Hello,
The board had a meeting two days ago.
It went well :-) (though we were distracted by a Russia/Netherlands...)
Resolutions are not yet transferred to Wikimedia Foundation website, but
I wanted to inform you of two points.
First, the minutes of April meeting were approved and are now published
here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/April_5-7%2C_2008.
Enjoy !
Second, as you probably guessed by now, the privacy policy was not
approved, due to the ongoing discussion. Voting is reported to july 2008
board meeting.
Best
Florence
Thomas Dalton writes:
> Legality aside, we're telling you, as real people, that this policy
> simply will not work. It doesn't matter how prudent it is, if it
> doesn't work, it's useless.
Hey, I'm a real person too, I promise.
--Mike
Ryan writes:
> I noticed that it doesn't mention anywhere the possibility that the
> policy
> may be altered in the future. Most sites, including Yahoo and
> Google, do
> so. Is this omission accidental or deliberate? Is such a mention
> either
> necessary or encouraged legally?
It's deliberate. Almost all commercial sites allow themselves to
change privacy policy unilaterally and without notice. That's not our
practice -- we take pains to let the community (both editors and the
larger community of users) know what we're doing before we do it, and
we seek feedback.
> In general, I agree with others that the policy might be worth
> splitting
> up. But if it isn't, I think it should be pruned. For example, I'm
> looking
> at Section VIII, Point C. Why in the world is it necessary in a
> privacy
> policy to specifically mention "badly-behaved web spiders" as a
> possible
> reason for examining log data?
I think the idea here is to suggest a specific example that promotes
better understanding than a categorical generalization might.
> The mention of IRC is strange. IRC is not a Wikimedia venue, so
> perhaps it
> should be removed completely. But if it is to be left, why was the
> mention
> about the possible exposure of IPs deleted? Surely that's an
> important
> privacy concern regarding IRC (where the IRC guidelines have nothing
> to do
> with privacy)
I'm not necessarily averse to excluding discussion of IRC, but you
will note that IRC is discussed in current WMF privacy policy (at
6.4). It's reasonable to infer that the Board in 2006 wanted IRC
included, perhaps because some users infer that WMF-related IRC
channels are somehow operated by us.
> Perhaps my main point is this:
>
> -- Yahoo privacy policy: 1,427 words
> -- Google privacy policy: 1,858 words
> -- Myspace privacy policy: 2,322 words
> -- WMF current privacy policy: 1,767 words
> -- WMF privacy policy draft: 5,081 words
The fact that our policy is longer than some others is something of
which we are painfully aware, and which we were aware of before any
community feedback started. But there are both reasons and
explanations for this.
First, as I recall from my research, Google has a separate privacy
policy for each product (e.g., a privacy policy for Google search, a
privacy policy for G-mail, one for Maps, one for Shopping, etc.). We
don't do that -- our draft policy covers all projects. (I assume
something similar is going on at Yahoo!)
Second, even if we limit our discussion to Wikipedia, the uses of the
service that may raise privacy implications are more various and
complicated than those of, say, Google search.
The question here is whether it makes sense to put everything in one
place or not. The previous WMF privacy policy put everything in one
place, but was shorter and (I strongly believe) too dense and
technical for non-technical users. We traded off length for
readability. I still think that is the right decision.
That said, any approach to shortening the privacy policy draft that
does not require removing or relocating essential privacy-related
information (and I continue to believe that an expression of the
Foundation's philosophy is essential) is something we're open to.
--Mike
Pathoschild writes:
> Mike Godwin <mgodwin(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> As to whether users will read it from beginning to end -- well, I
>> assume most won't.
>
> I think that is a problem.
If it is a problem, then are you suggesting that the current privacy
policy (implemented in 2006) doesn't have this problem? In my view,
the draft revision is more readable than the existing privacy policy.
Of course, we can solve the problem of readability by removing
essential elements and placing them elsewhere. That solution is, to
me, unsatisfactory, because the people who won't read our privacy
policy from beginning to end are exactly the same ones who won't click
to links containing important things like the Wikimedia Foundation's
philosophy with regard to privacy issues.
All document design that serves multiple purposes requires tradeoffs.
Given that the privacy policy (which will have legal consequences for
the Foundation but not for editors, in general) has to function both
as an inclusive, comprehensive document and as a reasonably accessible
document (and as an easily referenced document), I think the length
problem is one we're going to have to live with.
My test for whether a policy gets read is not primarily length -- it's
whether the language is accessible to ordinary, nontechnical users.
That's a major area in which the current policy falls short, and if we
end up with a longer policy because we took the trouble to reframe it
in ordinary language, I believe that is an appropriate tradeoff. It
should be remembered that this policy is not primarily for the purpose
of serving editors, but for giving notice to the whole world of users
what we do.
To the extent that you believe a hypertextual document is more likely
to be read than a longer document, in this context I have to
disagree. I've been working with privacy activists and privacy-
concerned citizens for nearly 20 years now, including nine years at
EFF, two or three years at CDT, and a couple of years at Public
Knowledge. My experience over this period has been (as I have said)
that those who want to inform themselves fully about privacy policy
tend to want all the information all in one place. (Really, this is
true of probably more than 90 percent of privacy-concerned users.)
It should be noted that the existing policy follows exactly the
principle I have outlined in the preceding paragraph.
> After your original draft I proposed such a separation at
> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Draft_Privacy_Policy_June_2008#Rewrite
> >,
> a complete policy-only version linking to a second editable
> "explanatory material" page. I think this is the ideal solution: we
> have a binding easy-to-read privacy policy, as well as the lengthy
> explanatory material properly separated from binding policy and
> editable by the community.
I've read your proposed draft, and have been influenced by it in many
ways. Please don't take my disagreement with you about this single
issue to reflect anything other than general appreciation and
gratitude for your efforts in your Rewrite, which I thought were quite
helpful.
--Mike
I haven't seen it discussed on this list, but are folks aware that Milos is
arguing that the English Wikipedia community should be excluding from
further voting on the global sysop proposals? Personally, it seems the
height of strange to (1st) regard meta members as important only because of
their home wiki and to (2nd) choose to exclude them based on one persons
belief that an entire project community is being unreasonable.
My view is that en.wp community members are as individually a part of the
meta community as members of any other project community, and to begin
excluding individuals based on other (non-meta) project membership is a
dangerous precedent and also quite senseless.
Nathan
There is a current proposal on meta to grant commons admins the
ability to view deleted image/image talk pages on all projects.
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metapub#Global_deleted_image_review)
This proposal is important because there are hundreds of thousands of
images on commons which began their Wiki-life on other projects and
were later transferred to commons with incomplete or inaccurate
history information and were then deleted. There are also instances
of images on commons being falsely claimed as sourced from another
wiki. Without the ability to completely review these images they may
be handled incorrectly. Today commons admins are forced to
coordinate with other projects via IRC, email, etc, to evaluate these
cases ... most of whom turn out just fine. This converts a couple of
seconds clicking into minutes of nagging and conversation. In practice
most commons admins just don't bother with it and the images remain
unchecked.
Your input is requested at the poll: It wouldn't be right to push
through a wide impacting proposal on meta without input from the
projects at large. (The Village pumps, noticeboard, etc for all the
major projects are being pinged about this proposal, please pardon the
spam.. :) )
Thanks.
well. i think many people prefer to return to the previous criteria, instead to continue with the current. and i said, in culture diffusion is more important a well known writing tradition than only speakers. historical examples: ancient greek in byzantine empire, latin in western european countries during middle age, sanskrit in post-classical india, etc. all those languages were extint in those eras.
it is time to discuse the policy that only satisfy langcom and nobody else.
c.l.
Thomas Dalton writes:
> 1) Still too long and rambling. It's clearly written with the
> intention of educating users about privacy on Wikimedia projects,
> rather than primarily as a binding policy on WMF, yet no user is ever
> going to read it.
I don't think education is exclusive as binding policy. Any policy we
publish is going to have a binding effect, to the extent that people
rely on our representations about what we do. That's why we have taken
the pains to make the policy match our actual practice as completely
as possible.
As to whether users will read it from beginning to end -- well, I
assume most won't. But some users -- the kind most interested in
privacy policies -- will. And so the idea was to prepare something
that's holistic and integrated for those users, but that also
functions as a reference for those who only want to find out about a
particular topic. Since we're trying to do more than one thing here,
the document reads differently than it would if it served only one
function (e.g., education).
> 2) Why abbreviate "Wikimedia projects" to "WMProjects"?
This is a fair point.
Pathoschild writes:
> That sentence has no verb...
I'm not sure how that happened, but I've fixed that particular
problem. Thanks.
--Mike
If someone lives in a small community, has contacts to the local media
and wants to put Wikimedia into it, he or she can tell about the
Wikimedia board elections. It is quite interesting to a local
newspaper or radio station to report that XY from our community takes
part in an international election, voting for someone (from another
country) who might become a Board of Trustees member of the
organisation of the famous Wikipedia.
Alas, one should be quick as the elections end already tomorrow...
Ziko
--
Ziko van Dijk
NL-Silvolde