Powerbase:Privacy Policy

Summary

If you only read the Powerbase website, no more information is collected than is typically collected in server logs by web sites in general.

If you contribute to Powerbase, you are publishing every word you post publicly. If you write something, assume that it will be retained forever. This includes articles, user pages and talk pages. Some limited exceptions are described below.

Publishing on Powerbase and public data

Simply visiting the web site does not expose your identity publicly (but see private logging below).

When you edit any page in Powerbase, you are publishing a document. This is a public act, and you are identified publicly with that edit as its author.

Identification of an author

When you publish a page in Powerbase, you will be logged in and identified by your user name (your real name).

The public and collaborative nature of Powerbase

Powerbase is collaboratively developed by registered Users using the MediaWiki software. Anyone whom Powerbase editors approve as a User, and who has Internet access, may edit existing material or contribute new material. By doing this, Users create a published document, and a public record of every word added, subtracted, or changed. This is a public act, and editors are identified publicly as the author of such changes. All contributions made to Powerbase, and all publicly available information about those contributions, are irrevocably licensed and may be freely copied, quoted, reused and adapted by third parties with few restrictions.

When a User registers with Powerbase, their full and real name goes into a list of Users that is visible to the public. Members of the public may communicate with a User by leaving a message on their User Talk page. The User will then automatically receive an email from Powerbase alerting them to the fact that someone has left a message from them on their User Talk page. The User may choose to respond to the message-leaver by leaving a message in turn on their User Talk page. At no point in this process is either User's email or other contact details visible or accessible to any member of the public.

Exceptions to this rule are Users (including Powerbase editors) who choose to publish their email address on their User Talk page. This enables members of the public to communicate with a User or editor directly, bypassing the User Talk page.

Powerbase will never pass on to any third party the email address or any other contact details of any User except

• Insofar as is necessary to protect the project in circumstances of vandalism or abuse, detailed in the section, "Purpose of the collection of private information", below, or
• In the event that Powerbase is required by law to disclose this information.

Powerbase will never sell the email address or other contact details of any User to a third party.

User accounts and authorship

Powerbase requires Users first to register with the project by emailing the managing editor at melissa.jonesATPowerbase.org.

Users are sent a User name and password by email. The password is confidential and is used to verify the integrity of their account. Except insofar as it may be required by law, no person should disclose, or knowingly expose, either User passwords and/or cookies generated to identify a User. Once created, user accounts will not be removed. However, Powerbase editors can delete a User's email address from the User list at their request, so that they no longer receive emails from Powerbase.

Purpose of the collection of private information

Powerbase limits the collection of personally identifiable user data to purposes which serve the well-being of its projects, including but not limited to the following:

• To enhance the public accountability of the project. Powerbase editors recognize that any system that is open enough to allow the greatest possible participation of the public will also be vulnerable to abuse and counterproductive behaviour. Powerbase has established a number of mechanisms to prevent or remedy abusive activities. For example, when investigating abuse on a project, including the suspected use of malicious “sockpuppets” (duplicate accounts), vandalism, harassment of other users, or disruptive behavior, the IP addresses of Users (derived either from those logs or from records in the database) may be used to identify the source(s) of the abusive behaviour. This information may be shared by Users with administrative authority who are charged by Powerbase editors with protecting the project.
• To provide site statistics. SPowerbase may statistically sample raw log data from Users' visits. These logs are used to produce the site statistics pages; the raw log data is not made public.
• To solve technical problems. Log data may be examined by developers in the course of solving technical problems and in tracking down badly-behaved web spiders that overwhelm the site.

Cookies

Powerbase will set a temporary session cookie (PHPSESSID) whenever you visit the site. If you do not intend to ever log in, you may deny this cookie, but you cannot log in without it. It will be deleted when you close your browser session.

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.)

Passwords

Many aspects of the Powerbase community interactions depend on the reputation and respect that is built up through a history of valued contributions. User passwords are the only guarantee of the integrity of a user's edit history. All users are encouraged to select strong passwords and to never share them. No one shall knowingly expose the password of another user to public release either directly or indirectly.

Private logging

Every time you visit a web page, you send a lot of information to the web server. Most web servers routinely maintain access logs with a portion of this information, which can be used to get an overall picture of what pages are popular, what other sites link to this one, and what web browsers people are using. It is not the intention of Powerbase to use this information to keep track of legitimate users.

These logs are used to produce the site statistics pages; the raw log data is not made public, and is normally discarded after about two weeks.

Here's a sample of what's logged for one page view:

64.164.82.142 - - [21/Oct/2003:02:03:19 +0000]
"GET /wiki/draft_privacy_policy HTTP/1.1" 200 18084
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_projects:Village_pump"
"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/85.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/85.5"

Log data may be examined by developers in the course of solving technical problems and in tracking down badly-behaved web spiders that overwhelm the site. IP addresses of users, derived either from those logs or from records in the database are frequently used to correlate usernames and network addresses of edits in investigating abuse of Powerbase, including the suspected use of malicious "sockpuppets" (duplicate accounts), vandalism, harassment of other users, or disruption of Powerbase.

Policy on release of data derived from page logs

It is the policy of Powerbase that personally identifiable data collected in the server logs, or through records in the database via the CheckUser feature, may be released by the system administrators or users with CheckUser access, in the following situations:

1. In response to a valid subpoena or other compulsory request from law enforcement
2. With permission of the affected user
3. To the chair of Powerbase, his/her legal counsel, or his/her designee, when necessary for investigation of abuse complaints.
4. Where the information pertains to page views generated by a spider or bot and its dissemination is necessary to illustrate or resolve technical issues.
5. Where the user has been vandalising articles or persistently behaving in a disruptive way, data may be released to assist in the targeting of blocks, or to assist in the formulation of a complaint to relevant Internet Service Providers
6. Where it is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of Powerbase, its users or the public.

Powerbase policy does not permit public distribution of such information under any circumstances, except as described above.

Sharing information with third parties

Except where otherwise specified, all text added to Powerbase is available for reuse under the terms of the GFDL.

Powerbase will not sell or share private information (such as email addresses) with third parties. The exception is if a User agrees to release this information for a specific purpose or if Powerbase is required by law to release the information.

Security of information

The Powerbase makes no guarantee against unauthorized access to any information you provide. This information may be available to anyone with access to the servers. A partial list of those people can be found in the developers list.

E-mail, mailing lists and IRC

E-mail

You may provide your e-mail address in your Preferences and enable other logged-in users to send emails to you through Powerbase. Your address will not be revealed to them unless you respond, or possibly if the email bounces. The email address may be used by Powerbase to communicate with users on a wider scale.

You can remove your email address from your preferences at any time to prevent it being used.

Mailing lists

If you subscribe to one of the project mailing lists, your address will be exposed to any other subscriber. The list archives of most of Powerbase's mailing lists are public, and your address may find itself quoted in messages. The list archives are also archived by Gmane and other services. Mails are usually not deleted or modified, but it may be done in extreme cases.

Information email addresses

Some email addresses (see below) may forward mail to a team of volunteers trusted by Powerbase to use a ticket system such as OTRS to view them and answer them. Mail sent to the system is not publicly visible, but is visible to this group of Powerbase volunteers. By sending a mail to one of these addresses, your address may become public within this group. The ticket system team may discuss the contents of your mail with other contributors in order to best answer your query.

Addresses that direct to the ticket system system include:

• info-de AT wikipedia DOT org
• info-en AT wikipedia DOT org
• info-es AT wikipedia DOT org
• info-fr AT wikipedia DOT org
• info-it AT wikipedia DOT org
• info-nl AT wikipedia DOT org
• info-pl AT wikipedia DOT org

Mail to board members' private addresses may also be forwarded to the OTRS team.

IRC

IRC channels are not officially part of Powerbase proper. By participating in an IRC channel, your IP address may be exposed to other participants. Different channels have different policies on whether logs may be published.

User data

Data on users, such as the times at which they edited and the number of edits they have made are publicly available via "user contributions" lists, and in aggregated forms published by other users.

Removal of user accounts

Once created, user accounts will not be removed.

Whether specific user information is deleted is dependant on the deletion policies of the project that contains the information.

Deletion of content

Removing text from Powerbase 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 Powerbase, meaning almost anyone trusted not to abuse the deletion capability, can see what was deleted. Information can be permanently deleted by those people with access to the servers, but there is no guarantee this will happen except in response to legal action.