On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 10:20 PM, Luis Villa lvilla@wikimedia.org wrote:
pretending that it solves anything would be a distraction from the actual, more serious problems that legal has identified.
Hey, folks, since this was sort of tossed off quickly, and several people have asked me about this statement off-list, let me clarify:
There is no legal problem with Wikimetrics, the tool.
There are *potential* problems with usage of Wikimetrics to create and monitor cohorts that reflect real-world data; i.e., that such and such a person attended a specific event at a specific time, or that such and such a person is of a specific political or sexual orientation (e.g., they attended an LGBT editathon), or so on and so forth. Using that sort of data to create cohorts can accidentally expose data that wasn't previously collected/made public, and is potentially problematic. (There may also be other potentially oddball uses, especially when the cohort size is very small, but that's the easiest-to-grasp example.)
The solution there isn't to condemn the tool, and that wasn't my intent; the solution is simply for all of us to be careful about what information we're collecting and feeding to it, especially if that information isn't passing through our normal checks and balances.
Hope that helps clarify- Luis