[Wikimedia-l] Geolocalization improvement proposal

[Cristian Consonni]

2012/7/24  <Birgitte_sb at yahoo.com>:
> [...] So I definitely believe what it.WM wants to do, to connect people with local events, has real value. And that it has value for the individual people just as much as for it.WM.

strong +1.

> The main question is whether the benefit from being able to connect people with local events is worth the risk of collecting more personalized of their data than we are accustomed to handling.

I could be wrong but I don't think we would "handle more data" than
what we are doing now. We are not going to use that data and as far as
I know that data "dies" in the moment the system has output the
message.

>  Maybe the benefit does win out for many people in Italy (I don't really understand enough about what degree of improvement you are anticipating to have a firm opinion). But it is certainly not worth the risk for people in areas that do not notice problems with the current system.

I will say that this seems fair enough for me, from what I have seen I
can say that the current system is working on wide flat areas with
enough internet provider servers coverage, this could vary from
country to country for a number of reasons (from morphology to
broadband penetration, etc.).

> This is why I am suggesting that the browser feature might only be limited to areas that are known to reach some pre-defined level of error under geolocation. Or else that it be made an opt-in feature (perhaps even advertised through the current geonotice in areas that are known to be a problem).  However I don't believe that gathering more browser data for everyone everywhere is a likely to be good overall solution.

Yes, opt-in is a viable solution but I think it spoils the best from
the system, in fact with opt-in we would only reach people that:
* are registered users
* are expert enough to know that such gadgets exist and know how to
activate them (I didn't know this myself till some months ago although
I'm a Wikipedia editor from 4+ years).
and I expect this category of users are already participating or
already know how to get informations about meet-ups and local events
even if are buried in obscure pages.

Anyway, I would be very glad of seeing a new study, comprehending more
countries  but I don't have enough time (and probably all the
necessary competences) needed for it, maybe we could some professor
interested on doing such a study (I think it could well be a research
work for an undergraduate student or a bachelor thesis).

Do you think this could work?

Cristian