(I am starting a new thread to give proper answers and publicity to questions asked by Strainu.)
Hi Strainu, thanks for the questions; though I have to admit I am a bit troubled about them appearing so late into the preparations, I also find them very valid and well-aimed. I might not know all the answers, so I will be leaving some of the questions untouched--maybe somebody else could join in and help explain the situation here.
# Do you offer any guarantees on the uptime or stress-performance of the system?
No. Just like the Wikimedia Foundation does not guarantee the uptime of its wikis, we cannot guarantee that our server will survive the amount of traffic it will receive in the weeks to come. We are, however, going to do our best to make it happen: the server, I believe, is well-configured and we're going to start the CentralNotice campaign with a visibility of 10% to see how this would affect the load on the server. If it's OK, we'll be rising the visibility sequentially to the expected 50% or higher--this would mean that our banners will be visible in one of every two hits for Wikimedia wikis in the participating countries.
# Do you offer any way to import past data from Google Analytics?
We can only do as much as the software will allow. Fortunately, there is a Python script which can be used to import Google Analytics data into Piwik -- please see http://piwik.org/blog/2012/08/google2piwik-update/ and http://clearcode.cc/offer/open-source-projects/google2piwik/ for more information about it.
# Is there any guarantee that you're following data protection rules in the country where the server is installed?
The server is controlled by Wikimedia Nederland, though it is physically located in Germany (at least that's what a WHOIS query for 46.38.241.117 tells me). I do not have enough information to answer this question--if there are some German lawyers here, I would welcome any additional comments on this subject.
# Does that law even allow private persons to access the data (that's especially doubtful, as it is probably in the EU)?
Just as with the question immediately above, I cannot answer this. Though it might probably be helpful to mention that at least one EU country that I know of (that is Poland) does allow private persons to access such data--although under special circumstances, of course.
# What happens to the piwik installation after the contest ends?
I have to say that we haven't been thinking about this yet, for the obvious reason that the contest has not even started. I believe that we'll create some anonymous statistics for use for the next year edition, and then the installation (together with the data) will be removed. (At least this sound quite reasonable to me.)
And to answer your last question (about us using GA last year), I think that this is simply because of the progress we've made with Wiki Loves Monuments since last year. We are now more knowledgeable about the organisational things than last year, and there are more people to focus even on such relatively unimportant issues like the usage of Google Analytics. Additionaly, I have to admit that I am especially interested in that because of my experience with setting up a campaign for Wikimedia Polska earlier this year, when I have been told that the WMF does not allow linking to GA-based websites for fundraising purposes.
And just to end this long e-mail, I'd like to make one this clear: not setting up CentralNotice for Romania (and any other country) is out of the question. If there will be no links in CentralNotice, this would mean that the publicity for the contest would be much smaller, and this would, in exchange, equal fewer pictures being uploaded--and this is the last thing we would like to do.
Besides that, Wiki Loves Monuments is a federative contest, and we (by "we" I mean the international team) can only advise you what to do and what to avoid. In the end, the local organisers will be reponsible for the contents of the linked websites, and also for the privacy and security of their visitors' data.
Thanks