We developed clicktracking to see what buttons were being used on our toolbar. It was enabled for all Wikimedia projects that had the usability toolbar and only gave us information of the type that "a user who has an edit count of 3 just clicked the 'bold' button". Collecting such data for internal research purposes is fully consistent with the letter and intent of the Wikimedia Foundation privacy policy: whenever we do so, we strive to minimize the amount of information collected to what's strictly necessary.
(Read http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/click-tracking-on-edit-toolbar-deployed/ for more details, or see the code in SVN at http://bit.ly/c7hg0J ) . We wanted to know, roughly, who was a novice and who was an expert, and we had the edit count metric for that. We also wanted to know who is active and who isn't, so for that we created a metric of edit count vs timeframe. Specifically, when someone clicks, we record what event happened (i.e., they clicked 'bold', 'left navigation-logo' etc), what their edit count at the time was, what their edit count over the last 1, 3, and 6 months was, and a randomly generated session ID that lasts until page refresh. This was done intentionally to keep the data anonymous. We turned this feature on for left-navigation at a sampling rate of about 1 in 1000 to get an idea of what was being clicked and what wasn't, so that we'd know what to collapse and what not to. We also used click-tracking on old editing toolbar to make sure that we didn't leave any buttons off that people really liked. The Special:ClickTracking page referenced here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Committee/Audit_Subcommittee/Archive_1#New_privacy_issue.3F was a prototype for visualizing the aforementioned data. It was never actually "turned on" to begin with, and it wasn't our highest priority to get it up and running, especially since *the visualization's* database operations aren't exactly lightning-fast and haven't been optimized yet. It also wasn't and won't ever be a wikipedia administrator tool. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
