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.