Wikipedia:Quick and dirty Checkuser policy

This proposed policy was predicated on the false premise that the community could give some members the right to access to private information about other individuals. It is not policy because it contravenes the privacy policy in the interpretation of the editor who added this note [1].

The community can grant administrators the permission to use the m:CheckUser interface solely for the purposes of tracing the source of persistent vandalism by showing consensus in favour with an WP:RfA-like vote. Any users granted the CheckUser right in this way may not use the checkuser privilege for anything other than tracing the source of persistent vandalism unless further policy on the matter allowing to use it for other purposes is created.

The CheckUser facility may also be used for investigating matters of interest to the Arbitration Committee at an arbitrator's request.

You can see how CheckUser works at meta:Help:CheckUser.

The original proposal can be found at /proposal.

Rationale

As those of you regular to RC patrol may have noticed we have been visited by some vandalbots lately. Blocking these has either caused temporary blocks of dynamic or proxy IPs (which should be unblocked as soon as possible to avoid collateral damage), or of open proxies, which should be blocked indefinitely and would serve as good seeds for the open proxy blocker bot.

Requests for m:Checkuser permission

Should be placed on a new page, such as Wikipedia:Requests for checkuser/USERNAME, and listed on WP:RFA.