Wine-Wiki:Privacy policy
From Wine-Wiki
When you edit any page in the wiki, you are publicly publishing a document and you are identified publicly with that edit as its author.
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Identification of Editors
When you publish a page in the wiki, if you are logged in, you will be identified by your user name. This may be your real name if you so choose, or you may choose to publish under a pseudonym, whatever user name you selected when you created your account.
If you have not logged in, you will be identified by your network IP address. This is a series of four numbers which identifies the Internet address from which you are contacting the wiki. Depending on your connection, this number may be traceable only to a large Internet service provider, or specifically to your school, place of business, or home. It may be possible that the origin of this IP address could be used in conjunction with any interests you express implicitly or explicitly by editing articles to identify you even by private individuals.
It may be either difficult or easy for a motivated individual to connect your network IP address with your real-life identity. Therefore if you are very concerned about privacy, you may wish to log in and publish under a pseudonym.
When using a pseudonym, your IP address will not be available to the public except in cases of abuse, including vandalism of a wiki page by you or by another user with the same IP address. In all cases, your IP address will be stored on the wiki servers and can be seen by the Wiki server administrators and by a few users who have been granted access. Your IP address, and its connection to any usernames that share it may be released under certain circumstances (see below).
If you use a company mail server from home or telecommute and use a DSL or cable Internet connection, it is likely to be very easy for your employer to identify your IP address and find all of your IP based Wikimedia project contributions. Using a user name is a better way of preserving your privacy in this situation. However, remember to log out or disconnect yourself after each session using a pseudonym on a shared computer, to avoid allowing others to use your identity.
Wine-wiki publishes your IP address or user name alongside every edits that you may make. We will meet any obligations imposed upon us by law which may involve wiki records. Your IP address, and its connection to any user names that share it or we may use as we see necessary for the wiki. Essentially under a wiki, you are important. We are interested in the articles you write and the knowledge you share. If the editor is a vandal, we wish to remove it and discourage his return and use the information the wiki provides to do this. When a user shares useful information and supports the wiki, we wish to prevent vandals damaging your work.
Creating a user name is helpful when you are making several edits. This helps the administrators recognize the editor and gain a measure of trust in your work.
When creating a user name, you may also wish to add a contact email address. This is stored and can be used by wikimedia for when other registered users use the wiki to send you an email. With the current version of Wikimedia [Jan 08], the address itself is not visible to registered users, nor is contact using email available to non registered users. We don't expect this to change. For years we have not used emails for any other purpose other than to contact editors regarding the wiki and on occasion we have found it helpful to quickly contact an editor regarding a page. If you are very concerned about the privacy of your email address, you might decide to create an email address that uses a pseudonym. Should you add an email address? It is for you to weigh up though we have found it does come in handy at times.
Your email address should not be seen by other users unless you respond, or possibly if the email bounces. The email address may be used by the Wiki to communicate with users and if you do not provide an email address, you will not be able to reset your password if you forget it. Don't forget you can remove your email address from your preferences at any time.
Cookies
The wiki will set a temporary session cookie whenever you visit. If you do not intend to ever log in, you may deny this cookie, but you cannot log in without it. More cookies may be set when you log in, to avoid typing in your user name (or optionally password) on your next visit. These last up to 30 days. You may clear these cookies after use if you are using a public machine and don't wish to expose your username to future users of the machine. (If so, clear the browser cache as well.)
Deletion
Removing text from the Wiki does not permanently delete it. In normal articles, anyone can look at a previous version and see what was there. If an article is "deleted", any user with "administrator" access on the wiki, meaning almost anyone trusted not to abuse the deletion capability, can see what was deleted.
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