[Foundation-l] New draft of privacy policy (urgent)

Mon Jun 23 21:39:23 UTC 2008

I've set up a draft version of the policy to demonstrate what issues I think
can be addressed:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Avruch/PPdraft

It addresses some issues raised on this list and some I identified,
particularly:

* Consistent terminology: Projects are variously referred to as projects,
wikis, WMprojects, WMProjects, Wikiprojects, etc. Wikiprojects (to take an
example) means something else entirely at least on the English Wikipedia,
and so should  probably be avoided. In most cases I've changed the usage to
simply "project" or "projects." Wikimedia Foundation is variously Wikimedia,
WMF and Wikimedia Foundation (although I didn't see the term WMF defined, it
may have been). I've made most of those instances consistent.

* Editing for length: I think there are a number of paragraphs that could be
condensed without losing readability or meaning. I've done a bit of that,
most especially in the first half. Might not be able to save a huge amount
of text this way, but there are definitely opportunities.

* Formatting: A couple of formatting issues, actually. I've altered the
header format to flow better and look better when displayed on Wiki, and
made the use of headers, bullets, subheaders and bolding more consistent.
I've removed the "Introduction" header just as a style difference, since its
the first text in the document anyway.

Mainly I think the policy works. Its definitely longer than most privacy
policies, but its also far more comprehensively written. A couple good
reasons for that - the Foundation has an opportunity to collect a lot more
user data than most other sites, and its policy is aimed at limiting the
Foundation and protecting the user rather than allowing maximum flexibility
for the corporation and its protection. All it really needs is some good
copyediting - for length, internal consistency and clarity.

If you want, this version can be copied into the other draft version as a
revision (and then reverted) so that the differences can be easily seen.

Nathan