Hi Pine --
Thanks for this -- it's a challenging topic but one that the Analytics team
takes very seriously.
I'm not familiar with the IP address review that's referenced in the link.
I don't know who the staffer might be. We don't currently calculate unique
visitors to anything in Analytics and IP address is not a particularly
accurate way to assess unique visitors regardless (due to proxies/NATs/etc).
We do store IPs as part of page requests in our raw logs which are deleted
every 30 days. This data is kept on a system where access is limited and
controlled by the operations team. We're in line with the privacy policy on
this.
To be clear, we are currently considering mechanisms to count unique
"requests" -- we rely on Comscore for this data and for several reasons,
primarily related to mobile usage, it's not sufficient to understand our
usage patterns. We are putting together some proposals to do this in as
limited way as possible and that's respectful to our users. We'll share
this with the community when we feel we understand the use cases and
trade-offs well enough to discuss in an informed manner.
-Toby
We do store the IP address associated with varnish requests as part of the
log. This data is
On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 8:50 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi again Analytics,
I was under the impression that no records are kept of which IPs access
which articles on Wikipedia when no edits are made, but it appears that
such records are in fact kept [1].
Is this proper? This practice appears to be permissible under the Privacy
Policy which states that "We use IP addresses for research and analytics;
to better personalize content, notices, and settings for you; to fight
spam, identity theft, malware, and other kinds of abuse; and to provide
better mobile and other applications."
It is possible that this information is relevant for determining the
number of unique visitors that Wikipedia gets and that this information is
always properly filtered before it gets to the Signpost. However, given
recent discussions which I thought said that Wikipedia was not instrumented
to track unique visitors, I am surprised to learn that this already seems
to be happening and that the situation has been this way for some time, so
I would appreciate clarification.
I want to emphasize that this question is about clarifying the practice of
tracking likely unique visitors by IP. This question is not intended to
start flame wars, get people into trouble, or limit the Signpost's access
to properly filtered information if there has been a determination that
WMF's retention of the raw data is appropriate. There might be appropriate
secondary questions about making sure that access to the raw IP access data
is carefully contained and secured.
Thank you very much,
Pine
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3ASerendipodous&di…
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