[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia blog moving to WordPress.com

[MZMcBride]

Matthew: thank you very much for writing up this detailed explanation.

Matthew Roth wrote:
>As a general concept, we’re redesigning the blog to be less focused on the
>Wikimedia Foundation and more on the Wikimedia movement. For the past
>year, we have been sharing more narratives from the movement, making this
>important communications tool more about movement partners and not
>exclusively about the Wikimedia Foundation. We believe the public has
>little understanding of the people behind the projects and we want to
>share their stories (i.e. why the contribute, why they edit, why they
>develop).

Yay! This is great.

>We have not yet selected a 3rd-party host. We have screened a couple of
>3rd-party hosts. While Wordpress.com is one of our top choices (not the
>standard consumer version, rather their 'managed' or white glove
>hosting services for high volume customers), we have not yet selected
>them. Right now the WMF legal team is in discussions with Wordpress.com
>and others.

Both the draft privacy policy and its associated talk page make it seem as
though this has already been decided. Clarification in this area would be
good, especially as I think it makes sense to figure out whether we should
have a requirement that external services follow our (new) privacy policy.

>We appreciate that if we host on a 3rd party site, we need to navigate the
>important issue of ensuring our privacies policies are compatible.

Navigate how?

>When we move hosting to a 3rd-party site, users will need to agree to
>the new privacy policy that we work out for the blog. During the
>transition when we update the database and move the blog from our
>cluster to a 3rd-party site, current blog users will need to create new
>accounts on the new blog and agree to the new privacy policy.

This seems to focus on blog editors, but not blog visitors. If I visit
wordpress.com, I see that my Web browser deflects Google Analytics,
KissMetrics, Quantcast, and WordPress Stats. If I visit wordpress.org, I
see that my browser deflects Google Analytics, Quantcast, Twitter Button,
and Facebook Social Plugins.

MZMcBride