User talk:Jack who built the house

Welcome to Tool Labs

Hello Jack who built the house, welcome to the Tool Labs project! Your request for access was processed and you should be able to log in now with ssh at login.tools.wmflabs.org. To get started, check the help page. You can also ask in our IRC channel at #wikimedia-labs ^connect or send an e-mail to our mailing list labs-l@lists.wikimedia.org – thank you, and have fun using Tools!

Regarding your tool idea "of tracking scripts to detect where users click", please note that this might be not compliant with Wikimedia's Terms of Use and you need to run that by at least your community and maybe get approval from WMF. --Tim Landscheidt (talk) 02:40, 21 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. Sure, I've read Terms of Use and will look for approval when it comes to activities which could raise objections. Jack who built the house (talk) 16:01, 21 January 2017 (UTC)

Click tracking and Tool Labs

In your Tool Labs access request you commented "The idea I & other engineers/admins have is to create some kind of tracking scripts to detect where users click. But these scripts have to save information somewhere. This is why we (and I) need Labs.". I have a couple of small concerns about this basic idea that I would like to share. The first is that if you do attempt to implement something like this, you must make sure that the data you collect is completely anonymous. You will be violating the Labs Terms of use and the Wikimedia privacy policy if you collect data about which actual users and/or IPs are taking action on the wikis and store it in Labs or Tool Labs. The second is that you are likely to have problems of scale if you try to track too many activities. I would suggest talking to the Wikimedia Analytics department about the possibility of using Extension:EventLogging for collecting your data rather than trying to implementing something using site javascript or a gadget and a custom collector on Tool Labs.

I don't want to scare you off or block you and your community from making good use of Tool Labs, but please do be careful about both private data and performance. --BryanDavis (talk) 23:24, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

Hello. Your #1 is perfectly obvious for me. As I said, I've read Terms of Use; and even before reading it I had a total understanding no personal information should be collected.

Regarding #2—very interesting! Thank you very much for assistance, I haven't heard of this extension. I will examine this possibility and discuss it with members of our community. At the same time, we have no big plans regarding click tracking so far (can’t say about the future)—specifically, it all grew out of 2 hot debates we had: the one was about which map links we should include to the geographical coordinates block (right now we have as many as 5 links there, as you can see here in the right top corner), and the other was related to which buttons should we have in the Edittools/charinsert section under the edit box. Though both of these could eat up some resources if trying to track all clicks for all users visiting. Jack who built the house (talk) 01:08, 23 January 2017 (UTC)