Message: 10 Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2005 00:26:04 +0100 From: Chris Jenkinson chris@starglade.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] Privacy policy and editing anonymously notice. To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@wikipedia.org, Wikipedia wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org, Wikimedia Foundation foundation-l@wikimedia.org Message-ID: 4360108C.5070803@starglade.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Hi all,

As the Board have been rather slow with publicising the new privacy policy,

What new privacy policy? Is there a new one?

I have taken the step of adding a notice to the bottom of [[MediaWiki:Copyrightstext]] on the English-language Wikipedia (the text which is displayed when you click "Edit this page"), which mentions that if you are editing anonymously, your IP address will be publically and permanently associated with the edits, and if you're editing while logged in, your IP address will be stored for around 2 weeks.

I don't like this message. It is an extremely stern and harshly worded message that might scare away potential contributors. Isn't a link to the policy enough? Most websites don't write out their entire Terms of Service (TOS) directly on the page; there's a link to the ToS at the bottom instead. (Sidenote: if you've ever taken the time to read the ToS for some major websites, they're quite scary...)

Someone has also added a link to the privacy policy on the bottom of every page.

I like that - nice and simple link to the policy, similar to the aforementioned ToS links.

<snip> Chris

I just don't think that the notice there is appropriate. When I clicked edit today, I went "What the...?!" A link at the bottom is enough, in my opinion. What do all of you think?

Regards,

Flcelloguy

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.

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