[Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

[Tomasz W. Kozlowski]

Hi,
it came to my attention very recently that a link to a YouTube video has 
been included in our fundraising banners[1] last year, enabling people 
by default to watch a video about Wikipedia loaded through a YouTube 
<iframe /> element.

There's been a small discussion about this on IRC, and I've been asked 
to seek the opinion of the wider community on this matter, which I hope 
to achieve by starting a thread on this list.

I wonder how the solution used in the banners reflects on our values, 
especially since we prefer to use a proprietary service over our own 
Wikimedia Commons, and effectively invite our users to expose their data 
(such as their IP address) to an external website (because no one's 
going to read the small information about YouTube privacy policy).

I am told that there are technical limitations behind the decision to 
prefer YouTube over Commons, but I'm not really convinced about that; I 
generally think that we should not include links to websites that can 
track our users in our banners, and YouTube (as well as websites that 
use Google Analytics for statistical purposes) definitely falls under 
that definition.

[On an unrelated note, it might be worth pointing out that the video on 
YouTube is listed as CC-BY and as CC-BY-SA on Commons, which introduces 
confusion and might lead to creation of derivative works that are 
released without the ShareAlike clause, which - I believe - it's not 
what the author of the video was after.]

== References ==
* [1] 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?banner=B12_1227_ThankYou_5pillars&forceBannerDisplay=true

           Tomasz