[WikiEN-l] Privacy policy and editing anonymously notice.

[David Gerard]

>As the Board have been rather slow with publicising the new privacy
>policy, I have taken the step of adding a notice to the bottom of
>[[MediaWiki:Copyrightstext]] on the English-language Wikipedia (the text
>which is displayed when you click "Edit this page"), which mentions that
>if you are editing anonymously, your IP address will be publically and
>permanently associated with the edits, and if you're editing while
>logged in, your IP address will be stored for around 2 weeks.


Firstly, I must apologise for being so terse and shitty on IRC last night.

Secondly, the message (which is [[MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning]]) got this edit:

 00:16, 27 October 2005 A Man In Black (rv - Why is a warning like
this necessary? Why is it being added to a MediaWiki page without
discussion?)

I did say that seeking outside opinion would be a good idea ... or
waiting to hear back from the Board, if this is of Board-level
importance.

Your added text was (at the top, not the bottom):

    By editing Wikipedia, your [[IP address]] (which is [[personally
identifiable information]]) is recorded. If you are not logged in,
your IP address will be publicly associated with your edits. If you
are logged in, your IP address will not be publicly displayed. Please
read our [[wikipedia:privacy policy|privacy policy]].

This is terrible in all sorts of ways.
(a) it's too long and too wordy.
(b) It will either scare or be utterly ignored by people who don't
care, and will cause noisy stupidity from those who think the sky is
falling if we block Tor because of vandals.
(c) You can't educate people about what IP addresses are in an
apparently important warning message. That's what links are for, not
warning messages. If they don't know an IP address is personally
identifiable information, this really isn't the place to tell them
inline.
(d) No-one reads a sentence over five words. No-one reads past the
second sentence. No-one reads a word over two syllables unless they
have to. (This one is really hard to keep to ...)
(e) Probably more.

(Your previous version was: "Warning: By submitting edits to
Wikipedia, your IP address, which is personally-identifiable
information, will be associated with your edit. If you are not logged
in, your IP address will be permanently and publically associated with
your edits. If you are logged in, your IP address will not be
publically displayed, however it will be kept for around 2 weeks.")

My suggested wording is:

    All edits to Wikipedia are recorded and visible, with the [[IP
address]] they are from. Your IP address is publicly visible on edits
where you are not [[Special:Userlogin|logged in]]. See
[[wikipedia:privacy policy|privacy policy]].

Says all we need, promises nothing.

If this is important enough to add for Foundation reasons, it's
important enough to get right. For *hundreds* of projects, not just
en:.


- d.