wikimedia
Remove providence tracker
PLEASE remove this junk. I know it only takes like five seconds to remove it when I bookmark or share links but it's the five most annoying seconds of every day—many times per day even since I link a lot to Wikipedia. With this line removed, a lot of the other functions in this file become nops so feel free to squash in some commits that remove all of them as you merge this. Wikipedia is something we all created for the public benefit, not to be annoying and painful like commercial malware is.
Hi @snan, thanks for your contribution. The provenance values we add to URLs are a valuable tool for tracking sharing from the Wikipedia app to other platforms, helping us understand and demonstrate the impact of our work. We understand it can be inconvenient for some users, so I suggest adding a setting that allows users to opt out of it instead of completely removing it. You can update this PR with the settings option or create a Phabricator ticket on our board for this if you don't feel comfortable working on it.
This sort of tracking does not belong in a free, for-the-people (and by the people!), charity-funded project. There's just no way if I link to a wikipedia page that I'd want to leave that gunk in the URL. Opt out would not be enough. Even opt-in (setting no-tracking by default) would not be enough. I spend so much time working on Wikipedia articles that when I try to link to them it should be a straight-forward, normal URL not a tracking URL. Are you serious right now. Rhetorical question because the answer is of course to REMOVE THE JUNK.
We don't want 👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀 spying on us when we use the reference library that we all made together. It's not an ad-driven "news" site or "social network" darkpattern attention trap. It's a collaborative reference work and encyclopedia.
Noting this as the teams Engineering Manager that I'm going to decline this specific pull request. We don't use this for any kind of granular tracking of individuals. The url string that gets attached is a generic id that allows us to measure the impacts of the apps or a feature as a whole, something that is vital for a non-profit to be able to do. However I do believe giving people the ability to turn this is off is something we should explore and we've created a task to add this capability in the future.
