[Foundation-l] LA Times article / Advertising in Wikipedia

[Robert Rohde]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 8:19 AM, Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil at wikinewsie.org>
wrote:

> If Wikipedia really did need to use advertising to bring in enough revenue
> this would be one of the least damaging places to have it.
>
> However, this may seriously conflict with the privacy policy as a referrer
> would be given and Google could gather data on who searched for what on
> the
> Wikipedia internal search pages. I strongly suspect this aspect of that
> particular "pact with the devil" is what many, many Wikipedians would
> strongly object to.
>

While it might be against the spirit of the privacy policy, I'd don't think
this is actually against the letter of the policy as currently constructed.


The Privacy Policy governs what WMF does with data we have collected and
have access to.  Using Adsense, for example, would mean asking a visitors
browser to directly contact and communicate with Google's servers.  Yes,
Google could exploit that, but strictly speaking, WMF would not be passing
any of the data from our servers to Google.

Whether that is an important distinction or a mere loophole is probably a
matter of opinion, but as it stands our privacy policy doesn't directly
address whether or not it is acceptable to systematically direct users
to third party sites that might engage in the independent collection of
traffic data.

(I also think that most Wikipedians are too uninformed / too unconcerned to
"strongly object", but lack of understanding is a seperate issue.)

-Robert Rohde