Quite.

Topical complaint from a Wikipedian about anonymous checkusers being granted access to Wikipedians' private information, on the talk page of a Wikimedia Foundation trustee: Why Did You Support Granting Private Information of Editors to Anonymous Administrators?

Sounds a bit like Pending Changes (installed on the German, Polish and some other Wikipedias, but not on the English one). This requires all IP edits to be approved by a "trusted" editor. Not a perfect system, but better than what is in place now.

Correct, though note that checkusers are not staff members but unpaid volunteers. The Wikimedia Foundation doesn't even necessarily know who they are.

Well, the latest edit tweeted by @congressedits for example is this one, inserting the following into David Icke's biography: "He is also a disinformation agent funded by the [[Pleiadians]]." That's just someone wasting their and everyone else's time. That's not to say there haven't been edits on politically contentious topics from gov't IP addresses; there most certainly have, and that's why these Twitter accounts are a good idea. The downside is that long-term, they will drive this sort of editing underground. People who do want to make a politically contentious edit will go to the nearest Starbucks to avoid detection. It's an inherent weakness of Wikipedia, because on less well watched pages some of those edits always slip through. Wikipedia is full of articles edited by people with an undeclared conflict of interest. It's arguably one of the reasons for its popularity.

That's it; quite a few edits will be perfectly fine, others are vandalism by bored staff, and occasionally you will get something interesting like the Snowden edit and others described here.

A prominent reason is probably boredom in the lunch break.

Not to forget Norway ... http://boingboing.net/2014/07/...

@parliamentedits, @wikiAssemblee, @gccaedits and @RiksdagWikiEdit Twitter accounts have been the set up to do the same for the UK, France, Canada and Sweden.

One thing to remember here is that most of these edits are probably made by junior IT staff rather than elected representatives (recall the recent Hillsborough case in the UK).

From the latest Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan (page 5):

In 2014-2015 our plan is to increase revenue to $58.5 million from a 2013-2014 projection of $52.5 million, an increase of 11%. Our revenue targets are designed to fund investments in the WMF, primarily in product development and engineering. We believe that if we chose to, we could increase revenues more than is reflected in this plan, but we believe this target reflects and appropriate balance between funding growth while minimizing annoyance to the readers of the projects.

---o0o---

Money on tap. And lots of people who see the fundraising banners donate because they think Wikipedia is having an acute financial crisis and might have to pull the plug any minute now.

Page 6 has a breakdown of spending. Product / Engineering is by far the largest item – over half, if you include the requisite proportion of HR, Finance and Admin. Given how strongly the unpaid volunteer community, who actually creates most of the value in Wikipedia, has rejected major new features this money has paid for, this is an expensive disconnect.

Discussion here