And when challenged, he fell back on that tired old excuse of, well, she had revealed it at one point on wiki, it was here, buried away in this obscure page, and common knowledge on Wikipediocracy of course, so how could he have possibly known it was against the rules to reveal it?
The guy revealed an editor's identity, for no good reason, in an external forum, without their permission, and in full knowledge that nowhere other than one out of the way Wikipedia talk page, had they made any kind of public declaration of who they were.
This guy, is the guy the ArbCom Committee now trust to go through the private Arbcom Wiki, deleting any personally identifying information deemed no longer relevant......
Note ridiculously vague language of "a significant number of years". Is NewYorkBrad just sitting around with his thumb up his ass here? Dude is a fucking lawyer, for Christ's sake.The Arbitration Committee has passed the following motion:
Information disclosed to the Arbitration Committee should be retained no longer than necessary. In order to further this goal, the committee will, beginning in April of each year, examine the information stored on the Arbitration Committee wiki. In general, information is considered no longer necessary if the user has not edited under any account for a significant number of years or if the reason for the private information to be held has passed. In these cases, the information should be removed from the relevant page, or the page deleted. It is noted that some information is retained for the purposes of stopping sockpuppetry and, where possible, this should be stored at the checkuser wiki and that technical limitations of wiki software would potentially allow information to be accessed again in the future.
For the Arbitration Committee, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:11, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
It's pretty obvious why he's been so enthusiastic in taking on this task. Eager to forge even closer links with his new buddies at Wikipediocracy, he's probably promised to turn over anything juicy he finds, to the Wikipedilcracy mod Tarantino, that panty sniffing creep who is in charge of all their efforts to identify anyone and everyone deemed an enemy of Wikipedia.I just want to note here that this effort has been led by Beeblebrox who is also doing the work of actually doing the required cleanup. Thanks to him for his leadership and work on this and I am glad this will become an annual task so that it will hopefully be a bit easier in future years. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:15, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
On, and this.........
A complete and total shit show.Short historical note: Arbcom wiki was created without much thought to security at the time; it's a very old private wiki, and different versions of the committee have used it differently. As new features were added to MediaWiki, there was no consideration of whether or not they were "safe" on private wikis where membership changed regularly and which had specific privacy concerns; for example, when the facility to receive email notices about pages on watchlists was made default, it didn't include the ability to turn it off once an account was blocked. We had to get one of the very few developers with the requisite permissions to deactivate accounts from server side, and it was never a priority until they realized there was a true security risk. Ultimately, we managed to get a special "account deactivation" tool that includes automatic deactivation of email notices as well as a few other features. The same principle was applied to the naming of accounts; at one point, we realized that it was a real security risk, and developed a different username pattern for that project. In fairness, it is difficult to justify investing a lot of time and effort to create specialized modifications for a private wiki when there are (and especially, were) so few people with the necessary qualifications and so much more important work to do.
I really support the idea of deleting unneeded stuff off Arbwiki, and transferring anything sock-related that involves private info to the appropriate wiki. (To clarify: the fact that an account has requested unblock, and any "vote" on that unblock request, don't in any way cross that line, so they don't have to go; things with IP addresses (and possibly email addresses) probably should be deleted/removed/transferred.) I can think of some other things that the 2009-2013 Arbcoms used Arbwiki for that should definitely be deleted (with at most a brief summary), but for all I know they've been deleted for years. Risker (talk) 03:32, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
