[Foundation-l] Google Analytics on Wikimania site

Thu Oct 18 21:51:24 UTC 2007

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>Presumably anyone given that access would be advised "thou shall not
>ever insert third party webbugs without the approval of the foundation
>on penalty of death" ;)
>
>It a lot easier to tell a few hundred people that and have it
>understood than expect a few thousand to get it.
>
>There are a lot of really terrible things that can happen from sitejs
>and raw html access which I will not state in public for fear of a
>horrific WP:BEANS violation.

Beans, beans, the musical fruit. The more you eat the more you toot.

Really, anyone that has a month or more on Wiki should know what the
potential for malicious use of special pages is. As far as I'm concerned, if
it says it is Wikimedia.org I should never by visiting be giving information
to some random third party. If any site doesn't have a privacy policy that
says that then I'd say someone should give them a nudge. This is repeatedly
an issue where someone thinks, "wouldn't it be great", but doesn't have the
full policy understanding. As such this perhaps needs a specific clause.

I would perhaps accept, and even participate in use of an alternative skin
or design that included analytics - the key issue being an opt in and
informed decision basis. I have my fingers crossed that instead the next
fundraiser will be particularly successful and developer time can be
allocated to statistical analysis thus satisfying the curious users who
desire to get analytics stats.

Brian.