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

[Tomasz W. Kozlowski]

Hi Victor,
thanks for your e-mail, I does indeed provide a lot of valuable 
background information!

I'm being told that the technical limitations I mentioned in my opening 
e-mail are somehow related to Squid and Varnish (the caching software we 
use) and our infrastructure being unable to serve videos at this scale.

However, as you correctly write, that banner only served those millions 
of our viewers a cached image that was uploaded to donate.wm.org (so it 
was cached the usual way) and /only/ if they had clicked the play button 
were they served the full video. I'm no specialist when it comes to 
server loads, but if YouTube does not lie to me, that particular video 
was viewed only 78,000 times, which does not seem that much.

The solution that was used was indeed inelegant and contrary to our free 
culture (not the open source crap) values; effectively, people were 
directed to use a proprietary service which (1) infringes their privacy, 
(2) does not even allow to correctly licence the video. (I wonder if the 
author of the remix is aware that their work should be released under 
CC-BY-SA.)

I can't speak about others, but I block fundraising banners by default 
and did not see that until Steven W. mentioned it to me at the 2013/14 
WMF budget discussion page on Meta.

Providing links to websites that hurt our readers' and users' privacy 
directly from banners which are visible to tens of millions of them /is 
an evil thing/ and cannot be compared to including links inside 
Wikipedia articles; the scales just don't match. This includes linking 
to websites that use Google Analytics to track their visits as well as 
websites such as YouTube which use different techniques to achieve this 
goal (and perhaps some others as well).

Giving users a very visible 'play' button and adding a short sentence 
about privacy is not that far from that; nobody's going to read it, and 
even if they do, they might not be exactly aware of what those long 
documents written in complicated legalese mean.

I believe that in addition to the two options you mentioned, there is 
also a third way: not to include any videos unless we are capable of 
using our own resources, ie. serving people content governed by our own 
privacy policy and served by our own machines.

(I see that Philippe sent another e-mail in the meantime; let me just 
mention that /not/ autoplaying videos on page load is no achievement; 
/playing/ them, on the other hand, is a good reason for painful death 
and reincarnation as a demon. Also, uploading videos to Commons without 
actually using them and preferring a proprietary service is in no way 
better.)

            Tomasz