Talk:OWID Gadget

Disappointment is not the word

The WMF breaks things. The WMF doesn't unbreak those things. Volunteers ask for features. The WMF doesn't deliver any solution. Volunteers work on solutions. The WMF blocks those solutions. Volunteers solve the issue. The WMF tries to break those again. Disappointment is not the word for that. We are dying. This is why. -Theklan (talk) 19:55, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

Not first gadget to use a consent pop-up

This is not the first gadget to use a consent pop-up within our movement. This pathway was based off what has been done for years on WikiVoyage with respect to topographical overlays for maps. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:12, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Doc James. Two notes here. First, a consent pop-up is an important part of privacy compliance, but it's not the whole thing. Kartographer, and Wikivoyage maps more generally, are part of a service that the Foundation hosts and that staff monitor and maintain. It has policies and security and legal review associated with it. It's not that Wikimedia projects can never send people to third parties, it's that not all third parties are the same. Some of them may collect more data than just IPs, or pose a greater privacy and security risk to users. In that context, a consent pop-up alone doesn't do the trick: we have to review the terms of how the third party uses data and either agree to them as an organization or execute a custom contract with them to handle data more carefully if their terms aren't good enough. The consent pop-up then becomes one piece of properly informing users of how their data is being used by a third party service provider in line with the Foundation's privacy policy. If you just do the pop-up without the review, it doesn't get there as far as privacy compliance is concerned. Second, I'm actually not sure about the quality of the particular gadget here. It looks like that got into place circa 2016, which was a wildly different privacy and security landscape than 2024. Expectations were much lower in terms of hosting a website around the world. If anything, pointing to this example is a second reason why we need a policy now to make sure we're not creating privacy and security risk going forward and are handling issues like this consistently. Jrogers (WMF) (talk) 21:57, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

Then host the software. Theklan (talk) 22:01, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

Their privacy policy is here. We have the software hosted on the wmcloud[1] but from what I understand it needs to be on production servers and it needs to have a technical team within the WMF dedicated to it before it becomes usable on WP. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:08, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

Risks

How is the risk any different than having a reference for a graph that includes a url linking to OWID? When one clicks on such a url it brings you to OWID and shares your IP address and machine details with them. We have millions of references that include urls without warnings. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:12, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

may be required to disallow loading content from ourworldindata.org

The whole point of this approach is that there is no content loaded from ourworldindata.org, only a static image loaded from commons. As Doc James says there is a reference link to the original source of that image and a warning about viewing it, which is actually more risk averse than the normal practice of allowing exit without warning to the reference url, which has no sandboxing. Tim-moody (talk) 21:29, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

OWID Gadget vs Graph extension

To be clear the Graph extension relied on third party libraries and was, I would guess, at least two orders of magnitude greater in scope and complexity than the OWID Gadget, which I expect is less than 100 lines of code. This code has already had three contributors who agree to collaborate on a central source. So reviewing this code should not prove difficult, and it speaks well to the subject of maintenance. Tim-moody (talk) 21:38, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

Not a workaround

I realize that this is frustrating for people here who have been working on OWID and are excited about it as a work around while graphs are disabled.

I want to clarify that this is not a work around while graphs are disabled. This is a solution. Not a workaround. The so-called solution for graphs is light years behind this. If it is solved in the future (it has been broken for a year, and will take at least one more year), it will be non interactive images, and only lines. If the WMF decides to go once more against our strategic goals and close the OWID solution, the interactivity it brings won't come with the proposal mentioned on the graphs discussion. It won't even be near that. Theklan (talk) 21:59, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

I agree, this is a strategic discussion. We will achieve the sum of all human knowledge more rapidly by collaborating with like minded organizations than just going it alone. We need to balance our ideals with the reality of the world around us. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:11, 26 April 2024 (UTC)