I also have not seen a clear explanation of what those who would like to generate statistics using web bugs plan to do with that data. How do they plan to use the data, and why aren't the plethora of statistics now made officially available by the WMF not satisfactory?
You have bypassed the correct procedure. The amount of time that it takes the WMF to accomplish goals can be frustrating. Getting them to make your goal their goal can be frustrating. But it all has to start with you presenting them with a coherent goal that takes all the constraints into account. Then you need to get WMF approval which often involves getting community approval.
Let's be clear that the privacy policy is a legal issue for the WMF. Volunteer admins cannot take user privacy into their own hands, under their own interpretation. That's just not how it works!
2009/6/6 Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu
This is another e-mail on this subject that just strikes me as flawed. These are not vague privacy fears - they are real privacy fears. I see a fundamental failure by those involved in this controversy to understand this point.
On Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 1:31 AM, Tisza Gergő gtisza@gmail.com wrote:
Robert Rohde <rarohde@...> writes:
You may not be aware, but the relaying of page view data to third party analysis platforms has been tried on a number of occasions in the past and consistently shutdown. (I think this even includes cases before the Privacy Policy was adopted.)
However, to my recollection there has never been a case that quite mirrors yours since we are talking about a privately hosted server administered by a highly trusted community member.
The (WM-DE-owned) toolserver ran a statistics script called WikiCharts for a few years, which worked with data relayed by Common.js from several wikipedias, including de and en. While that is not exactly the same situation (as the WMF has access to the toolserver), I think it proves my point that passing IP data to an (in the strict organizational sense) third-party server does not necessarily violate the privacy policy, neither letter nor spirit, as long as that server remains within the larger WM community.
It is important to understand that this is a much more general question than that of web statistics: any third-party service that interacts with the standard wiki user interface receives private data, whether it needs it or not, because the user interface (the HTML page) is "executed" in the user's browser, and the browser has to contact the third-party service, and it cannot hide its IP in that process. For example, we considered setting up some sort of spell checking service for hu.wp. That is something that cannot be done well centrally - there is too much difference between languages. And if you do it with a local server, it has to communicate with the user's browser, and could in theory log requests and correlate them with edits on the wiki, thus it has to conform with the privacy guidelines. It would be a shame if all such uses would be blindly forbidden because of vague privacy fears.
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