[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.