Hi Dario, Reid,
This seems sensible enough and proposal #3 is clearly the better approach. An explicit opt-in opt-out mechanism would not be worth the effort to build and would become yet another ignored preferences setting after a few weeks...
A couple of thoughts:
* I understand the reasoning for not using do-not-track headers (#4); however, it feels a bit odd to say "they probably don't mean us" and skip them... I can almost guarantee you'll have at least one person making a vocal fuss about not being able to opt-out without an account. If we were to honour these headers, would it make a significant change to the amount of data available? Would it likely skew it any more than leaving off logged-in users?
* Option 3 does releases one further piece of information over and above those listed - an approximate ratio of logged in versus non-logged-in pageviews for a page. I cannot see any particular problem with doing this (and I can think of a couple of fun things to use it for) but it's probably worth being aware.
Andrew.
On 13 January 2015 at 07:26, Dario Taraborelli dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org wrote:
I’m sharing a proposal that Reid Priedhorsky and his collaborators at Los Alamos National Laboratory recently submitted to the Wikimedia Analytics Team aimed at producing privacy-preserving geo-aggregates of Wikipedia pageview data dumps and making them available to the public and the research community. [1]
Reid and his team spearheaded the use of the public Wikipedia pageview dumps to monitor and forecast the spread of influenza and other diseases, using language as a proxy for location. This proposal describes an aggregation strategy adding a geographical dimension to the existing dumps.
Feedback on the proposal is welcome on the lists or the project talk page on Meta [3]
Dario
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Geo-aggregation_of_Wikipedia_pagevi... [2] http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003892 [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Geo-aggregation_of_Wikipedia_p... _______________________________________________ Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics