Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Archive/Provide Editors with online private space

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Provide Editors with online private space

  • Problem: Currently users must store large amounts of data on their own computers/smartphones/whatever even when such data relates directly to their wiki work. Ideas are sometimes lost when a user has no access to their regular storage media, but not everyone can afford or has the freedom to carry their own individual storage gadgets around
  • Who would benefit: Users working on long term projects which they prefer to keep private for the time being / the wikis those users contribute to
  • Proposed solution: Provide a private namespace where editors can store private information which they do not want to share with the rest of the world until it is ready for publication
  • More comments: This idea has been plagiarized from (the defunct?) Yahoo Groups where users were provided various online storage spaces which could be designated as private. It was great because it allowed participants to store information no matter where they were editing from: home, work, school, etc.
  • Phabricator tickets:

Discussion[edit]

This proposal seems somewhat vague. What kind of data are you talking about? Private drafts, private file storage? How do we avoid it becoming a new way to store copyvios? Some Wikipedia Zero users are already using us as their free Youtube - wouldn't having private storage only make this problem worse? Max Semenik (talk) 21:37, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

We already have private storage for ContentTranslation and Phabricator drafts, and stashed uploads, so a new private area wouldn't really make that problem worse. OTOH as long as the private storage is not really integrated with the workflow (the way e.g. drafts are), why not just one of the many external solutions (Dropbox, Google Doc, whatever) instead of investing effort into something that will have a fraction of that functionality? --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 22:51, 19 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

No. MER-C (talk) 03:13, 19 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Is this a page which would only be viewable by the user and admins? In that case I think that copyvios would be less of a concern, and might be covered by the "private research" exemptions in some territories. Availability of the page would need to be restricted to "regular editors" by some criteria. AlasdairW (talk) 15:43, 19 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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