Hi all, to give a little insight here: about two years ago the German Wikipedia community reached consensus that, for the page http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BZ (which is basically user statistics and ranking), an opt-in is required. That means only those users may be listed there who have added their name to http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Beitragszahlen/Opt-In.
The reasoning behind this approach is simple: just because a piece of personal data is public, the aggregation of such data isn't automatically also public. Why is that so? Because such aggregations can provide insights into editing habits and other behavior of the person behind that user account which touches on their privacy. A similar analogy is: just because cookies exist and are public information from a website's perspective doesn't make it acceptable to generate viewing profiles and analyzing browsing patterns because that inforation touches the user's privacy. Why did the German community decide this? Germans have traditionally (at least since 1983) been particularly conscientious about personal privacy. The constitutional court here even claimed a basic right to control how one's personal data is used by others, regardless of whether that data is made public or not at some point in time. Retrieving, storing, using, aggregating, and publishing personal data is regulated by fairly strict laws that typically require compelling reasons for such activities before they are allowed - or the person's explicit permission. Some of these principles have also been codified at the European Union level under the subject of "data protection" so this isn't a strictly German approach (anymore). Hope that helps, Sebastian _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
