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…