Wikisource:News/2014-06

Launching a privacy policy built the wiki way

The original report is on the Wikimedia blog

We are happy to announce that on April 25, 2014, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees approved a new privacy policy. The new privacy policy explains how we collect, use and manage the information of over twenty million registered users and 490 million monthly unique visitors to the Wikimedia projects.

But the policy wouldn’t have been possible without support from users like you. The new privacy policy is the result of a community consultation spanning over eight months.

A need for a change

Early 2013, we recognized that our privacy policy, which hadn’t been updated since 2008, did not address a number of new technologies or provide enough detail to our users about how their information was being handled. But the Wikimedia way is unique — we knew that we could not develop a privacy policy without the help of the very user community the privacy policy is intended to protect. So, we launched an open call for community input on June 18, 2013, to find out what issues mattered to you and what you wanted to see in a new policy.

Armed with that input and mindful of the sensitivities invoked by recent revelations of mass governmental surveillance programs, we created an initial draft proposal for a new privacy policy and opened up a 5.5-month long online discussion.

Perfecting the privacy policy through consultation

Our initial draft of the new privacy policy underwent thorough review by the Wikimedia community and sparked some spirited debate. In fact, the discussion surrounding the privacy policy, data retention guidelines and access to nonpublic information policy totaled over 195,000 words and resulted in over 250 changes to the documents. What emerged was a much stronger policy that reflects the global Wikimedia community’s values.

For more information about the consultation process and how the new policy differs from the old one, please see our previous post.

What happens now?

With the Board’s approval, we will begin a month-long notice period [from May 7 to June 6] to give everyone another chance to review the new privacy policy. Following the notice period, the policy will officially go into effect.

We thank all those that participated in this open and collaborative process, which resulted in a privacy policy that was truly developed in the wiki way. In that spirit, the new privacy policy is licensed under a free license so that anyone can reuse and build upon it when creating their own privacy policies.

Featured texts for June 2014

Grab a download!

The featured text for June 2014 is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a 1865 novel by Lewis Carroll. (Main page template)

The novel is widely regarded to be one of the best examples of the literary nonsense genre. It tells of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar, anthropomorphic creatures. The tale plays with logic, giving the story lasting popularity with adults as well as with children.

This is the 1866 edition based on the 1865 first edition, with original illustrations by John Tenniel.

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"

So she was considering in her own mind, (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid,) whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a white rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.

Read on...

Collaborations for June 2014

On 30 September, 1839, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror under the combined command of James Clark Ross slipped their moorings at the naval dockyard at Chatham with orders to find the south magnetic pole and to explore the great southern continent of Antarctica. The youngest member of the crew at 23 was an assistant-surgeon, Joseph Dalton Hooker, with an interest in botany. Over the following four years Hooker collected, drew and recorded many species of plants. As a result of these explorations The Botany of the Antarctic Voyage of Erebus and Terror was written and published in three volumes. The first volume has been chosen for June's Proofread of the Month.

The Maintenance of the Month task for June 2014 is Proposed policies and guidelines. The goal is to give an agreed status (policy, guideline, essay, help page, obsolete page) to proposed rules. Some of the current proposed policies and guidelines are about derivative works and are expected to be based upon the relevant request for comment conducted last year.

Administrator confirmations

One administrators was confirmed in May 2014:

Tarmstro99 (talk | contributions)

Four administrators are having their confirmation discussions in June 2014: