[Labs-l] Discussion needed: Technically feasible, legally okay... but want tools do we want?

[Brad Jorsch (Anomie)]

On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 12:03 PM, Merlijn van Deen <valhallasw at arctus.nl> wrote:
>
> For example, the deep user inspector's punchcard could be prevented by
> simply hiding or rounding the time of an edit (although it might also be
> necessary to rewrite revision id's, for example).
>
> It's really not a technical or legal obstacle

Err, it seems to me that rewriting the revision ids everywhere in the
database would be a major technical obstacle.

Rounding timestamps is less so, although to prevent this "punchcard"
you'd have to round them to the point where they'd be useless for many
things people *do* want to do.

Keep in mind that to prevent "evildoers" you'd really have to do this
rounding on-wiki as well: how would you like to go to
Some_page?action=history and not be able to tell when an edit was made
or reverted?


-- 
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation