On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 8:30 AM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
2011/8/16 MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com:
An extension such as ClickTracking is probably a much better option if you can get local consensus and sysadmin support.
Are there any special implications i should know about? Privacy? Performance? Anything else?
As for privacy: for each event, we store * the kind of event (e.g. 'clicked on the recent changes link in the sidebar') * the timestamp, with second-level granularity, in UTC (just like for edits) * whether the user was logged in * the user's lifetime edit count at the time of the event * the number of edits the user made in the 1, 3 and 6 months preceding the event
This is all tracked in a database table that is not shared with the outside world. The data we'll give you will be in some aggregated form like "on September 2nd between 16:00 and 17:00 UTC, the recent changes link was clicked 40 times, of which 30 clicks were by users with a lifetime edit count greater than 10". So aside from the fact that we store some mildly stalkerish (but not personally identifiable, unless your edit count differs substantially from everyone else's such that you can be identified by your edit count alone) information privately, the information we make public shouldn't be privacy-sensitive, right?
As for performance, we'll be fine. As I said, we've run this kind of thing on wikis before (including enwiki, which is a little bit higher-traffic than hewiki) and we were fine. We just didn't do much with the data at the time IIRC (apart from looking at 'how many times was each link clicked for the duration of the tracking', which only tells you which links are used and which aren't), and it's too old to be useful now.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)