Illapedia:Privacy policy
From Illapedia
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[edit] 1 Summary
If you only read Illapedia, no more information is collected than is typically collected in server logs by web sites in general.
If you contribute to Illapedia, 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.
[edit] 2 Publishing on Illapedia 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 Illapedia, you are publishing a document. This is a public act, and you are identified publicly with that edit as its author.
[edit] 2.1 Identification of an author
When you publish a page in Illapedia, you do not have to be logged in and have a verified email address. If so, your IP address will be posted publicly in the revision history of the page and thus also in Recent Changes and any comments you post on talk pages.
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.
When using a pseudonym, your IP address will not be available to the public, but it will be stored on the Illapedia server for a relatively short amount of time. Thus it will be available to developers and 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 Illapedia contributions. Using a user name is a better way of preserving your privacy in this situation. However, remember to disconnect yourself after using a pseudonym to avoid allowing others to use your identity.
[edit] 2.2 Cookies
Illapedia will set a temporary session cookie (wikidb_session) 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.)
Some MediaWiki extensions such as the "Dismissable Sitenotice" will also create cookies. These save any preferences that are not saved in the database by default such as to hide the sitenotice. Note that you can not edit pages if you deny the "reCAPTCHA" cookie.
[edit] 2.3 Passwords
Many aspects of Illapedia's 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. Note that it is impossible for us to retrieve your password, we can only renew it if necessary.
[edit] 3 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 Illapedia 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 months.
Here's a sample of what's logged for one page view:
64.164.82.142 - - [21/Oct/2006:02:03:19 +0000] "GET /Creatures HTTP/1.1" 200 18084 "http://illarion.org/community/wiki/index.php/Main_Page" "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, in tracking down badly-behaved web spiders that overwhelm the site, or very rarely to correlate usernames and network addresses of edits in investigating abuse of Illapedia.
[edit] 3.1 Policy on release of data derived from page logs
It is the policy of Illapedia that personally identifiable data collected in the server logs will not be released by the developers who have access to it, except as follows:
- In response to a valid subpoena or other compulsory request from law enforcement
- With permission of the affected user
- To the Senior Administration Team of Illapedia, their legal counsel, or their designee, when necessary for investigation of abuse complaints.
- Where the information pertains to page views generated by a spider or bot and its dissemination is necessary to illustrate or resolve technical issues.
- Where the user has been vandalising articles or persistently behaving in a disruptive way, data may be released to assist in the targeting of IP blocks, or to assist in the formulation of a complaint to relevant Internet Service Providers
- Where it is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of Illapedia, its users or the public.
Illapedia policy does not permit public distribution of such information under any circumstances, except as described above.
[edit] 4 Sharing information with third parties
Illapedia will not sell or share private information, such as email addresses, with third parties, unless you agree to release this information, or it is required by law to release the information.
[edit] 5 Security of information
Illapedia makes no guarantee against unauthorized access to any information you provide. This information will be available to all developers with access to the servers.
[edit] 6 E-mail
You may provide your e-mail address in your Preferences. The email address may be used by Illapedia to communicate with users on a wider scale.
If you do not provide an email address, you will not be able to reset your password if you forget it.
[edit] 7 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 occasionally in aggregated forms published by other users.
[edit] 7.1 Removal of user accounts
Once created, user accounts can not be removed at the request of a user. User accounts that are considered inactive may be removed from time to time as decided by the Illapedia Senior Administration team. It may be possible for a developer to change the username on an account, but you will need to request this yourself. Illapedia does not guarantee that a name will be changed on request.
Whether specific user information is deleted is dependant on the deletion policies of the project that contains the information.
[edit] 8 Deletion of content
Deleting text from Illapedia does not really delete them. In normal articles, anyone can look at a previous version and see what was there. If an article is "deleted", any sysop/administrator, meaning almost anyone trusted not to abuse the deletion capability, can see what was deleted. Only a developer can permanently delete information from Illapedia and there is no guarantee this will happen except in response to legal action.
[edit] 9 Copyright
This privacy policy has been adapted from Wikipedia's Privacy Policy and is released under the same license.
[edit] 10 Disclaimers
Please see the Disclaimers.
