WikiLectures:Privacy Policy

Summary
Your access to Wikilectures is routinely stored in web server log. Everything you contribute to Wikilectures is published at this project. If you write something, assume that it will be saved here forever. This applies to articles, user and discussion pages. Some exceptions are discussed below.

Public information
If you visit a website, a log record is saved to website log file. From this log, however, it is very difficult to determine your identity. If you edit a Wikilectures page, you publish your work and your authorship is marked in the history of the article.

Author identification
When editing a page you can be logged in or not. If you are logged in, your edits will be signed by your nickname. If you are not logged in, your IP address will be record and written in the history of the article. Through IP address it is possible to get your real identity, even if it is very toilsome. So we recommend to use a user account and edit articles while logged in.

Cookies
During your visit at this website Wikilectures send you a temporary cookie (PHPSESSID). If you want to log in, some other cookies will be sent to you so you do not need to enter your username and password everytime you visit a Wikilectures page. However, when you log out or clear your browser cache, these cookies are deleted.

Passwords
Your password should stay secret. If you are working on a public computer, we recommend to log out when leaving Wikilectures and close all browser windows. This will keep your password secret.

Protected logs
Every time you visit a webpage you send a large amount of information. Most servers keep these information to get some statistics about favourite pages, reference pages, etc.

Wikilectures as MediaWiki software use these information only for statistics and usually delete them after two weeks. Here is an example of such log:

64.164.82.142 - - [21/Oct/2003:02:03:19 +0000] "GET /wiki/draft_privacy_policy HTTP/1.1" 200 18084 "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_projects:Village_pump" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/85.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/85.5"

Only administrators can see these logs and only for purpose to solve some technical problem about software or to check out e.g. a vandalism. There is possibly no way, how could common user without direct access to the server display this log.