interiot wrote: Okay, do individuals' deletion totals need to be made opt-in then?
Not sure - I would have thought that is uncritical, but Paddy's comments on Commons-l imply the opposite.
If I have a question about whether specific feature is okay, who is the best person to ask?
I think it would be a very good idea to ask the Foundation to develop a privacy guideline for MediaWiki and tool developers.
Does a user's total number of edits count as "intelligence that is not relevant to Wikipedia activity"?
Since several wikis have policies requiring a minimum number of edits to the main namespace, etc, it *is* relevant. OTOH, I'm a bit undecided if it's really OK to expose this information without asking.
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.
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.
I'm not sure if this would be feasible and/or legally sound. I'm just brainstorming here.
-- Daniel
PS: sorry for cross-posting again. I guess this discussion should be moved to the foundation list or something.
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