[Foundation-l] Google Analytics on Wikimania site

Thu Oct 18 18:25:28 UTC 2007

On 10/18/07, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester at gmail.com> wrote:

> <snip>

In any event it violates the spirit of our policy (we do not allow
> users to display potentially identifiable information of others, so
> why would we allow them to install analytics?). It's not something we
> really want to test, don't you think?

Careful, I think you'd also have a hard time identifying any Foundation
level policy that actually prohibits users (who are not WMF employees) from
posting personal information about other people (even though I am confident
everyone understands that doing such without permission is very bad).
Wikipedia has a large variety of policies, but the WMF has far fewer, which
is part of the issue here.

A comprehensive list of WMF policies is here:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Policies

There are many things, like this, where most people may agree on an
appropriate course of action, but there is no document that anyone can point
to that actually conveys that information to others.  I suspect that the
person using Analytics on the Wikimania site meant no harm.  If I were
developing a whole site, and had no access to site traffic logs, then I'd be
tempted to use similar tools to measure and understand traffic flow too.
And a reasonable person could conclude that there is no existing WMF policy
saying not to.

-Robert Rohde