Heh. I sense that a proposal that doesn't have strong backing from any
of the Big Ds is not going to progress very far. I'm holding out hope
that Dan will weigh in. ;-) In seriousness, here's why I think it's
worth doing:
Making use of a tool that's designed to inform decisions across the
movement with data is awesome, and we want to see positive feedback
loops where more uses of the tool encourage .. more uses of the tool.
When folks see WLM using WikiMetrics, they'll want to use it for their
event, or their next online campaign. It could help us create a
greater sense of seriousness about data. It's not so much about
accountability (checkuser-style) but visibility (recentchanges-style)
which can increase adoption.
With regard to legal issues, I'm not convinced that exposing a simple
cohort name like "Berlin Editathon" triggers the kinds of issues we've
discussed with Luis, but we should certainly get signoff if we do
this. The privacy issues potentially come into play when we disclose
cohort _membership_, but cohort names should be pretty low-risk.
What's the kind of exposure you're worried about?
With regard to abuse, wouldn't a simple "block this user and flag
these log entries as hidden" feature take care of that? And it seems
to me we'd like to have the blocking capability anyway to deal with
abuse.
Anyway, I don't mean to make a huge deal of it - I think it'd be a
nice touch, and help encourage use of tool by creating greater
visibility for the community.
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation