On 01.04.2011 14:28, Stephen Bain wrote:
On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 6:00 PM, Brett Hillebrand bretthillebrand@internode.on.net wrote:
"Tools that allow profiling of individual user's activity (beyond what can easily be achieved directly on the public wiki sites) must only be applied with the respective user's consent (opt-in)."
Well the policy is pretty vague (indeed, you have quoted the whole of it there).
yes, it is vagues. because a precise policy would be twenty pages long, and still wouldn't cover all corner cases. So the policy is supposed to give a general idea, any corner cases get decided on a case by case basis.
What counts as profiling and what does not? And what "can easily be achieved" using only the wiki?
The editing overlap can be reproduced quite straightforwardly using Special:Contributions and article history pages (or the API), perhaps with the aid of a pencil and paper and the browser's search function for the larger sets. There could be quite a bit of labour in that though. Does that count as "easy"?
No, that's not "easy". But the result is unlikely to give away much about the user's lifestyle beyond the information which pages they edit. And that information *is* easily available on-site already, we can expect people to expect this. As opposed to plotting the time of day they mostly edit, which isn't that hard to get from the site either, but gives much more (apparent) insight into a person's habits.
-- daniel