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

[Oliver Keyes]

I would disagree that the scale does not match. I'm not sure how many
people the fundraising banners reach, but I imagine it's a subset of
"people who use wikipedia". Almost /all/ of our external links are going to
be linking to somewhere with a non-compliant privacy policy.


On 17 July 2013 06:52, Tomasz W. Kozlowski <tomasz at twkozlowski.net> wrote:

> 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
>
>
> ______________________________**_________________
> Wikimedia-l mailing list
> Wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.**org <Wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l>,
> <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@**lists.wikimedia.org<wikimedia-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org>
> ?subject=**unsubscribe>
>



-- 
Oliver Keyes
Community Liaison, Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation