On 10/3/07, SJ Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > Leon has been away for some time. Remember that almost everybody is a
> > volunteer and volunteers generally take longer than paid people.
>
> This last comment is a nonsequitur. 'Asking about this and not getting a
> response' is a systemic communication problem, which can be fixed
> regardless of who is directly working on a given project.
>
> It is also untrue. Volunteering and speed of response are also not
> directly related; some of the most reliably responsive people, outpacing
> official staff, are volunteers - in WP as elsewhere.
>
> The commitment and reliability of volunteers varies with context, as
> might be expected; the most committed people in the world are zealots
> who, more often than not, are volunteers for their cause of choice.
> And organizations dealing with daily life and death situations have
> long relied on the courage, stamina, and dedication of volunteers.
I agree with SJ's comments. This idea that we can't expect
responsible and professional behavior from volunteers is highly
misguided, and I think it's harmful to our community.
That said, sending private emails to someone who is 'out' is not going
to get you much anywhere. We have a bug tracker. There is a ticked
for wikinews opened Sunday. I don't think a few days response on
something like a site traffic tracker is a problem.
Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh(a)gmail.com>:
> I'm not saying that volunteers can't do things quickly. I'm saying
> that you can not expect volunteers to work quickly.
I don't agree.
What you can't expect is volunteers to put in more effort than they
are willing. But that doesn't mean that we couldn't avoid slow results
by better managing our volunteer resources.
Lots of other volunteer groups manage to perform very reliable. But as
far as I can tell none that do make the mistake of presuming that you
can assign everyone the title of CEO and and that the volunteer crew
will self-direct themselves in a way which achieve important goals and
deadlines.
>[wikicharts]
>>Thanks for that, I'll take a look.
>Wow. You didn't know about that?
>We really need to solve these communications problems because it's
>utterly miserable that we've got people complaining that we need X
>when they aren't aware of the kinda-X that we already have. This seems
>to happen very frequently :(
Wikicharts doesnt even have an option for en.wikibooks. We've asked about this and gotten no reply from leon or anybody else involved with this. That's part of my initial problem, that Wikibooks wants X and doesnt have kinda-X either.
If people say that there is code in the SVN for page counting off the squid logs, that's a good solution from my end. The sooner the better, but if there is a solution in the pipeline then I wont hassle anybody about it anymore.
--Andrew whitworth
_________________________________________________________________
Climb to the top of the charts! Play Star Shuffle: the word scramble challenge with star power.
http://club.live.com/star_shuffle.aspx?icid=starshuffle_wlmailtextlink_oct
It is not just Wikibooks craving statistics. Wikinews would incredibly
benefit from knowing who likes what in terms of current events. It would
give us an idea as to what we need to expand on. This is, IMO, about
expanding the capabilities of a project. To bring more of what our
"readers" want. I agree there are privacy issues, but on a Wiki-wide
scale, all projects, I see no reason why we cannot take a survey/vote on
those active users who wish to participate or not. New users can get the
option as well. This is not an impossible thing to achieve. If all that
stands in the way is a policy then I say take the time to at least
consider the possibilities before striking the idea down with a bolt of
lightning. This, or something similar to Google Analytics, would be of a
huge benefit to every Wiki.
Jason Safoutin
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> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: Google Analytics test (Andrew Whitworth)
> 2. Re: university blocking wikipedia (C F)
> 3. Re: university blocking wikipedia (Thomas Dalton)
> 4. Re: university blocking wikipedia (fredbaud(a)waterwiki.info)
> 5. Re: university blocking wikipedia (Florence Devouard)
> 6. Re: university blocking wikipedia (Thomas Dalton)
> 7. Re: university blocking wikipedia (Casey Brown)
> 8. Re: university blocking wikipedia (Terin Stock)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2007 18:11:02 -0400
> From: Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111(a)hotmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Google Analytics test
> To: <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID: <BAY127-W1984DAD8EFC517A41DC76FA6AE0(a)phx.gbl>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
>
>
>> Sending complete logging information on our visitors to a third party
>> would still be an absolute violation of our privacy policy, so probably
>> a no-no. :)
>> The opt-in-only experiments are at least interesting, though, and should
>> give people a taste for what kind of aggregate info we can make use of.
>>
>
> Exactly, this is only an experiment and we will gather useful information from it whether we try and push things to a new level or not. Many book authors have been crying for some time now for a way to get some readership statistics about their books. The idea of enabling page hit counters has been brought up and shot down on a regular basis. We've applied for an account to the page counter on the toolserver but with no reply.
>
>
>> I think it'd be a lot nicer to do the tracking for all pages and all
>> books, from our in-house logging system. All hits to the HTTP proxies
>> are logged, and this log stream is available internally in its entirety
>>
>
> The issue of enabling page counters has been brought up before on bugzilla. See http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5667 for one example. It's not that we aren't looking for an in-house solution, but it seems like most options have been exhausted. I would be thrilled to learn that there was an in-house logging mechanism available to us to use. We know that one doesnt currently exist in a usable form, and that the techs have more important things to do then throw one together for us.
>
> --Andrew Whitworth
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Climb to the top of the charts!? Play Star Shuffle:? the word scramble challenge with star power.
> http://club.live.com/star_shuffle.aspx?icid=starshuffle_wlmailtextlink_oct
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2007 18:13:27 -0400
> From: "C F" <shmaltz(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] university blocking wikipedia
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <81000b5a0710021513o53f0c65did4100dfc1f529ec3(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On 10/2/07, Terin Stock <terin.stock(a)wikinewsie.org> wrote:
>
>> I know the Palm Beach County Public School district in Palm Beach,
>> Florida activity blocks all access to Wikipedia, under the "Educational
>> Sites" category. I've talked with some teachers, they suggest using
>> answers.com as a solution. Most of the teachers also raised concerns
>> about blocking of other useful websites, both from the teacher's and
>> student's standpoint.
>>
>
> Well thats for a Public School district, not a university. Public
> Schools have been way more stricter with content filtering than
> universities.
>
> However, blocking wp from schools is something I can understand, and I
> am assuming that it doesn't have to do with content but with the fact
> that users using the school districts computers can edit wp, and thats
> what they are trying to avoid.
>
>
>
>> That said, it seems that the only Wikimedia site blocked is Wikipedia.
>> And isn't answers.com just a sql dump of Wikipedia? Do they have editors
>> that check the articles on their site?
>>
>> C F wrote:
>>
>>> On 10/2/07, Samuel Klein <sj(a)laptop.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Unis have *been blocked* by wikipedia when they hosted active vandals.
>>>> That's different.
>>>>
>>> I'm assuming what the OP said was that the Us blocked wp, and not that
>>> the Us were blocked by WP.
>>>
>>> In any event this is just a rumor as long as the OP only heard about
>>> it, it hasn't really happened.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> SJ
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, 2 Oct 2007, dan harp wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> just heard an odd thing from a peer @ the high school
>>>>> I work at.
>>>>>
>>>>> "Many major universities have blocked wikipedia"
>>>>>
>>>>> thought I would throw it out to the community and get
>>>>> a bit of direction to research - I find the
>>>>> possibility odd.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> ____________________________________________________________________________________
>>>>> Need a vacation? Get great deals
>>>>> to amazing places on Yahoo! Travel.
>>>>> http://travel.yahoo.com/
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> foundation-l mailing list
>>>>> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>>>>> Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> foundation-l mailing list
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>>>>
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>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2007 23:20:33 +0100
> From: "Thomas Dalton" <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] university blocking wikipedia
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <a4359dff0710021520w3602a58fi2444ed10445da8bc(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On 02/10/2007, Terin Stock <terin.stock(a)wikinewsie.org> wrote:
>
>> I know the Palm Beach County Public School district in Palm Beach,
>> Florida activity blocks all access to Wikipedia, under the "Educational
>> Sites" category. I've talked with some teachers, they suggest using
>> answers.com as a solution. Most of the teachers also raised concerns
>> about blocking of other useful websites, both from the teacher's and
>> student's standpoint.
>>
>
> They have a whole category specifically for blocking sites they
> consider educational? Does someone need to explain the point of
> "school" to them?
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2007 22:21:45 +0000
> From: fredbaud(a)waterwiki.info
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] university blocking wikipedia
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID: <W636512220220601191363705@webmail8>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Is it blocked, or just not linked?
>
> Fred
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Terin Stock [mailto:terin.stock@wikinewsie.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 2, 2007 04:07 PM
> To: 'Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List'
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] university blocking wikipedia
>
> I know the Palm Beach County Public School district in Palm Beach,
> Florida activity blocks all access to Wikipedia, under the "Educational
> Sites" category. I've talked with some teachers, they suggest using
> answers.com as a solution. Most of the teachers also raised concerns
> about blocking of other useful websites, both from the teacher's and
> student's standpoint.
>
> That said, it seems that the only Wikimedia site blocked is Wikipedia.
> And isn't answers.com just a sql dump of Wikipedia? Do they have editors
> that check the articles on their site?
>
> C F wrote:
>
>> On 10/2/07, Samuel Klein <sj(a)laptop.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Unis have *been blocked* by wikipedia when they hosted active vandals.
>>> That's different.
>>>
>> I'm assuming what the OP said was that the Us blocked wp, and not that
>> the Us were blocked by WP.
>>
>> In any event this is just a rumor as long as the OP only heard about
>> it, it hasn't really happened.
>>
>>
>>
>>> SJ
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, 2 Oct 2007, dan harp wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> just heard an odd thing from a peer @ the high school
>>>> I work at.
>>>>
>>>> "Many major universities have blocked wikipedia"
>>>>
>>>> thought I would throw it out to the community and get
>>>> a bit of direction to research - I find the
>>>> possibility odd.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ____________________________________________________________________________________
>>>> Need a vacation? Get great deals
>>>> to amazing places on Yahoo! Travel.
>>>> http://travel.yahoo.com/
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> foundation-l mailing list
>>>> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>>>> Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>>>
>>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> foundation-l mailing list
>>> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
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>>>
>>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2007 00:11:29 +0200
> From: Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] university blocking wikipedia
> To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Message-ID: <fdufmd$hos$1(a)sea.gmane.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> dan harp wrote:
>
>> just heard an odd thing from a peer @ the high school
>> I work at.
>>
>> "Many major universities have blocked wikipedia"
>>
>> thought I would throw it out to the community and get
>> a bit of direction to research - I find the
>> possibility odd.
>>
>>
>>
>> ____________________________________________________________________________________
>> Need a vacation? Get great deals
>> to amazing places on Yahoo! Travel.
>> http://travel.yahoo.com/
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> foundation-l mailing list
>> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
>>
>
>
> Ask them to cite their sources :-)
> (for example, ask the person to provide names of universities
> supposingly doing that)
> Then, if the person reveals unable to provide any names, adopt a very
> serious and dignified face, nod gravely, and says "urban legends are
> terrible. I wish so much people would start using figures and citing
> sources when they make a claim. We should ban sentences starting by
> "many says that", or "some people consider that" or "Most people know
> that"".
>
> Ant
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2007 23:25:14 +0100
> From: "Thomas Dalton" <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] university blocking wikipedia
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <a4359dff0710021525p68d63dc7s18a3d8a916ab7efc(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
>
>> Ask them to cite their sources :-)
>> (for example, ask the person to provide names of universities
>> supposingly doing that)
>> Then, if the person reveals unable to provide any names, adopt a very
>> serious and dignified face, nod gravely, and says "urban legends are
>> terrible. I wish so much people would start using figures and citing
>> sources when they make a claim. We should ban sentences starting by
>> "many says that", or "some people consider that" or "Most people know
>> that"".
>>
>
> You want to pass [[WP:WEASEL]] into law? Sounds like a plan. Everyone
> pick a country, and we'll start work.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 7
> Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2007 18:25:25 -0400
> From: "Casey Brown" <cbrown1023.ml(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] university blocking wikipedia
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <4053450b0710021525k2f908c63lf530d33eca9d9b89(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> ....like we do on Wikipedia! :-)
>
> On 10/2/07, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> dan harp wrote:
>>
>>> just heard an odd thing from a peer @ the high school
>>> I work at.
>>>
>>> "Many major universities have blocked wikipedia"
>>>
>>> thought I would throw it out to the community and get
>>> a bit of direction to research - I find the
>>> possibility odd.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> ____________________________________________________________________________________
>>
>>> Need a vacation? Get great deals
>>> to amazing places on Yahoo! Travel.
>>> http://travel.yahoo.com/
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> foundation-l mailing list
>>> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>>> Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>>
>>>
>> Ask them to cite their sources :-)
>> (for example, ask the person to provide names of universities
>> supposingly doing that)
>> Then, if the person reveals unable to provide any names, adopt a very
>> serious and dignified face, nod gravely, and says "urban legends are
>> terrible. I wish so much people would start using figures and citing
>> sources when they make a claim. We should ban sentences starting by
>> "many says that", or "some people consider that" or "Most people know
>> that"".
>>
>> Ant
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> foundation-l mailing list
>> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
Remember that the voters of Palm Beach County, Florida couldn't read a
butterfly ballot. Perhaps their educational system was responsible for
that?
-Durova
On 02/10/2007, Terin Stock <terin.stock(a)wikinewsie.org> wrote:
> I know the Palm Beach County Public School district in Palm Beach,
> Florida activity blocks all access to Wikipedia, under the "Educational
> Sites" category. I've talked with some teachers, they suggest using
> answers.com as a solution. Most of the teachers also raised concerns
> about blocking of other useful websites, both from the teacher's and
> student's standpoint.
They have a whole category specifically for blocking sites they
consider educational? Does someone need to explain the point of
"school" to them?
>We already have some basic tools that count top viewed pages. There
>are active improvements happening for that kind of reporting: I just
>checked in some more pagecounter aggregation code into SVN an hour or
>so ago.
I guess maybe they arent well advertised. Several wikibookians have been out looking for existing solutions, none with positive results. We found the one page counter that was being tested for wikipedia, but when we asked for the counter to be extended to wikibooks, we got no reply.
>What do you want, exactly? I know google analytics offers a lot but
>I'm guessing that your primary interests can be satisfied with far
>less.
>I'm assuming you want more than just page request counting?
Google Analytics is overkill. All we want are page hit counts. The bugzilla request i showed in my previous post was a request for that very thing that was ended as WONTFIX. Like most other people, when I see that tag I say to myself "Okay, no sense barking up that tree anymore". In the case of wikibooks, we could probably even be happy with per-book counts (if that metric is somehow easier to calculate). All we want is some kind of method to quantify readership on a per-book basis. In lieu of an actual "count", a simple relational metric such as "more" or "less" would suffice. We aren't looking for anything fancy.
--Andrew Whitworth
_________________________________________________________________
Windows Live Hotmail and Microsoft Office Outlook – together at last. Get it now.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA102225181033.aspx?pid=CL1006269…
Folks,
Has any type of survey of individual Community Members ever been taken on
any online Foundation project?
If there has, what were the mechanics involved in taking it? If not, would
conducting such a survey be possible?
I am somewhat computer-challenged, so please be gentle :-).
Marc Riddell
On 10/2/07, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
> The issue of enabling page counters has been brought up before on
> bugzilla. See http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5667 for one
> example. It's not that we aren't looking for an in-house solution, but it
> seems like most options have been exhausted. I would be thrilled to learn
> that there was an in-house logging mechanism available to us to use. We
> know that one doesnt currently exist in a usable form, and that the techs
> have more important things to do then throw one together for us.
What do you want, exactly? I know google analytics offers a lot but
I'm guessing that your primary interests can be satisfied with far
less.
We already have some basic tools that count top viewed pages. There
are active improvements happening for that kind of reporting: I just
checked in some more pagecounter aggregation code into SVN an hour or
so ago.
I'm assuming you want more than just page request counting?
The log format is documented:
https://wikitech.leuksman.com/view/Squid_log_format
Write some good aggregation/reporting scripts that are either (1) very
very fast and memory efficient or (2) able to work well on sampled
data (say 1:1000, but it should be rate agile)... or ideally both
(keep in mind that our minimum traffic level is now up to ~16k req/s).
Obviously the reporting scripts have to not disclose private data.
This can be tricky. Use your best judgement and be prepared to be told
you've gotten that wrong and need to scrub the output further.
If you do this I'll work with you to make sure that the reports you
are looking for are generated if at all reasonably possible.
Is it blocked, or just not linked?
Fred
-----Original Message-----
From: Terin Stock [mailto:terin.stock@wikinewsie.org]
Sent: Tuesday, October 2, 2007 04:07 PM
To: 'Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List'
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] university blocking wikipedia
I know the Palm Beach County Public School district in Palm Beach,
Florida activity blocks all access to Wikipedia, under the "Educational
Sites" category. I've talked with some teachers, they suggest using
answers.com as a solution. Most of the teachers also raised concerns
about blocking of other useful websites, both from the teacher's and
student's standpoint.
That said, it seems that the only Wikimedia site blocked is Wikipedia.
And isn't answers.com just a sql dump of Wikipedia? Do they have editors
that check the articles on their site?
C F wrote:
> On 10/2/07, Samuel Klein <sj(a)laptop.org> wrote:
>> Unis have *been blocked* by wikipedia when they hosted active vandals.
>> That's different.
>
> I'm assuming what the OP said was that the Us blocked wp, and not that
> the Us were blocked by WP.
>
> In any event this is just a rumor as long as the OP only heard about
> it, it hasn't really happened.
>
>
>> SJ
>>
>>
>> On Tue, 2 Oct 2007, dan harp wrote:
>>
>>> just heard an odd thing from a peer @ the high school
>>> I work at.
>>>
>>> "Many major universities have blocked wikipedia"
>>>
>>> thought I would throw it out to the community and get
>>> a bit of direction to research - I find the
>>> possibility odd.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ____________________________________________________________________________________
>>> Need a vacation? Get great deals
>>> to amazing places on Yahoo! Travel.
>>> http://travel.yahoo.com/
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> foundation-l mailing list
>>> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>>> Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> foundation-l mailing list
>> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
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>
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Urban myth I think, but who knows? Perhaps it is not linked on some library reference pages. They went on the warpath against ABEbooks a while ago when WorldCat was linking to it (if no library had the book). A community with strong opinions.
Fred
-----Original Message-----
From: dan harp [mailto:dharp66@yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 2, 2007 03:53 PM
To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: [Foundation-l] university blocking wikipedia
just heard an odd thing from a peer @ the high school
I work at.
"Many major universities have blocked wikipedia"
thought I would throw it out to the community and get
a bit of direction to research - I find the
possibility odd.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Need a vacation? Get great deals
to amazing places on Yahoo! Travel.
http://travel.yahoo.com/
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Many people are probably aware now that i've started a test of the Google Analytics page counter on en.wikibooks. I hear that people are running a similar kind of test on en.wikinews. Currently, these programs are opt-in: only registered users are using these scripts, and it involves manually adding them to the personal monobook files. The information received so far has been fantastic: counts of page hits, click patterns, information about entry points that we can use to improve the welcome for new visitions, etc. However this test has also raised a few concerns. Some concerns I would like to address, others I would like to get input from the foundation about.
1) First and foremost is the issue of privacy. The information that google analytics collects is a step above what is typically available to regular users, but not quite as detailed as CU data. Some information, such as geographical area and the ISP of a user is aggregated, but it is not attached in any way to a user's screenname. That is, without a priori knowledge about the user, it is impossible to attach a particular username to a particular ISP, geographical location, or any other piece of collected data. I am currently inspecting the google analytics code looking for a way to suppress the collection of ISP or geographical information, but havent found a way yet.
1a) Ancillary to the idea of privacy is the issue that the analytics code should probably remain opt-in. Many users are conscious of privacy and security issues, and they shouldnt be forced to decide between participating in a tracking program or not visiting wikibooks at all. I've proposed a solution that unregistered users could be tracked by default (testing wgUserName == null), but registered users would need to opt-in explicitly. After all, I feel that information about our readers is far more important then the same information about our editors.
1b) Another related idea is that individual books could be tracked for readership patterns, while the whole remainder of the wikibooks project could remain script-free. Notification templates could be used to indicate which books the scripts were active on. A book could be tracked for a month or so at a time. We could track a handful of books at once, and then change which books we track on a regular basis.
2) Second is the issue of server load. Running the script now currently involves an additional javascript page access per user. However, the javascript files can be cached. The script runs in javascript and performs interactions with the google analytics website, but does not transact with the WMF servers. I believe that server load for us should be minimal (but I want confirmation about this from the techs)
3) Log files are only available by default to the google account holder (myself) and other people that are specifically added by myself to the profile. If we keep the access list very restrictive, we dont need to worry about sensitive data from becoming public. However, we do run the risk of giving users with access "power", which is a common fear. If we were to set up accounts on behalf of the project or the WMF (as opposed to personal accounts), we could negate this issue entirely.
I'm looking for as much input on this issue as I can get. I'm not planning to make any changes to any javascript for the forseeable future, till the concerns are ironed out.
--Andrew Whitworth
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