[Foundation-l] Privacy policy, statistics and rankings

[Robert Rohde]

Personally, I don't see any intrinsic problem with different wiki
communities having different policies about what kinds of auxiliary
content they will accept (as long as it doesn't interfere with the
basic mission of the project).

I will say though that trying to control the ways that already public
data might be aggregated is pretty unexpected from my American
viewpoint.   It is also seems pretty clear that aggregation of edit
statistics is perfectly acceptable within the larger WMF Privacy
Policy.  Hence, I think the German Wikipedia community would find it
nearly impossible to enforce their position on privacy with respect to
the actions of most external third parties.  It even seems likely to
me that if the same information appeared on EN or Meta, that they
would have trouble finding a consensus for deletion within those
communities.

So, if the Germans wish to have a more restrictive privacy policy
governing their own content, then that seems fine, but I suspect they
would have a difficult uphill battle to extend that decision beyond
their own immediate sphere of influence.

-Robert Rohde