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Posted by: gomi

Slimey has taken http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-August/045180.html with a recent foundation-l reply regarding the new http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Draft_Privacy_Policy_June_19_2008.

Ever the sweetheart, David Gerard heckles her:

Slimey then gets all legal on their ass:

Someone then accuses her of skating too close to WP:NLT! Can a Slim-ban be far off? Wow, sounds like she may be a Wikipedia Review member soon!

Posted by: Somey

Well, that's what too much exposure to Dave Gerard will do to a person...

I can't imagine they'll actually ban her. Obviously there are lots of people who'd like to see her admin rights taken away though, and speaking only for myself, this is the first time since I've been observing the Slimphenomenon that I've actually gotten the feeling it could actually happen. It's an interesting dilemma for her, actually - if she resigned her adminship voluntarily, it would probably ensure that there wouldn't be any further sanctions beyond that... But she almost certainly wouldn't pass another RfA for a long time, and given that the chances she'll retain her admin rights are probably better than 50 percent, she's probably better off sticking to her guns.

I don't think I'd ever even considered the possibility that she'd want to start an account here, but of course she doesn't have to call herself "SlimVirgin" or even "Slimmy," and everyone is welcome to register as long as we can reasonably verify that they're not spamming, socking or impersonating someone.

OTOH, we have considered, at great length, the issue of what we might have to take down if she were ever to admit that she really is who we've been saying she is, and who she's been saying she isn't.

Posted by: gomi

The funny thing, of course, is that Slim has barely used her admin tools lately. She's deleted and restored a few articles and protected a page or two, but she has only abusively blocked a handful of times in the last year! I think that she largely acts through proxies now, such as Crum375 and (of course) the seemingly unassailable sphincter Jayjg. Even those ranks seem to be thinning, with JoshuaZ de-sysopped and Crum375 on the ropes.

She appears to be running out of friends ....

Posted by: Carruthers

Well, there is that mysterious arbcom case between her and Lar, which seems to be getting on her nerves...and then there's the other arbcom extravaganza which seems to be all hinging on the first Arbcom...and since nobody seems to know what's going to happen, including (probably) SV herself, it does tend to make a person a bit testy at times....or so I imagine....

Posted by: Yehudi

My understanding is that some WP checkusers believe they can run as many checks as they like without good reason. That would horrify checkusers on most other projects.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

When I was a guest checkuser on Wiktionary, all RfA candidates were subject to an automatic checkuser. There is no consensus as to when it is appropriate to run checkuser, and the privacy policy SlimVirgin spends so much time mewling about does not in any way address that issue. All the privacy policy says is that a checkuser may not disclose what he or she discovers except as consistent with the privacy policy. SlimVirgin, for all her cowardly braying, has no evidence that anyone has disclosed anything about her, but that doesn't make for very good whine, now, does it?

Posted by: wikiwhistle

Yes I think people still know if they stand for RfA on en.wiki, any recent socks they have will come to light.

Posted by: Gold heart

Checkuser can be run at the whim of the checkuser, or their buddies. There is no protocol established as to its proper use, or abuse. Also I have seen an editor indefinitely blocked by checkuser from evidence that was clearly wrong, and privy to just me, but enough of that. Checkuser and its use is a wiki-joke, and should be re-assessed.

Posted by: Cla68

The obvious thing here is that if you don't have anything to hide, then you don't care if you get checkusered or not. So, if SV is so concerned about trying to keep her and her friends from being checkusered, what do they have to hide?

Posted by: One

I agree, but the solution will probably be having more checkusers conducting more checks--being better able to check each other, and having more eyes of potential socks. The iron-clad expectation of privacy is very weird to me.

Posted by: dogbiscuit

Paranoia?

Posted by: Kelly Martin

Indeed, it's the bolded part that I don't understand. Of course, I edited Wikipedia under my own name (except toward the end, where I used a few anonymous socks), and so perhaps I lack an appreciation for the need that some people feel for privacy in this regard, but frankly if you're in a situation where other people finding out about your hobby would somehow endanger you, perhaps you need to find a different hobby.

Then again, I'm a ham radio operator; our addresses are published by the government in a easily-searchable database for the whole world to see. Can't get much more transparent of a hobby than that.

Posted by: Gold heart

".....being better able to check each other", is the important factor that's essentially missing. There appears to be no appeal against a checkuser decision. An editor can only appeal to other admins, and those admins always uphold the checkuser result. Like the courts, there could be at least a two tier system, with the higher tier for appeals. At the head of all that, an ombudsman to oversee the proper protocols. I have seen abuses/misuses at first hand, and checkuser can be very much abused, no doubt.

Posted by: CrazyGameOfPoker

I don't agree with that line of reasoning, at all. That's the sort of reasoning that was used to explain warantless wiretaps on American citizens by the government. Just because someone doesn't have anything to hide does not mean that they need to silently comply with the policy. Now WP is slightly different, because they're isn't a 4th Amendment to point to, but at the same time, but that reasoning is really bad.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

I'm not so convinced of that. People with checkuser may act abusively, but in most cases that's not "abuse of checkuser", it's just abuse by someone who has checkuser rights.

The real problems that come out of the use of the checkuser tool are:

• The data generated by the checkuser tool is misinterpreted by the checkuser, and those misinterpretations are then relied upon in good faith by the checkuser or by others
• Information obtained by the use of checkuser which is of no relevance to administering the encyclopedia project, but which is relevant for other purposes (including without exclusion wikipolitics, media attention, or personal curiosity) acted upon by the checkuser in a manner inconsistent with reasonable administration of the encyclopedia project, or disclosed to other persons who then act upon it in a manner inconsistent with reasonable administration of the encyclopedia project
• Individuals are threatened with being checkusered in an attempt to force them to alter the nature of their participation in the encyclopedia project

The first is misuse, and will occur and will sometimes cause significant ill will, especially when good faith actors have been unknowingly influenced by someone acting in bad faith (e.g. the Poetlister incident). The second is abuse; not only is it invasive of reasonable expectations of privacy, but it is abuse of the trust placed in checkusers not to use the tool to ends other than those intended when it was granted. Jayjg's bombshelling of CharlotteWebb is a good example of this.

Let's be clear that the first is not "abuse". Checkusers will make mistakes; mistakes only become abuse when not rectified in a reasonable manner and a reasonable timeframe, or when they are repeated so many times as to establish a pattern of incompetence. It is the inappropriate release of information obtained by checkuser that is abusive, and checkusers who do this should be defrocked with due haste.

However, the key to all of this is that the focus has to not be on when checkuser itself is used; it has to be on how the information derived from checkuser data is disseminated and acted upon. It seems that very few people understand how checkuser actually works. Deriving useful information from checkuser data may require running the checkuser tool on seemingly uninvolved individuals, and placing restrictions on doing this will almost certainly hamper the ability of checkusers to use the tool as an aid to effective administration of the encyclopedia project.

There is too much drama around checkuser, a problem that has no easy solution since Wikipedia is filled to overflowing with those who love drama and those who use drama as a tool. It may be that turning it off for a time is the best solution, although I rather doubt that.

Posted by: Moulton

Be afraid. Be very afraid...

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Draft_Privacy_Policy_June_19_2008

Draft of June 19, 2008

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Draft_Privacy_Policy_June_19_2008#Disclaimer

The Wikimedia Foundation believes that maintaining and preserving the privacy of user data is an important value. This Privacy Policy, together with other policies, resolutions, and actions by the Foundation, represents a committed effort to safeguard the security of the limited user information that is collected and retained on our servers. Nevertheless, the Foundation cannot guarantee that user information will remain private. We acknowledge that, in spite of our committed effort to protect private user information, determined individuals may still develop data-mining and other methods to uncover such information and disclose it. For this reason, the Foundation can make no guarantee against unauthorized access to information provided in the course of participating in Foundation Projects or related communities.

Posted by: DevilYouKnow

Agreed. Methinks that Slim doth protest too much.

Posted by: dogbiscuit

The really bizarre thing, when you think about it, is that in terms of privacy, SlimVirgin has lost it anyway. She has developed this online character which is her. She appears to have no significant interests outside of Wikipedia based on her online activities (if she is just one person). Everything comes back to What SlimVirgin does as that character.

Her real life is of no interest - and she appears to have little conflict of interest between her online anonymous world and her private interests (for example, being an animal rights conflicted editor is not made any worse by any particular real life activities as far as I can see, and Pan-Am 103 is stale news). However, in terms of Wikipedia, she will not be able to escape the legacy of her nom-de-plume. Whatever control she once sought is lost, and the name is destroyed as a credible force in Wikipedia.

If she now wants to be anonymous again, she would have to throw aside her interests and relationships on Wikipedia, and start again entirely from scratch. Any knowledge of her new identity being related to the old one would simply destroy her new persona's credibility. Perhaps she is angling for some big fix to Wikipedia to ensure the ability to sock with impunity.

Posted by: Proabivouac

Of course this will be in some examples entirely opaque.

Let's suppose I'm trying to identify someone in the leadership. I might like a checkuser to help me verify or debunk a proposed equivalence. Unless I then publish the IP data, which would be as unnecessary for me as it would be for the checkusers, there would be no evidence of abuse besides the log that a checkuser was performed.
.
When you have checkusers participating on WR, and equivalences of high-profile Wikipedia participants being proposed over here, it's not an unreasonable concern. I'm not saying it should our concern…I myself am very interested to discover the identities of some of the people running this project, and if a checkuser wants to help me do so, great, your confidence is assured.

But it's not too difficult for me to put myself in the shoes of someone who would fear the checkusers for this reason, supposing this is the reason, especially if I had a poor relationship with the Checkusers on WP. Paranoia here is the natural byproduct of the existence of undiscoverable intrigue.

Posted by: Yehudi

Checkuser is very unreliable when you have several people all editing from the same office, school, library or Internet cafe. I know that I have shared IPs with someone on WP. Were I checkusered at random, or on David Gerard's whim, I might thus get blocked for sockpuppetry.

Posted by: Disillusioned Lackey

A world run on David Gerard's whim. Oog. That's another scary place.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

Checkuser isn't an exact science, which is why I referred to the results of the checkuser tool as "data" and the conclusions of the checkuser itself as "information". Checkuser data has to be processed before any conclusion can be drawn from it, and that process is complicated and prone to error. There are no small number of landmines along the way.

One of the reasons we set up the checkuser-l mailing list back in the day was so we could help each other through sharing of information. Pretty much anyone who has spent any time with checkuser knows about the various large ISP proxies (Singapore's, for example), the IPs that belong to Starbucks and Panera and other internet cafe operators, the ranges that are used by various mobile services and dialup ISPs, and the like. The better checkusers have enough sense to try to determine what sort of business holds an IP under investigation (business, web farm, residential provider, mobile provider, etc.)

The newer features of checkuser (logging browser agents and other related data from the HTTP request header) help a lot, and in many ways that metadata is even more helpful at determining sockpuppetry than IP coherence ever was.

I once saw David Gerard identify two people as sockpuppets of one another because both editors used IPs in Illinois. He alleged that one was a work IP and the other was a home IP, and combined that with some intersection of editorial interest to derive incontrovertible proof. He was almost certainly wrong; the two locations were three to four hours drive from one another in any reasonable daytime traffic load, too far to reasonably commute, and the similar interests were readily explainable by the readily-supportable supposition that both individuals were recent alumni of (or otherwise affiliated with) the same university. (That doesn't mean they knew one another; this is a major midwestern land-grant university with an undergraduate enrollment in excess of ten thousand.) David nonetheless stuck to his guns and harassed both of these individuals off of Wikipedia. I have no idea if either ever returned. I think part of the problem here was that David Gerard has no concept of the size of Illinois.

Is this checkuser abuse? No. Is it abuse by a checkuser? Yes.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Nor, I wager, could he tell you what a land-grant university is, though every US state has one.

The image of David Gerard as any kind of aggie has given me today's smile.

Posted by: LessHorrid vanU

Hypothetically, of course, you may have nothing to hide - and you have absolute faith in the tenets of the rules for the use of CheckUser and the policies and practices that CheckUser is used in protecting. However, you may have some qualms in regard to the ability of some individual CheckUser(s) in understanding the results obtained from of the use of the tool and coming to a completely false conclusion regarding the relationship between some accounts, in which case it may be prudent to know what CU has been checking what accounts, and for what reason, so that any potential poor evaluations are addressed long before they are made public, to the un-necessary distress and embarrassment of all parties.

Switching to SlimVirgin now, I thought that she was previously keen on the work and results of CU - in that it has been used to identify various accounts that were stalking or otherwise harassing her. I find this recent change of opinion quite perplexing, and wonder what may changed her mind.

Posted by: dogbiscuit

The other point to highlight about this is that it is the same logic that Poetlister notes: she sees her online image as a very important facet of her existence, which she uses to explain her sensitivity.

Who are we? Our birth name, passport number, or simply a name we have chosen for ourselves?

Given that Harry Webb has faded out of existence to be replaced with British pop star, does it matter if Linda Mack once existed? To all intents and purposes, as far as the world is concerned, there is only SlimVirgin.

So much for anonymity.

Posted by: Yehudi

What is a name? My grandfather would insist that his real name is his Hebrew one, that is used when for example he is called to read the Haftara in synagogue. But few if any non-Jews have a clue what it is. His ancestors and their friends had names in Russia and Eastern Europe which were often changed by the British authorities, so for example Katzenellenbogen became Caxton.

Posted by: Taxwoman

It's a bit obscene, isn't it, comparing SV and PL. PL has always been open. She only didn't edit under her real name because RachelBrown told us that everyone uses funny pseudonyms. But she has freely displayed her photographs (note the plural, contra some nonsense on WP/ANI); her date of birth is on Meta and there is more info she has disclosed. (Again contra some nonsense on WP/ANI, she initially did not reveal her occupation, generic or otherwise, though she admitted to living in England.)

In other words, PL has always been a real person you could relate to and indeed identify if you met. SV has never done that. Where has she released a photo or her date of birth or which country she is in?

Posted by: dogbiscuit

Well, it depends whether you want to read the intent of the post, which was simply to observe that in many respects, worrying about real names is irrelevant, you are, in this context, your online reputation. I would prefer it as "compare and contrast".

I thought it was fairly clear, Poetlister is rightly protective of her reputation which, as far as the majority of the world is concerned is "Poetlister" not Mrs X. The oddity that SlimVirgin has been so fixated about her real life name, that she has damaged the reputation that she built over a number of years to the point that she might as well throw away the SlimVirgin brand and start a new one - the taint of the dark side of Wikipedia will forever go with that nickname. Who gives a toss about Linda Mack or Sarah McEwen, what have they ever done in the public eye? But SlimVirgin is a whole drama in three acts.