User:Jamesofur/CUstatement

Jamesofur
Howdy!

For those who haven't met me either on wiki or IRC (or some of you irl) my name is James. If you look at my account ( here for my matrix or here for the SUL util) you will notice a couple things. One that is obvious is that while my En account has been created for a while I wasn't really active before last August. Before that I was around (with very infrequent wikignomish edits logged in and out) but I mostly read, and read. Because of a habit I have of following links to keep getting the story this often included pages about the "infrastructure" of the wiki and eventually led me to getting more active. The other thing you will notice is that while I have not been an admin on En for long (RfA Passed April 22nd) I have a fair amount of tools... on other wikis. My focus for quite a while has been cross-wiki abuse (vandalism and spam) as part of that I am a Checkuser and Sysop on the Simple English Wikipedia, a sysop on Meta Wiki as well as a Global sysop and Global rollbacker. I am also an OTRS agent focusing on Permissions and copyright violations.

I think I could be a great addition to the En checkuser team:


 * Availability: Whether I am working, studying (finally done with that actually) or just hanging out I am almost always on IRC and available via email to help (something I really enjoy). This has always been great because even when I'm not actively doing something on wiki people are able to get my attention when there is a xwiki vandal on the loose or questions that need to be answered. I am available for hours a day (and frequently at odd hours when other CUs do not seem to be available) and am easily contactable by multiple people for emergencies (and happy to help whenever humanly possible).
 * crosswiki experience, work and tools: In the course of my work I have frequently come across an obvious sock or vandal with no English checkuser available (there tend to be very few who come on IRC at least whenever you want one :) ). Even more frequently the stewards have wanted an En Checkuser to check for collateral damage before making a global block (since En has the most contributers it is often very important to do that for a major block) or the SPI clerk team was looking for help when no CU was on. On multiple occasions I have ended up being able to help only because the user decided to unify their account on Simple and provide me with information to check (and generally mailing list information to verify it). Having access to the Checkuser tools on En would allow me to help for time sensitive (and perhaps complex) checks and fast and simple requests that are not worth leaving to rot, especially when vandals are crossing project boundaries where I have either the tools or contacts to help deal with them. I will also be available to speed up processing of normal on wiki Checkuser requests.


 * Prior experience: I have already held the Checkuser ability since December (and been identified to the foundation because of it). Because of that I have already had extensive experience with the tools both technically (range blocks, proxies/nmap, XFF's etc) and the (arguably more important) first hand experience learning more about behavioral evidence.  I have also had experience with the vandals we already have to deal with through work both with they come to Simple (when they get blocked here they go there) and through the Checkuser-l mailing list (where I'm a list admin).

I can tend to be a bit tldr and so I don't want to drag on too much longer, but I am happy to answer any questions people have and will promise to respond quickly. You can also feel free to trout me and tell me to give you a brief version if needed.  James  ( T   C )  15:42, 7 May 2010 (UTC)