that at least the WMF knows who they are, and the rank and file editor potentially has some recourse if it finally comes to it. So I say the usefulness there is treating editors right and furnishing a safer environment for them, in which they are not so exposed to anonymous administrators. Thank you for your response. Trillium Corsage (by the way although Trillium is a type of flower, I am in fact a dude. So please use male pronouns if it occurs to you. It was just an email address I picked sort of randomly and then I ran with it as pseudonym). ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open Letter to Lila Regarding Access to Non-Public Information Policy
Trillium, while I sympathise with several of the points you're making, the Board has approved the current version of the policy. In light of this, your insinuation that the Executive Director could simply alter the policy to her liking seems somewhat far-fetched. Just because staff have not yet implemented the new version doesn't mean they can just make it disappear. Nathan, several suggestions have been made how identities can be confirmed. The proponents of the now-enacted laissez-faire policy continuously suggest that the Foundation would have had to reinvent the wheel here. However, all sorts of organizations need to confirm the identity of individuals. Just look at how banks do it. In Switzerland, you can make a copy of your ID and have it certified by your post office, then mail it to the WMF along with your signed confidentiality agreement. In Germany, companies use the PostIdent process which the WMF can use as well (Austria has something similar), or you go to a bank and have your signature certified. Canada Post provides a verification service, etc. And what if there are countries where no such process is available? What's the issue? These users can still just copy their passports or IDs. The policy still makes sense if we can't really be certain of the identity of some volunteers, and this could be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. It's not like we're talking about an inordinate amount of people here. Pine, even if we were merely talking about retaining copies of IDs, the argument misses that there is not only the potential case of volunteers who intend to misuse the tools already at the time they are given access. Based on experience from Wikipedia, the much more likely scenario seems to be that users are indeed valuable community members when they get access but later become frustrated / change their personality / ... and only then start to make trouble. If their identity were confirmed at one point, this would constrain them for all time to come. On 29 June 2014 08:31, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote: Trillium, I am having difficulty understanding how retaining copies of possibly forged identification documents helps anyone with holding accountable any rogue functionary or OTRS user. Can you explain that please? Surely someone who intends to misuse the tools will be smart enough to forge an identification document. Even in the United States, forging identification documents is not impossible, and the police occasionally catch people creating such documents. Pine On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 7:42 AM, Trillium Corsage trillium2...@yandex.com wrote: @Nathan You said so if you want to argue that such users should be positively identified, then please make some practical suggestions (which you have conspicuously avoided doing so far). How should identities be confirmed? In what circumstances should the ID information be disclosed, and to whom? What, fundamentally, is the usefulness in collecting this information to begin with? What are the use cases in which it is necessary? It would be a good faith evaluation of the copy of the identification document provided. There's no need to be quarrelsome about the practical suggestions I've conspicuously avoided. I did at least suggest a secure filing cabinet and making use of a removable hard-drive. As to the precise criteria by which an identification document is deemed good enough, I'd suppose those would be developed on a good faith basis by the action officer. Nobody is depending on perfection by that individual. The principle would be that the document appears genuine, has the minimum elements settled on by the policy (name, age, address, possibly other elements). If the document is in a foreign language, say Swahili, and the WMF person can't read that, I would think it would be a do the best you can and file it by respective Wikipedia and username. None of these are insurmountable obstacles. The answer to this is hard is not well, let's just stop doing it. The answer is this is important, let's just do the best we can. I have called for a basic examination of the document, not any verification process. I'd suppose if the document looked suspect in some way, then a telephone call or follow-up could be done, and that would be a verification, but I would expect that to be the exception, not the rule. Again, these details would be settled by the hands-on person, not by me attempting to write a ten-page standard operating procedure while Nathan zings me with what are your specifics on the mailing list. What is the usefulness in collecting this information to begin with? Well, I thought the premise here was obvious. It was obvious enough to those that crafted the previous policy in the first place. It establishes some level of accountability to those individuals accorded access to the personally-identifying information of editors. Personal accountability
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Vietnamese wp above 1 M articles and growing
On 2014-06-24 04:52, Tanweer Morshed wrote: That's a great news that the Vietnamese Wikipedia has crossed 1M articles. What are the significant reasons behind Vietnamese Wikipedia's such growth? Is it just the usage of such clever Bots (that you have mentioned) or contribution by the Vietnamese Wikipedians? And actually how does the Cheer!-bot generate articles? Does it translate articles from English (or other) Wikipedia? And apart from translating, can it set and maintain correctly other aspects of Wikisyntax and coding? A great many of the Vietnamese Wikipedia's recent articles have been created automatically using bots, manually with word processors and mail merge, or semi-automatically with machine translators like (presumably) Google Translator Toolkit. Nonetheless, Cheers!-bot held a moratorium on new articles around the million-article mark, so that day was all about writing articles the old fashioned way. Predictably, our bot articles are more infobox than prose. On the other hand, they do have correct grammar and wiki syntax, which cannot be said for most machine-translated articles, comprehensive as they may be. Cheers! is one of our most experienced editors and has done an admirable job correcting errors, whereas some machine translator users have uploaded incomprehensible articles anonymously, giving us no opportunity to engage and educate. I can't say for certain how Cheers!-bot generates species stubs, but its earlier U.S. geographic stubs were translated from the Spanish Wikipedia's own bot-created stubs. I'm in the process of cleaning them up, translating the occasional Spanish place name to Vietnamese. We're also integrating our [[vi:Template:Infobox settlement]] with Wikidata, to provide more current information with minimal maintenance. For example, see the infobox at [[vi:Loveland, Ohio]], which passes only three parameters but provides 18 rows of information. The surge in bot-created stubs has alarmed some members of the Vietnamese Wikipedia community. One frequent theme in our village pump is that our depth at [[m:List of Wikipedias]] has fallen from over a hundred (one of the highest) to just 15 (one of the lowest) in a few years. Even taking the depth metric with a grain of salt, I think this observation has led us to a newfound appreciation for edits, non-articles, and maybe even authentic, hand-made articles. More importantly, the million-article milestone has shed a light on our seemingly low number of active editors. Some have expressed concern that the steadily rising article count has disincentivized readers from creating own articles on their own. So we're discussing some changes to our main page and messages to better engage potential contributors. We've also integrated tightly with VisualEditor -- the sandbox, no such article message, and no search results message all send users to VisualEditor by default -- hopefully lowering barriers to entry. None of the Vietnamese Wikipedia's bot operators are interested in inflating our article count for the sake of. We care deeply about the future of our wiki and the health of its community, and we welcome feedback from the community at large. -- Minh Nguyen Administrator [[vi:User:Mxn]] [[m:User:Mxn]] ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open Letter to Lila Regarding Access to Non-Public Information Policy
Okay, that's enough, Trilliium. You've now made a personal attack against an identifiable individual based on gossip and rumour. Stop. Risker On 29 June 2014 10:18, Trillium Corsage trillium2...@yandex.com wrote: Pine, An analogous argument to the one you're making is: someone who intends to rob your home will be able to get in one way or other, so why bother locking the doors when you go out. This is not a good argument. You're calling into question the reliability of every identification document copy ever presented to the WMF by an advanced-rights-seeking administrator because a really sophisticated wrongdoer (I dunno, Chinese military intelligence, with whom arbitrator Timotheus Canens is said by some to be associated?) could make a masterful forgery that beats the system. The fact is that 95% of them, I'd suppose, are going to be okay and the identification requirement is going to be an effective deterrent to at least the casual among the bad apples. And of course, once they've truly identified, the personal accountability aspects of it are going to keep in line once well-intentioned administrators that might be tempted to go bad for some reason. Forging identification documents is not impossible is another variation of the perfection is not attainable and no policy can be a magical solution arguments put forth previously on this mailing list by the WMF's deputy general counsel Luis Villa. I've attempted to answer those by explaining that you can have a pretty good and effective policy without having an infallible one. Trillium Corsage 29.06.2014, 07:32, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com: Trillium, I am having difficulty understanding how retaining copies of possibly forged identification documents helps anyone with holding accountable any rogue functionary or OTRS user. Can you explain that please? Surely someone who intends to misuse the tools will be smart enough to forge an identification document. Even in the United States, forging identification documents is not impossible, and the police occasionally catch people creating such documents. Pine On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 7:42 AM, Trillium Corsage trillium2...@yandex.com wrote: @Nathan You said so if you want to argue that such users should be positively identified, then please make some practical suggestions (which you have conspicuously avoided doing so far). How should identities be confirmed? In what circumstances should the ID information be disclosed, and to whom? What, fundamentally, is the usefulness in collecting this information to begin with? What are the use cases in which it is necessary? It would be a good faith evaluation of the copy of the identification document provided. There's no need to be quarrelsome about the practical suggestions I've conspicuously avoided. I did at least suggest a secure filing cabinet and making use of a removable hard-drive. As to the precise criteria by which an identification document is deemed good enough, I'd suppose those would be developed on a good faith basis by the action officer. Nobody is depending on perfection by that individual. The principle would be that the document appears genuine, has the minimum elements settled on by the policy (name, age, address, possibly other elements). If the document is in a foreign language, say Swahili, and the WMF person can't read that, I would think it would be a do the best you can and file it by respective Wikipedia and username. None of these are insurmountable obstacles. The answer to this is hard is not well, let's just stop doing it. The answer is this is important, let's just do the best we can. I have called for a basic examination of the document, not any verification process. I'd suppose if the document looked suspect in some way, then a telephone call or follow-up could be done, and that would be a verification, but I would expect that to be the exception, not the rule. Again, these details would be settled by the hands-on person, not by me attempting to write a ten-page standard operating procedure while Nathan zings me with what are your specifics on the mailing list. What is the usefulness in collecting this information to begin with? Well, I thought the premise here was obvious. It was obvious enough to those that crafted the previous policy in the first place. It establishes some level of accountability to those individuals accorded access to the personally-identifying information of editors. Personal accountability encourages acting with self-control and restraint. With apologies to the other person that responded, anonymity encourages a care-free and unrestricted handling of that data, and in fact to some of these people it indeed yields a MMORPG (multimedia online roleplaying game) environment, and they will do whatever they want, because
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open Letter to Lila Regarding Access to Non-Public Information Policy
On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 4:18 PM, Trillium Corsage trillium2...@yandex.com wrote: (I dunno, Chinese military intelligence, with whom arbitrator Timotheus Canens is said by some to be associated?) Seriously? I think you've gone on long enough for now. You can come off moderation when you contribute something to the discussion rather than attacking others and, dare I say it, just plain ranting. Austin ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open Letter to Lila Regarding Access to Non-Public Information Policy
Pine, An analogous argument to the one you're making is: someone who intends to rob your home will be able to get in one way or other, so why bother locking the doors when you go out. This is not a good argument. You're calling into question the reliability of every identification document copy ever presented to the WMF by an advanced-rights-seeking administrator because a really sophisticated wrongdoer (I dunno, Chinese military intelligence, with whom arbitrator Timotheus Canens is said by some to be associated?) could make a masterful forgery that beats the system. The fact is that 95% of them, I'd suppose, are going to be okay and the identification requirement is going to be an effective deterrent to at least the casual among the bad apples. And of course, once they've truly identified, the personal accountability aspects of it are going to keep in line once well-intentioned administrators that might be tempted to go bad for some reason. Forging identification documents is not impossible is another variation of the perfection is not attainable and no policy can be a magical solution arguments put forth previously on this mailing list by the WMF's deputy general counsel Luis Villa. I've attempted to answer those by explaining that you can have a pretty good and effective policy without having an infallible one. Trillium Corsage 29.06.2014, 07:32, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com: Trillium, I am having difficulty understanding how retaining copies of possibly forged identification documents helps anyone with holding accountable any rogue functionary or OTRS user. Can you explain that please? Surely someone who intends to misuse the tools will be smart enough to forge an identification document. Even in the United States, forging identification documents is not impossible, and the police occasionally catch people creating such documents. Pine On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 7:42 AM, Trillium Corsage trillium2...@yandex.com wrote: @Nathan You said so if you want to argue that such users should be positively identified, then please make some practical suggestions (which you have conspicuously avoided doing so far). How should identities be confirmed? In what circumstances should the ID information be disclosed, and to whom? What, fundamentally, is the usefulness in collecting this information to begin with? What are the use cases in which it is necessary? It would be a good faith evaluation of the copy of the identification document provided. There's no need to be quarrelsome about the practical suggestions I've conspicuously avoided. I did at least suggest a secure filing cabinet and making use of a removable hard-drive. As to the precise criteria by which an identification document is deemed good enough, I'd suppose those would be developed on a good faith basis by the action officer. Nobody is depending on perfection by that individual. The principle would be that the document appears genuine, has the minimum elements settled on by the policy (name, age, address, possibly other elements). If the document is in a foreign language, say Swahili, and the WMF person can't read that, I would think it would be a do the best you can and file it by respective Wikipedia and username. None of these are insurmountable obstacles. The answer to this is hard is not well, let's just stop doing it. The answer is this is important, let's just do the best we can. I have called for a basic examination of the document, not any verification process. I'd suppose if the document looked suspect in some way, then a telephone call or follow-up could be done, and that would be a verification, but I would expect that to be the exception, not the rule. Again, these details would be settled by the hands-on person, not by me attempting to write a ten-page standard operating procedure while Nathan zings me with what are your specifics on the mailing list. What is the usefulness in collecting this information to begin with? Well, I thought the premise here was obvious. It was obvious enough to those that crafted the previous policy in the first place. It establishes some level of accountability to those individuals accorded access to the personally-identifying information of editors. Personal accountability encourages acting with self-control and restraint. With apologies to the other person that responded, anonymity encourages a care-free and unrestricted handling of that data, and in fact to some of these people it indeed yields a MMORPG (multimedia online roleplaying game) environment, and they will do whatever they want, because they are free from accountability. The other key aspect of usefulness is to the rank and file editors. They will feel better knowing that if some creepazoid or cyberbully starts going over their IPs, and of course Googling and otherwise sleuthing for more on them, that at least the WMF knows
Re: [Wikimedia-l] First _draft_ goals for WMF engineering/product
Hi Erik, Thanks for sharing this update. It looks like a move in a good direction for WMF's engineering. I am worried by how short-term the current plans/goals are, though. I know that a lot of work that the engineering department does, particularly with regards software, which can only be planned on a quarterly basis to ensure it's as agile and responsive to changing needs as possible. However, there's also the long-term view - what the key pieces of work that department wants to get done over the course of the next year or longer are - which is currently missing. I think this is particularly important for the engineering side of things (expected server capacity needs etc.), but it's also relevant for the software development side in terms of the larger picture. Is there a wikipage available somewhere that sets out the long-term view/strategic priorities for the engineering department? If not, could I encourage you to think about starting one? Thanks, Mike On 27 Jun 2014, at 02:55, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: As an update on the goals process for WMF engineering, we've begun fleshing out out the top priorities for the first quarter. Going forward, we'll aim to call out the top priorities for each quarter as we approach it, to create more shared visibility into the most urgent and high-impact projects we're working on. I've decided for now to use a division between User-Impacting Changes and Cross-Functional Platform and Process Improvements. The intent of calling out both areas is to ensure that important organizational priorities don't fall off our collective radar. At the management level, the intent is for us to pay special attention to the priorities called out in this manner, and this may also impact our willingness to request help from across the organization if necessary to support these priorities, at least in Q1. I've merged the current draft into the goals document, here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals#Top_departmental_priorities_for_Q1_.28July_-_September_2014.29 Once again, this is draft and marked as such. The Impact column will include links to relevant metrics once those are a bit more solid; if you look further down in the document you'll see that these are being refined and tweaked in multiple areas right now. A little bit of rationale for some items that may surprise you: - I've decided to list HHVM as the top priority in both categories. This is because a) it's a very complex undertaking from an engineering perspective and requires significant coordination across development operations, b) it's probably the biggest change regarding how code gets executed in production since we adopted PHP in the first place, c) the expected performance benefits for many uncached logged-in user operations are very significant (I defer to the team to quantify before throwing out estimates). This is also indicative of the importance we're attaching to site performance. There's no question that performance is directly correlated with user engagement, and it's appropriate that we spend significant effort in this area. - We're elevating SUL finalisation ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/SUL_finalisation ) to a top priority, and I've classified it as user-impacting. This is because it's on the critical path for making it easier to develop cross-site functionality (as long as we have to deal with the edge case of detached accounts, certain features that work across wikis are just trickier to implement), and one of those long term issues of technical debt we've been kicking down the road for years. It's also a pretty complex project -- if it goes wrong and we mess up our account database, we're in big trouble. So we want to make sure we have lots of eyeballs on this from a technical and community management perspective. We may not completely wrap up in Q1 since we need to give users whose accounts are affected significant warning time, which is just elapsed time we can't shorten. - Front-end code standardization is called out as a top priority. We really need to dig ourselves out of the mess of having disjointed templating systems, widget libraries, and JS frameworks across our codebase if we want to increase development velocity and UX consistency. I'm prepared to sacrifice short term development velocity on other projects in order to make this happen. - The content API that Gabriel is working on ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Content_API ) is called out as a top priority. This is because the Parsoid output (for which the content API will be a high performance front-end) is now getting to the point where it's starting to become plausible to increasingly use it not just for VisualEditor, but also for views as well. The potential here are performance benefits across the board: for logged-in users in general by consistently relying on fast, cached
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open Letter to Lila Regarding Access to Non-Public Information Policy
Hi Pajz, The idea that a previously trustworthy functionary or OTRS volunteer might later go rogue has occurred to me, so let's work with that example for a moment. Let's hypothesize that we have a good way (90% confidence) of verifying all submitted identity documents and that those documents are retained by WMF in a way that's highly secure and not likely to be accessible by any number of governments (90% confidence). Let's also hypothesize that a steward has a mental breakdown, gets bribed, develops a personal grudge, or otherwise becomes compromised. This rogue steward then uses their tools to discover privacy sensitive information about a handful of other users before their actions are noticed and stopped. What can WMF do with the identity document that it has? WMF can take legal action against the rogue steward, and can blacklist the rogue steward so that they can never again be a functionary. Both of those sound like good ideas, although the first might only work if the steward resides in a location which has an effective law enforcement agency that is willing to cooperate with WMF. However, it's not clear to me that we can reach 90% confidence about the authenticity of identification documents, nor is it clear to me that we can keep identification documents secure from privacy intrusions while they are in transit and while they are in WMF's custody. I think the latter would be a big worry for some potential candidates for functionary roles, and it is imperative that WMF not be perceived as an agency of any government, or an organization whose neutrality or integrity are compromised. If you or someone else can suggest reasonable ways to reach 90% confidence that identity documents are genuine and that identification information will not be compromised while in transit or while at WMF, then I think it makes sense to require identification. But so far I am not convinced that we can reach either of those thresholds and it sounds like WMF has reached the same conclusion. Pine On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 7:45 AM, Austin Hair adh...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 4:18 PM, Trillium Corsage trillium2...@yandex.com wrote: (I dunno, Chinese military intelligence, with whom arbitrator Timotheus Canens is said by some to be associated?) Seriously? I think you've gone on long enough for now. You can come off moderation when you contribute something to the discussion rather than attacking others and, dare I say it, just plain ranting. Austin ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open Letter to Lila Regarding Access to Non-Public Information Policy
On 06/29/2014 03:19 PM, Pine W wrote: If you or someone else can suggest reasonable ways to reach 90% confidence that identity documents are genuine and that identification information will not be compromised while in transit or while at WMF, then I think it makes sense to require identification. But so far I am not convinced that we can reach either of those thresholds and it sounds like WMF has reached the same conclusion. I'm not privvy to that discussion, but I'd expect that [...] that does not unduly exclude valuable volunteers is also an implicit requirement of any identification method considered. Even if you /could/ develop a mechanism by which we had safe and reliable identification of functionnaries, it'd be worthless if most (or even just many) of the volunteers we had were unable to avail themselves of it because of social or geographical constraints. -- Marc ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
