Reports and findings of the Audit Subcommittee
- For statistical reports on Checkuser and Oversight, see Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Audit Subcommittee/Statistics
The Audit Subcommittee procedures approved by the Arbitration Committee state that "The Committee shall announce the results of the investigation on-wiki in as much detail as is permitted by the relevant policies." A summary of closed cases is posted here, with links to the full report where one is provided. Only closed cases are listed.
| Tracking number[1] | Date received | Date closed | Summary of findings or link to full report |
|---|---|---|---|
| 09-001 | 23 Apr 2009 | 05 May 2009 | Privatemusings[2] request information about checks against himself. Replied privately. |
| 09-002 | 23 Apr 2009 | 24 Apr 2009 | Privatemusings[2] inquired whether candidates in the 2008 Arbcom election were routinely checked. Candidates in the 2008 election were not routinely checkusered.[3] |
| 09-010 | 10 June 2009 | 22 June 2009 | Allegation of misuse of checkuser; no misuse found. |
| 09-012 | 1 Aug 2009 | 11 Aug 2009 | Allegation of misuse of Oversight to remove vandalism that was outside the oversight policy. The committee finds that use of the oversight function was an error, but that using suppression to remove some types of vandalism that are difficult to remove with ordinary deletion is acceptable in limited cases. A policy discussion was initiated here. |
| 09-013 | 29 Aug 2009 | 6 Oct 2009 | An allegation of misuse of checkuser by Raul654 was made by an editor to Arbcom, who forwarded it to the Audit Subcommittee for investigation. The investigation was opened on 29 August 2009. AUSC members investigated, prepared a draft report, and sent it to the complainant and Raul654 for comment. A final report was forwarded to Arbcom and the investigation was closed on 6 October 2009. Arbcom's response is here. |
| 09-014 | 2 Oct 2009 | 05 Oct 2009 | Suppression of edits at User:Law and User talk:Law that "outed" him as a sockpuppet of The_undertow. The Audit Subcommittee finds that suppressing the edits was an error in judgement, but not serious enough to require followup action. See narrative report below. |
| 09-015 | 21 Oct 2009 | 2 Nov 2009 | User concerned that public checkuser comments revealed too much detail. The Audit Subcommittee agrees and advised caution in the future. |
Annotations and footnotes
Full reports
User:Law and User talk:Law
The audit subcommittee has investigated a complaint dealing with the suppression of four edits on User:Law and 2 edits on User talk:Law. (Issue 09-014)
On August 16, an IP vandal identified Law as The_undertow both on User:Law and User talk:Law; the vandalism included a great deal of extraneous vulgarity. The edits were immediately reverted. On August 20, Law deleted and selectively restored the pages to delete the vandal revisions. On August 21, an Oversighter suppressed the revisions with the stated reason "outing."
The audit subcommittee has determined that the edits do not qualify for suppression; as Law was not an "approved" alternate account, identification of Law's prior account is not "outing." The suppression has been reversed, although the revisions remain deleted, as it is any user's prerogative to remove vulgar vandalism from their user and user talk pages.
The oversighter has confirmed that Law contacted him/her privately and that he/she knew that Law and The_undertow were the same person, but states that he/she either did not know or forgot that The_undertow had been under a block, and "interpreted his most recent departure (and return under a new name) as a RTV thing." Since the edits were deleted and there was no urgency, consultation on the oversight list or with another oversighter privately would have been best practice. If a stranger contacts oversight asking for allegations of sockpuppetry to be suppressed, this should normally provoke questions. Here, the circumstances (including Law resigning his sysop status immediately after deleting the edits) should have raised questions. Instead, the oversighter did not take steps to confirm Law's status, and essentially gave him the benefit of the doubt. The audit subcommittee finds this to be an error in judgement, but not one so serious as to provoke further inquiry or action. We are unable to independently determine whether the oversighter knew more about Law than he/she has said.
The audit subcommittee has adopted a policy of not disclosing the names of oversighters or checkusers involved in complaints where there is no finding of wrongdoing, although the individual is free to identify themself and post their own explanation.
This report was approved 5-0 with John Vandenberg recusing.
For the Audit Subcommittee, Thatcher 16:02, 5 October 2009 (UTC)
"Randy in Boise" suppressions
Background
For many years, Oversight has been used to remove edits that include privacy violations and a limited number of other material. Removal of these edits was irreversible without intervention from a developer, and had other adverse effects on the database. Therefore the use of this tool was tightly limited and only those edits that were clearly problematic were oversighted. In February 2009, an improved tool, known as "suppression", was made available to oversighters. Suppression is fully reversible, and is now the standard tool for removing privacy violations and other material meeting the suppression criteria. Oversighters are now able to remove potentially problematic edits from public and administrator view at an earlier stage, and review the use of the tool after the fact. This feature is particularly valuable where there is an alleged breach of privacy on a heavily watched, rapidly edited page.
History of the event
On 12 November 2009, during a discussion on Administrator noticeboard/Incidents, an editor posted a comment that included a reference to a Wikipedia critique[1] from some years ago; this reference was incorrectly but reasonably interpreted by another editor as being an attempt to reveal personal details about the second editor. The second editor, aware that there is a significant time factor involved in suppressing edits to AN/I, alerted both the Oversight mailing list (Oversight-L) and contacted another administrator on IRC to try to locate an oversighter for suppression of the edit that was mistakenly thought to be an outing attempt. While the request was being discussed on Oversight-L and the link to the Wikipedia critique article was identified, the administrator on IRC had contacted a steward and had requested suppression. The steward acted on the request for suppression, as per standard procedure. The suppression was reviewed on Oversight-L and, several hours later, was reversed by a Wikipedia oversighter.
The Audit Subcommittee finds that all parties acted in accordance with policy during the course of this event, but that several misunderstandings and gaps in practice complicated the situation.
Recommendations
- The Arbitration Committee, which is ultimately responsible for suppression usage on English Wikipedia, should contact the Stewards group and request that if a steward carries out emergency oversight/suppression on this project, the steward notify the Oversight-L list so that the suppression can be reviewed to ensure it is within project norms. Stewards should also be invited to submit their email addresses so they can be given write-only access to Oversight-L to facilitate this communication. The approach to the stewards should include recognition that stewards may take action in emergency or serious situations before all of the relevant information is known, and that reversal of a steward's decision under such circumstances is not a reflection on the action or the steward, but is based on additional information that the steward may not have at the time of the suppression.
- The Oversight team is urged to review suppressions performed in unusually time-sensitive situations, regardless of who carries out the suppression, and to reverse suppressions subsequently determined to be outside of scope, as such suppressions are more likely to be made before full information is received.
- The Oversight team is strongly urged to develop and communicate the situations in which suppression may be used to redact personal information of a user when that user has voluntarily revealed personal information in the past. Factors to consider include whether or not the editor is a minor, how long the information has been present on Wikipedia, the location of the information requested to be suppressed, how extensive the suppression would need to be in order to redact all references to the personal information, community standards (including those articulated by prior Arbitration Committee decisions) and whether other processes (e.g., revision deletion, reversion of edits) will provide a satisfactory resolution. Suppressions should be able to be justified within the WMF privacy policy.
For the Audit Subcommittee, Risker (talk) 05:09, 17 December 2009 (UTC)