[nre]

> We cannot recommend external resolver services such as those run by Google, Cloudflare, Quad9, among others, for a variety of reasons. We have no control over how these services are run or what private data is logged. Even though most of these services have explicit privacy policies, they do log some data and we have no control or insight into that.

I find it very ironic that Wikipedia themselves talk about the privacy/logging practices of other DNS services but neglect to indicate a clear policy for their own service. I would imagine it's based off the regular Wikipedia privacy policy but they should clearly indicate that.

[judiisis]

It's in the privacy policy section >Wikimedia DNS is still being beta-tested and evaluated both internally and with our community. As such, there are no guarantees of the reliability or future availability of the service, and there is no formal privacy policy published yet. That said, our current configuration (visible here: dnsdist.conf.erb and recursor.conf.erb) does not currently log anything. We currently intend, in broad strokes, to adhere to the Foundation's long-standing values around privacy-related issues, as well as to Mozilla's TRR policy, when and if this service is more-formally launched in the future.

[NoPicklez]

Couldn't agree more.

It's very easy to throw shade at other providers, then not provide those assurances in your own service.

It seems like a weak attempt to throw shade at other providers without substantiated claims. Take Quad9 for instance, they have plenty of information in their transparency report regarding their service, over and above what Wikimedia has provided.

[ff317]

[Disclosure: I'm an engineer at Wikimedia involved with this project]

Wikimedia hasn't actually formally launched or announced this project. We've been working on it in the background for a long time, and we've just recently reached the point of wanting to do a slightly-broader round of both beta-testing the service and soliciting other meta-feedback on the plans with our Wikipedia editor and reader communities.

Unfortunately, the only way we can do this testing and feedback round is through a public interface like meta-wiki. And of course, once we've put out public information on how to use and access it, it's being picked up on various social media and news sites and publicized beyond what we desired at this stage. We knew that was a risk, but it's still a little jarring how fast it has shown up in places like this HN thread.

We absolutely plan to have a published privacy policy and other such things in place when the service is actually, officially launched. Launching some time in the future is not yet certain to even happen, as there is still internal evaluation/debate of the project's various costs and risk/benefit going on during this phase as well.

[nre]

Beta service or not I still think it's a good idea to have a policy up as soon as possible, even if it's a broad one saying that this is still in development and all queries are logged for diagnostics or something. Considering how this is on HN it's going to be on Reddit and Twitter soon and it'll explode from there.

[pabs3]

Sorry, I didn't think about the impact of posting this here, it showed up on IRC first though.

[nvy]

>showed up on IRC

Does wikimedia have an IRC server?

[extraduder_ire]

They don't have an official one, but many de-facto rooms exist on other networks operated by volunteers. Mainly on Libera chat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IRC has more detail.

[pabs3]

Not sure, but the link was on OFTC.

[NoPicklez]

I think all of that is completely understandable when launching a new service.

But I would refrain from commenting on other services, if you don't have those assurance in place yourself.