On 8/10/06, Daniel Kinzler daniel@brightbyte.de wrote:
Ideally, new users would be presented with a text explaining what data they expose when they contribute, and how this may be analyzed. This may even be made a click-through part of the account creation process.
I suspect in certain legal jurisdictions we may be actually required to do this. (anyone?)
The problem with this is that it puts up another barrier to registration as a user.
Also ideally, users would be able to state which types of analysis they want to allow. Perhaps a simple scheme of "no statistics", "simple statistics" and "detailed statistics" would be enough, with a default of "simple". "Simple" statistics would basically be total counts (number of edits, maybe per namespace, number of deletions, etc), "detailed" would be "anything goes". A per-project policy could then require admins to at least allow simple statistics, or something like that.
My concern with this is that abusive users will abuse privacy options to reduce oversight of what they're doing, and that adopting such a policy would eventually lead to restricting access to such things as Special:Contributions.
-Matt