In addition to privacy issues, we want to give as little reason as possible for spammers to post links on Wikimedia sites and give them as little information as possible about how to design effective spam links. Providing data about the effectiveness of external links could benefit spammers.

There may be a way to make exceptions for providing aggregated data for a whitelist of GLAM links.

Pine

Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2014 20:57:17 +0000 From: Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com To: "A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics." analytics@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: Strainu strainu10@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Analytics] [Wikitech-l] Exit stats? Message-ID: CAGHUEtbjMyaT_c-FCxyOZsF9Bh0r8r7Mb3PwFmfO2T1NorhySg@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

FWIW, I once had some JavaScript added to the common JS script on Commons, collecting anonymized clicks to external links on image pages, in an attempt to give some stats to the GLAM community. That would fire off basic data like time, page, and target URL to a toolserver logging script. Volume was low enough, but I had to turn it off due to privacy paranoia soon after.

Cheers, Magnus