To Luis and others,
First thank you for responding. Now, you referred to WMF lawyer Michelle Paulson's "excellent blog post," yes I suppose it is that. It's a terrific marketing document and piece of salesmanship, with feel-good phrases like "the Wikimedia way is unique," "open and collaborative process," and "the policy wouldn’t have been possible without support from users like you." Its title is a bit ominous: "Launching a Privacy Policy Built the Wiki Way." I, and 90 percent of editors if they understood what they are about to be subjected to, want a privacy policy built by lawyers and executives that they reasonably trust to protect their interests, not one that purports to be written as if a Wikipedia article by whomever shows up and starts typing.
Is the policy, as Paulson states, truly "intended to protect the user community?" Explain to me and others that are concerned how Wikipedia using tracking pixels, supercookies, GPS technology, and metadata on us is designed to protect us. As Jimi Hendrix sang: "let us stop talking falsely now, the hour's getting late." What Paulson and Brigham are doing there, only with the other tracking and analysis technologies that I quoted directly from the policy in my email preceding last, is not protecting the users but rather establishing the legal defense position of "you were duly warned."
Luis, please tell me if I'm wrong then, for example, how my being monitored at Wikipedia with tracking pixels and GPS technologies protects me or my interests.
I also disagree with you where you emphasize that there were 200,000 words of constructive discussion. To anyone who reads Wikipedia talkpages, there is a great portion of chat-room-like content as well as redundancy as well as people that just don't know what they are talking about. So it doesn't convince me for you to brandish "200,000 words," no more than "2 million." Wikipedia editors don't keep up with that, they depend on specialists to look out for their interests, and this policy is not doing that at all.
How does it look out for the community's interests to accord total anonymity and exemption from the policy to the hundreds of administrators that are basically online role-playing gamers, pushing around editors and "investigating" them at whim and to the devil knows what ends? Not long ago one of these types actually banned a Nobel Prize winner Brian Josephson. The same administrator had previously boasted on Wikipedia of his large penis, and further cursed a content editor that he should "rot in the hell that is eternal block." Josephson won his Nobel in physics "for his theoretical predictions of the properties of a supercurrent through a tunnel barrier." The administrator, that goes by at least three known usernames, is a cheap dumb anonymous cyberbully. The world the WMF is making places the one above the other, but I'm not sure it's the right one. (Https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=block&user=DangerousPanda&page=User%3ABrian+Josephson&year=&month=-1&tagfilter=), (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_notice....)
The answer is simple on that part at least. The WMF must start identifying, if not publicly at least to it, those it accords access to the personal-identifiable information of editors. They're going to behave better if they know they can be held accountable for their actions.
Trillium Corsage
05.06.2014, 18:34, "Luis Villa" lvilla@wikimedia.org:
Hi, Trillium and others-