Toolserver:List of things to ask WM-DE
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Edit counters[edit]
Given that all major wikis rely on edit counters (See w:en:WP:RfA and w:de:Wikipedia:Sichter#Sichterstatus for uses) and the balance of German privacy laws, what data are we allowed to display. Keep in mind that there are third party competing edit counter such as http://en.wikichecker.com that provide high granularity. Note that Wikimedians may choose to use a pseudonym.
- Total sum of edits
- Two figures can be obtained, one through MediaWiki API which includes deleted edits but excludes page moves and another by COUNT of the revision table. The difference is the number of deleted edits or edits that involve page moves.
- Date of First Edit
- Easily obtain through MediaWiki's API and HTML interfaces. Some users have argued that the user contributions page should be limited to the past 30 days. Also, we can calculate the average edit rate per day.
- Edits by Namespace
- More difficult to obtain from MediaWiki, requires cycling through every namespace and summing the edits. Can be used to profile users, drama users are likely to have more User_talk edits, programmers more Template edits, policy debtors more Wikipedia/Wikipedia_talk edits, article writers and vandals more (article)/Talk edits.
- Edits by Month
- Can also be obtain as easily as Edits by month, requires cycling through every month and summing the edits. Can be used to determine a user's activity.
- Most edited Articles
- Time consuming, sometimes simply by looking through a user's contributions, one can tell which pages they've edited the most. However, a more elaborate method involves opening the XML formatted contribute from the API into Excel 2007, creating a pivot "Summarize using a Pivot table", select the "title" and "ns" fields, changing the "Summarize value field by" to "Count", then sorting by "ns". This can be used to determine what a particular user's interests are and which article they've contributed the most to.
- Edits by Day of Week
- Some user script tools perform this. Excel may be able to do something similar[1]. Showing the user's weekday activity may be useful to check if the person is busy on a particular day.
- Edits by Hour
- Typically combined with Edits by Day of Week. Can show a user's activity pattern and possibly their sleeping pattern. Is a Tool allowed to show the status of the user based on past activity, such as showing "Currently sleeping/waking/Editing" icons without showing the patterns?
- Geo-location restriction
- Consider the privacy law is presumably only applicable to Germany we could disable advanced functionality for German and Unknown IP addresses.
- Globe opt-in and opt-out
- Considering the different stances of enwiki (which wants default opt-out) and dewiki (which wants default opt-in), would default of opt-in be allowed?
- Remote loading
- There's already a tool that remotely loads data and code from the WMF servers using JavaScript thus being nothing more than a boot strap loader. Is the remote code loaded and executed on the user host machine subject to WM-DE rules?
Nazi imagery[edit]
Given that German law prohibits display of Nazi Symbols (see commons:Template:Nazi symbol) what efforts, if any, should Toolserver users take to prevent the display of the symbol.
Examples include image creation/editing tools, not to mention the Unicode symbols (U+5350, U+534D) [2]