Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Audit Subcommittee/2011 appointments/AGK

AGK

AGK (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA)

Nomination statement (250 words max.)

I am pleased to volunteer to serve on the Audit Subcommittee this term. The role of a subcommittee member is to scrutinise the use by functionaries of the checkuser and oversight tools. That role requires an auditor to 1. work independently and 2. devote sufficient time to their work. On both counts, I think I am a suitable candidate.

1. Having never used CU or OS, and having never worked especially closely with the non-arbitrator editors with CU/OS access, I am largely independent of that group. Such independence is essential if an auditor is to work impartially.
2. As well as being an active content contributor, I have been an arbitration clerk (for three years), an administrator, mostly active at Arbitration Enforcement (for four years this May), and, as Chairman of the Mediation Committee (since April 2010), the sole active processor of requests for mediation. This record in my view demonstrates my committment to being active on all duties I undertake or am drafted to.

If appointed, my approach would be to: be available enough to investigate all complaints referred to the AUSC; ensure that all complaints are responded to promptly and exhaustively, with clear findings and recommendations; routinely examine the CU and OS logs for irregularities; and ensure that statistics on CU and OS use are regularly made available to the community. I have made my ArbCom questionnaire available at User:AGK/AUSC and am happy to answer any other questions.

Standard questions for all candidates

A: Most of these answers were covered by the questionnaire that ArbCom asked all potential candidates to complete, so forgive me for posting derivatives of my earlier answers. If expansion on any point is desired, I am of course happy to oblige. AGK [•] 09:26, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: I've extended my answers to Q1 and Q2, as upon re-reading I didn't feel that I had answered in enough depth. AGK [•] 21:05, 17 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Please describe any relevant on-Wiki experience you have for this role.

A: For about three months, I maintained statistics on the requests for mediation process—at User:AGK/rfm. I did this to understand how many requests we accept and turn away in the month I studied, and why we did so. As a result of the statistics, I rewrote the guides and the MedCom policy and made some modifications to the requests process. This kind of tracking of the specifics of processes in order to help with the formation of general strategy is, I think, the kind of work that is suited to somebody who is looking to work on the audit subcommittee.

As a Committee clerk, I have a working relationship with most of the current arbitrators; working alongside the three arbitrators who sit on the subcommittee would be natural to me. As a mediator, my experience is in handling disputes and problems in a balanced and detached way; in my view, this is precisely what an auditor should do. Formal mediation (that is, mediation provided by the Mediation Committee) handles the most complicated content disputes, and so, very often, the most frustrated parties. Just as the mediator is the uninvolved party in a heated disagreement, so too is the auditor the source of neutral scrutiny in disputes or complaints relating to checkuser/oversight users and members of the community; my experience as a mediator has accorded me an outlook that I hope would be of benefit to me should I be appointed as an auditor. As an administrator frequently active in arbitration enforcement, I have experience in establishing the basic facts and best remedial action to take in complicated or contested situations. Finally, as an editor who has been an active contributor to Wikipedia for over five years, I've been around for much of the evolution in community practice and policy that has led to Wikipedia working the way it does today; and the complicated and delicate matter of use of the CU and OS tools makes experience in many diverse issues, in my view, very valuable. AGK [•] 21:05, 17 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Please outline, without breaching your personal privacy, what off-Wiki experience or technical expertise you have for this role.

A: Though not trained as a programmer, I'm probably more computer-literate than most, and I am familiar enough with layer protocols and network addressing and most of the other technical concepts that appertain to the CU tool. I'm probably something of a secret geek (though which Wikipedian isn't?), which is probably evidenced by one of my favourite jokes being this:

An IPv4 address goes into the pub: "A strong CIDR please, barman, I'm exhausted".

I copied this answer from my ArbCom questionnaire; by the time I was writing this, I had been writing up my answers for over an hour, so please forgive my joke :). As I think have many Wikipedians, I've installed MediaWiki quite a few times—including the CheckUser extension. I know the output returned by the tool, the myriad different factors at play when pulling server data on user accounts, and the value and limitations on both CU and OS. AGK [•] 21:05, 17 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Do you hold advanced permissions (checkuser, oversight, bureaucrat, steward) on this or other WMF projects? If so, please list them. Also, do you have OTRS permissions? If so, to which queues?

A: I'm not very active on other WMF projects and I don't assist with OTRS. AGK [•] 09:26, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Questions for this candidate

Question from Chzz

In your nomination, you state that your inexperience in CU/OS is a plus-factor. Other candidates have extensive experience. Do you therefore think that their prior involvement is a negative factor in evaluating them as candidates?  Chzz  ►  03:41, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A: Not at all. I think that the perspective is valuable, just as technical experience is also valuable. What I meant was that I have not been involved much in the day-to-day use of CU and OS (aside from when I clerked the old RFCU process a few years ago, when there was a mostly-different group of active checkusers), so what I was saying was that my detachment from CU and OS use and from its users was a good thing. That, I think, also applies to some of the other candidates in this election; and indeed, only one has ever actually used CU/OS. All of the candidacies in this appointments process are strong, and I would like to make it quite clear that I was portraying my strengths—not trying to portray the others as somehow incapable of auditing. AGK [•] 09:20, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Chzz

(As you said you have no experience of CU) - Please explain what a 'useragent string' is.  Chzz  ►  03:41, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A: In the context of CU, the user-agent string is a sequence of information about the user browser, system language and operating system version, and other system information that is stored as part of checkuser data. It can be used in an evaluation of the probability that two accounts are related, but, as with other CU data, has finite value because of spoofing. It can be especially useful to a checkuser who is using the tool in response to misbehaving web-crawalers and in relation to users (who make up the majority of people who edit Wikipedia) without the technical know-how to hide or change their user-agent. As private information accessible by the CU tool, it would be material to an AUSC investigation of use of checkuser. AGK [•] 09:10, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

Comments may also be submitted in confidence to the Arbitration Committee privately by emailing arbcom-en-blists.wikimedia.org

• Wow, nobody has commented here in all this time? Not sure what that means but AGK is exactly the type of consistently level headed, good faith assuming user I want checking my work and telling me if I screwed up. Beeblebrox (talk) 01:23, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]