User:MBisanz/ACE2008/Guide/Risker

Hello, below are some optional questions to help the voters at the 2008 Arbitration Committee elections get to know you, the candidate, better.

• 1. How long have you been an editor of Wikipedia?

• A. Since December 2005 as a registered user. I did some IP editing before that, but not consistently. I registered because an article I wanted to edit was semi-protected, and found myself more and more engaged in the process.

• 2. How many total edits do you have on Wikipedia? What is your % of edits to the article space?

• A. I have just over 10,000 edits, roughly 37% of which are in articles and an additional 10% in article talk.[1]

• 3. Are you an administrator? If so, how long have you been one?

• A.I am an administrator, and my RFA was in May 2008.

• 4. Do you hold any other userrights or positions at the English Wikipedia? (crat, medcom, WPPJ, etc)

• A. No.

• 5. Do you hold any userrights or other positions of trust at other WMF projects? Which ones?

• A. No.

• 6. Have you ever been named as a participant of a Request for Arbitration? If so, please link case(s).

• A. No, although I have presented evidence and commented on workshops and proposed decisions.

• 7. Have you ever been blocked or subject to restrictions such as WP:RESTRICT, WP:BLPLOG, WP:AER, or WP:SANCTION? If so, please link to the relevant issue.

• A. No.

• 8. Have you ever been blocked or formally sanctioned at another WMF project? If so, please describe.

• A. No.

• 9. What is your best work at Wikipedia? (an article, list, image or content template)

• A. "Best" is a matter of opinion. The work that, to date, has brought me the most personal satisfaction was bringing James Blunt to GA, which I did as a "gift" for a close off-wiki friend.

• 10. If elected, would you request the Checkuser and/or Oversight userrights?

• A. Yes to both. I believe arbitrators must be able to personally review CheckUser results that are being used as evidence in a matter before them, and that to have access to that information, they should be required to complete the same personal identification process, and be publicly identified as having access to the information. I expect that, as one of the few women who would have access to these permissions, I will be called upon to assist in privacy- or personal safety-related RFCUs and oversight requests.

• 11. Please list any disclosed or undisclosed alternate or prior accounts you have had.

• A. User:Risker checklist is an alternate account where I watchlist pages from Unwatched pages (admin access only). I don't watch any articles that have BLP material in them using this account, and check the watchlist a couple of times a week to pick up on unreverted vandalism. User:Risker on the road is an alternate account where I will temporarily copy over my regular watchlist when I know I will be logging in to a potentially insecure computer, in order to protect my administrative password and privileges; I do not edit with that account.

• 12. What methods of off-wiki communication do you use to discuss Wikipedia related matters? (IRC, Skype, WR, Mailing Lists, blogs, etc) Please link to any publicly available forums you use.

• A. I read and occasionally participate on the wiki-en-L mailing list, and receive the Foundation-L list as well. I use IRC. My email is active, and I will occasionally use Gmail chat to communicate with others (although that is often chat of a more personal, non-project nature). I do not use Skype, do not blog, and am not a member of Wikipedia Review.

• 13. Do you have OTRS access? If so, which queues?

• A. No.

• 14. How do you resolve the apparent inconsistency between RFAR/MONGO and RFAR/Jim62sch as to off-site activities by users?

• A.

• 15. What is your opinion on the new closed motions process?

• A.

• 16. Besides compromised accounts, under what circumstances would you support or initiate an emergency request for desysopping?

• A.

• 17. Currently, only Jimbo Wales and the Arbitration Committee are authorized to perform/request involuntarily desysop an administrator whose account has not been compromised. What is your view of community-based desysopping decisions?

• A.

• 18. If you owned Wikipedia as the WMF currently does, what would you do to fix the BLP problem?

• A.

• 19. In 2004, the Arbitration Committee referred issues to the Mediation Committee. However, as of recent, the Arbitration Committee has not referred issues to the Mediation Committee. Would you refer more content-based disputes to MedCom or continue the current practice?

• A. I don't believe that the Arbitration Committee should require editors to participate in a dispute resolution practice that has been intentionally designed to be voluntary. It is more likely to harm the mediation process than it is to satisfactorily resolve the content dispute.

• 20. In the past the Arbitration Committee has taken a checkered view of wheel wars, desysopping in some cases and not desysopping in others. What do you believe constitutes a wheel war which would result in a desysopping?

• A.

• 21. How involved must an administrator be to be unable to enforce policy on a user? Given that it is expected that all admins understand policy when they pass RFA, under what circumstances would you not desysop an administrator who was clearly involved with a user they blocked or an article they deleted/protected?

• A.

• 22. Besides the technical capabilities administrators have, the Arbitration Committee has granted administrators the rights to enforce certain general sanctions with regards to specific editors and articles. What is your view on these new non-technical privileges being considered part of the "administrative" function for purposes such as RfC, Recall, and RfAR?

• A. I believe that an administrator claiming to be editing or otherwise intervening in a situation under the purview of general (or specific) sanctions issued by the Arbitration Committee is to be considered acting in an administrative capacity. This includes establishing article-specific editing "guidelines", and issuing warnings or otherwise interacting to discuss editorial behaviour with respect to the article/topic area involved. Administrators who are strictly editing an article that is under general or specific sanctions should stick to editing and discussing content, and not use any administrative tools in relation to that article. There are about a thousand administrators active every day; RFPP and 3RR noticeboard are just as useful for administrators as for any other editor.

• 23. Current checkuser policy at the English Wikipedia prohibits checkusers from fulfilling "fishing" requests. However, global privacy policy does not prohibit such requests from being fulfilled, so long as personal information is not disclosed. Would you support the alteration of the en.wp policy to permit fishing requests?

• A. I think every checkuser request should be done for a specific reason.

• 24. In 2006 the Arbitration Committee asked the community to address the issue of protecting children's privacy on Wikipedia. To this day there is still no policy on how to handle children's privacy on Wikipedia. What steps would you take to ensure children's privacy is protected under policy?

• A. To be honest, I am not certain that this is truly a project issue; I suspect there may be a Foundation issue here, given some of the relevant US legislation and that from other countries where Foundation servers are hosted.

• 25. How do you resolve the apparent inconsistency between RFAR/LevelCheck and RFAR/Durova as to what may be considered justification for blocks of educated new users?

• A. The key difference in these two cases was that the former involved a disruptive user, while the latter involved an exemplary one. Blocking is intended to prevent disruption of the encyclopedia. Blocking an excellent user because he might be someone else is more likely to disrupt the encyclopedia.

• 26. Originally RfARs were named in the style of Party X v. Party Y in line with the idea of two groups in opposition to each other (eg. User:Guanaco versus User:Lir). Later it was changed to naming an individual user (eg. Husnock). Now cases get random names like Highways 2. What naming convention do you believe is the appropriate one for ArbCom to use in designating case names? under what circumstances should a case name be changed after opening, such as in RFAR/Zeraeph?

• A. i think it is generally better to name cases after their key point than any particular party in the case. I have no problem with the idea of renaming cases to a more benign or neutral one.

• 27. A case is presented between two administrators who have repeatedly undone each other's administrative actions with regard to the deletion of an article. The basis for the deleting administrator's action was an OTRS ticket showing the article to be a copyright violation. In performing the deletion, the administrator clearly referenced the OTRS ticket number. Assuming the undeleting administrator did not have OTRS access, do you penalize him more or less for wheel warring? Do you penalize the deleting administrator for wheel warring?

• A. Wheel-warring to undelete a deleted article (regardless of the reason) is almost always a poor decision; we have DRV to address this, and if it was a bad deletion consensus would quickly support the undeletion. Copyright violations can usually be confirmed in addition to the OTRS ticket; administrators must be able to justify their decisions regardless. Depending on the individual circumstances, this would likely be a "trouts all around" situation.

• 28. To what extent do you believe policy on Wikipedia is or should be binding?

• A. In an ideal world, our policies would be both prescriptive and descriptive, and quite strongly binding. This is not an ideal world. Policies are regularly edited on the spur of the moment to reflect the day's threads on WP:ANI, with no attempt at broad community consensus. They're also poorly written in many cases, and contradictory in others. Given that, I am hard pressed to say that they are or should be binding or prescriptive. (copied from Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2008/Candidate statements/Risker/Questions for the candidate)

• 29. Do you believe that former arbitrators should be on the Arb Comm mailing list? Why or why not?

• A: The one advantage of keeping former Arbitrators involved is to provide some history; however, it is my understanding that there is a very extensive archive available for the reference of current arbitrators, and it's my personal experience that human memory often varies significantly from what is documented to have occurred. I have observed some former arbitrators participating in on-wiki dispute resolution which I perceive may be related to something discussed on the ArbCom mailing list, which indicates that some of them are actively assisting the Committee in its activities. Nonetheless, my preference would be for the mailing list to be restricted to the current committee. (copied from Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2008/Candidate statements/Risker/Questions for the candidate)