[Foundation-l] Re: Research access to logs

Wed Aug 17 09:49:31 UTC 2005

Tim Starling <t.starling at ...> writes:

> 
> Jerome Jamnicky wrote:
> > I thought it would be obvious, but giving you a sample of the logfile is
> > a violation of the (current) privacy policy.  So your options are to
> > offer a script to alter the logfile so that we would not violate the
> > policy by giving the resulting file to you, or to get the policy changed.
> 
> Well, it was me who suggested that, we could just give him log files for
> a few IP addresses corresponding to people who have given their consent.
> For example, we could give him logs of his own requests.
> 
> I'm now thinking, however, that log files are not what Tobias wants at
> all, instead he wants something similar to the page view counter, which
> was disabled for efficiency reasons.
> 

A page view counter does not include any information on the frequency two
articles are viewed within a short timeframe by the same user. This information
is stored in the logfile or it could be obtained changing the mediawiki software
so that the relevant statistics are stored online in a database table with a
kind of the following structure: (id_article_a, id_article_b, counter,
timestamp). To prevent the table from scaling with the square of the number of
articles the entries with the lowest counter could be deleted if they have not
been changed for a specified period of time.