[Wikimedia-l] [announcement] Ombudsman commission wider scope - Wikimedia-l

hi,

I'm writing to you to bring the news that, after a while of work and discussion, the Board has finally addressed the need to amend the scope of our Ombudsman Commission, following the community consensus from a while back [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Scope_of_Ombudsman_Commission .

The resolution was approved in November [2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Amending_the_Scope_of_the_Ombudsman_Commission and has been just published.

As a former ombudsman, as well as an endorser of the proposal, I can say that while this may not be a huge thing, it still is important and will, hopefully, make our work easier :)

best,

dj

The Ombudsman Commission is currently the body which investigates complaints about violations of the privacy and access to nonpublic information policies established by Wikimedia Foundation and which apply to all Wikimedia wiki projects. The Ombudsman Commission was appointed on 23 July 2006 by the Wikimedia Foundation Board with the generally narrow scope of investigating potential privacy violations performed by users having access to the CheckUser interface (namely CheckUsers and Stewards).

Over time, the Ombudsman Commission has received a growing number of requests to investigate cases which are not clearly complaints about individual CheckUser actions but may be potential or real violations of the privacy policy. Following the 2006 Board Resolution's definition of the scope, the Ombudsman Commission has consistently rejected these requests, and the applicants remain unsatisfied as there is no other body in the Wikimedia movement tasked to resolve these problems. Therefore, the members of Ombudsman Commission, with help of the WMF legal team, asked the WMF Board to redefine the scope of the Ombudsman Commission. The Board of Trustees of the Foundation has accepted the community's consensus and has authorized an expansion of the Ombudsman Commission's scope to include two more tasks: To review, upon request, local project CheckUser and Oversight policies to ensure that they do not violate the respective global policies.

To investigate, upon request, potential violations of the appropriate global policies by local CheckUsers and Oversighters.

Investigation of potential violations of local policies which are not violations of the global polices remain the responsibility of the local project and not within the scope of the Ombudsman Commission at this time.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Scope_of_Ombudsman_Comm... [2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Amending_the_Scope_of_the_Om...