[HN Gopher] Wikimedia: wprov
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Wikimedia: wprov
Author : tosh
Score : 68 points
Date : 2021-04-18 13:14 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wikitech.wikimedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (wikitech.wikimedia.org)
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Context? Explain?
| tinalumfoil wrote:
| It looks like it serves the same purpose as UTM codes
| sleavey wrote:
| Should it then be added to block lists in various tracker-
| removal browser addons?
| brodock wrote:
| Yes
| akersten wrote:
| For an encyclopedia that holds itself to high standards of
| integrity and information sourcing, disguising outbound-to-
| inbound tracking parameters by camouflaging them as "provenance"
| is pretty on the nose.
| 0xTJ wrote:
| Without commenting on any other part, I don't get what you're
| saying about provenance. They're just using a word correctly.
| donohoe wrote:
| It's hardly disguising. No one likes verbose URL parameters.
|
| Having a reliable way to know where readers come from (in
| aggregate) is low-stakes stuff.
| codegladiator wrote:
| > is pretty on the nose.
|
| why ?
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| To be fair, Wikimedia is the for profit arm of Wikipedia.
| Wikipedia itself is still pretty good in terms of user
| friendliness.
| bawolff wrote:
| This is incorrect
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| This is completely backwards. Wikipedia is the name of a
| project. That project is operated by the Wikimedia
| Foundation, which is a nonprofit.
| Aissen wrote:
| Some open source product owners have understood the value of not
| tracking their users. Others, it seems, still think it's a benign
| thing to do.
|
| To be more constructive: if you need data, ask your users to
| enable telemetry (or in this case, provenance parameters). Some
| will understand what you need, and you'll get a usable sample
| from those users.
| orf wrote:
| The problem with this is that nobody will change the defaults,
| so that approach is utterly useless if you want actionable
| information.
|
| People label a number of different things, some bad and some
| good, under the general umbrella of "tracking". I'm not sure
| that name conveys enough nuance.
|
| Wikipedia wants to evaluate how effective a particular feature
| is and so they are slightly modifying a URL to do this. It's
| not tracking you, your family or your dog. It's basically
| appending "&source=ios".
|
| I'd think that is perfectly fine to any reasonable person.
| kelnos wrote:
| Maybe I don't want to share a URL like that and tell everyone
| what OS and app I'm using to browse. I get that a lot of
| people (yourself included) don't care about that, and I think
| it _is_ fair to ask what the big deal is, but that 's just
| how I feel. I can't back that up with data or worries about a
| threat (though I imagine some people might be able to)... I
| just don't like it, even if it's one of the most benign forms
| of tracking.
|
| > _I 'd think that is perfectly fine to any reasonable
| person._
|
| I reject the assertion that I'm not a reasonable person.
| Please avoid arguments of this form, as it essentially says
| "if you don't agree with me, you're an
| idiot/wrong/defective", which is not productive way to argue
| your point. (I know I'm guilty of doing this on occasion as
| well, but I'm trying to get myself to stop.)
| stefan_ wrote:
| This shit is added without even a thought of what the hell
| you are trying to evaluate. Insecure middle management types
| that want to have this noise added should be required to
| write up a study proposal and register a hypothesis.
|
| Instead its everywhere and for what? What is the actionable
| information?
| orf wrote:
| > This shit is added without even a thought of what the
| hell you are trying to evaluate. Instead its everywhere and
| for what? What is the actionable information?
|
| They are trying to evaluate the effectiveness of the social
| sharing features in their various projects. There are any
| number of reasons to do this - maybe nobody uses these
| features and they can remove them, or maybe "New Readers
| video in Hindi distribution on Facebook" has an insane
| click through rate that might have an impact on the
| allocation of resources in the future/feed into other
| products being developed.
|
| You know, stuff you need to do when you run one of the
| worlds largest websites.
|
| It's also quite clearly spelled out in the linked page, the
| mailing list thread[1] and the implementation.
|
| If you can think of a better way to get this kind of data
| that fits more comfortably within your strong personal
| feelings about the contents of URLs then I'm sure the
| "insecure middle management type" that proposed it[2] would
| love to hear your counter-proposal.
|
| 1. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/analytics/2015-Feb
| ruar...
|
| 2. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:ABaso_(WMF)
| [deleted]
| zackbloom wrote:
| That's the definition of biased sampling.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Only if you have reason to suspect that those who opt-in are
| a skewed sample with respect to the things you want to
| measure.
| surround wrote:
| Changes like this are normally discussed and voted on by the
| community, right? Could someone link to the discussion where this
| decision was made, so we can better understand it?
| jchw wrote:
| It was discussed on a mailing list at some point.
|
| https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/analytics/2015-March/0...
| surround wrote:
| > I'd really rather this be either something that's totally
| not understandable by the user (e.g. ?saf=1), or something
| that is clearly understandable (e.g. ?appshareafact=1).
|
| I guess they decided to go with "totally not understandable."
|
| Also - is this mailing list something that anyone can
| participate in, or only wikimedia office staff?
| yorwba wrote:
| There's a form for subscribing to the mailing list here:
| https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jessriedel wrote:
| I noticed this being appended to Wikipedia URLs when I share from
| the Wikipedia mobile app. Apparently it cannot be disabled, which
| I find very distasteful.
| [deleted]
| distances wrote:
| Yep it's annoying. Always have to go through the clipboard so
| that I can remove the parameter manually.
| chrisshroba wrote:
| Just wondering why you're removing it?
| jchw wrote:
| While techniques like these are undoubtedly handy for
| analytics, advertising, affiliates, etc. in my opinion they
| go against the actual purpose of a URL. Removing such
| suffixes makes my URLs cleaner and defeats the purpose of
| the tracking mechanism, a practice which hopefully some day
| will be so commonplace that this kind of tracking is
| abandoned. (And there are tools that automate it, so it
| could some day become a tracking blackhole the way adblock
| is, if such a feature is ever integrated into a popular
| piece of software.)
| gpvos wrote:
| Short, clean URLs. I hate all those
| fbclid&utmz&affiliateid&xyz parameters with a vengeance,
| often they end up longer than the actually meaningful part
| of the URL.
| gojomo wrote:
| I often remove such appendages because I prefer clean,
| compact, semantic URLs that narrowly reflect _my_ specific
| intent when sharing an article: "this article is good".
|
| I don't want any other website/software agendas overlaid
| into my communication in ways that (1) leak info about what
| tools I'm using, even seemingly-innocuous info; (2) dilute
| any salient aspects of the URL by layering on excess (or
| even worse opaque) tracking info.
|
| I've deleted that damn "?s=21" from the end of Twitter URLs
| hundreds of times.
| jessriedel wrote:
| Makes URLs longer and harder to read at a glance, and the
| reader cannot easily judge how much info they are leaking
| when they click it.
| mlinksva wrote:
| I always attempt to remove cruft form links before
| sharing/publishing/including. Cruft is in bad taste, and
| sharing it is bad manners. This assertion may well reflect
| my bad taste, and even bad manners toward people analyzing
| the provenance of clicks!
|
| Maybe https://docs.clearurls.xyz/ (extension for Firefox
| and Chromium-based browsers) will strip wprov from URLs at
| some point
| https://gitlab.com/KevinRoebert/ClearUrls/-/issues/920
|
| Another thing that ought to be built in for browsers to
| live up to being agents for users.
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