WikiEducator:Privacy policy

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Why this privacy policy

Contributions to WikiEducator come from many sources; individuals, groups and organizations. Most of the contributors are adults, some are children. This privacy policy was put into place to provide terms of use, in particular to articulate how WikiEducator will protect the children who use this service.

What this privacy policy covers

This Privacy Policy covers WikiEducators treatment of personally identifiable information that is collected when you use this site, and when you use the WikiEducator services.
Information that you provide to WikiEducator is used for communicating with you and/or enhancing your experience with WikiEducator. WikiEducator does not distribute your individual information to others except as may be compelled by law. Collective information may be shared with others but does not identify individuals.

Terms of use

  1. You must be at least 13 years or older to register and use this Service. If you are under the age of 13, you must use an account created by a parent or guardian, and you must have the explicit permission of a parent or guardian to use the Service.
  2. You are responsible for all transactions that occur from within your account or under your screen name. You are responsible for keeping your password secure. You must immediately notify the WikiEducator of any breach of security or unauthorized use of your account. WikiEducator is not liable for losses caused by unauthorized use of your account, you may be liable for such unauthorized use.
  3. The use of some features of this service, require the creation of an account. You may never use another user's account without prior permission. You must provide accurate and complete information when creating an account on WikiEducator.
  4. You agree not to employ automated systems (including crawlers, spiders, robots, etc) that send more requests to WikiEducator servers than possible to do by a human using a conventional web-browser in the same amount of time.
  5. You may not use WikiEducator for any illegal, illicit, or unauthorized purposes. Users agree to comply with all local laws regarding online conduct and acceptable content.
  6. You are responsible for any and all content (data, text, information, screen name, graphics, photos, profiles, audio, video clips, links, or any information that you contribute to WikiEducator) that you submit, post, share, attribute, create, and display on WikiEducator.
  7. All the content you deploy to the WikiEducator service must be within the CC-BY-SA or CC-BY creative commons license.
  8. You agree not to transmit, construct, or provide means to send unwanted email messages to any WikiEducator user or use this service to convey unsolicited or unwanted emails to external users.
  9. You may not transmit any code, worms, or viruses or destructive code to the WikiEducator Service or to hosts such code on this service.
  10. You may not use WikiEducator to violate any laws in your jurisdiction. You may not post any content that violates the copyright, trademark or other intellectual property rights of WikiEducator or a third party.
    1. Violation of these terms can result in the immediate termination of your WikiEducator account and the removal of all associated content. While WikiEducator strictly prohibits such conduct and content on its Service, you understand and agree that WikiEducator cannot be responsible for the Content posted by users on the service. Furthermore, you understand that you may be exposed to such materials and that your use of WikiEducator is at your own risk.
    2. WikiEducator respects the intellectual property of others, and we ask you and our users to do the same. WikiEducator may disable and/or terminate a user's account if WikiEducator determines that the user is violating applicable copyright or other intellectual property rights of WikiEducator or any other third party.
  11. WikiEducator may contain links by third party websites that are not owned, affiliated, or controlled by WikiEducator. WikiEducator has no control over and assumes no responsibility for content, policies, or practices of any third party website. Moreover, WikiEducator cannot edit or censor any of the content provided by these third party sites. By using the service, you are relieving WikiEducator from any and all liabilities arising from your use of these third party websites.

Information Sharing

The whole point of this wiki is to share information. WikiEductor is meant to be an international engine of Open Educational Resources (OER). Join, contribute, and contribute often. WikiEducator agrees with the idea of free cultural works and believes in publishing educational materials as free cultural works. It is NOT WikiEducator's practice to share personal or private information. for further information regarding the sharing of personal information see the release of data section below.

Your profile

Identification of an author

When you publish a page in the wiki, you must be logged in.

When 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. If you are very concerned about privacy, you may wish to log in and publish under a pseudonym.

When using a pseudonym, your IP address will not be available to the public except in cases of abuse, including vandalism of a wiki page by you or by another user with the same IP address. In all cases, your IP address will be stored on the wiki servers and can be seen by WikiEducator's server administrators. Your IP address, and its connection to any usernames that share it may be released under certain circumstances (see below). Remember to log out or disconnect yourself after each session using a pseudonym on a shared computer, to avoid allowing others to use your identity.

Passwords

Many aspects of the WikiEducator's 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.

Contributions

Simply visiting the web site does not expose your identity publicly (but see private logging below).

When you edit any page in the wiki, you are publishing a document. This is a public act, and you are identified publicly with that edit as its author.

Cookies

The wiki will set a temporary session cookie (PHPSESSID) 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.)

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 the WikiEducator 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 weeks.

Here's a MediaWiki sample of what's logged for one page view: 

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/Wikipedia:Village_pump"
"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 and in tracking down badly-behaved web spiders that overwhelm the site. IP addresses of users, derived either from those logs or from records in the database are frequently used to correlate usernames and network addresses of edits in investigating abuse of the wiki, including the suspected use of malicious "sockpuppets" (duplicate accounts), vandalism, harassment of other users, or disruption of the wiki.

Policy on release of data derived from page logs

It is the policy of WikiEducator that personally identifiable data collected in the server logs, or through records in the database via the CheckUser feature, may be released by the system administrators or users with CheckUser access, in the following situations:

  1. In response to a valid subpoena or other compulsory request from law enforcement
  2. With permission of the affected user
  3. Where the information pertains to page views generated by a spider or bot and its dissemination is necessary to illustrate or resolve technical issues.
  4. 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
  5. Where it is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of the WikiEducator, its users, the OER Foundation, its funders and or the general public.

WikiEducator policy does not permit public distribution of such information under any circumstances, except as described above.

Copyright

All content contributed to WikiEducator will be done using a CC-BY or CC-BY-SA creative commons licence.

To read further on this policy see the related FAQ page: What Copyright Licensing Arrangements Does WikiEducator Use

Confidentiality and security

  • We limit access to personal information about you to employees who, as part of their job, we believe need to come into contact with that information to provide services and features to you, and to administer our server(s).
  • We have physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards to protect personal information about you.
  • In the event that you believe that your personal safety is at risk or if you believe that you may be the victim of identity theft or other illegal conduct, please contact the appropriate federal, provincial or local law enforcement agencies directly.

Consent

WikiEducator has created some templates for your use as consent forms. If your school requires the parents or legal guardians consent for the minor to contribute and collaborate on WikiEducator please feel free to use one of these templates and edit it for your schools use.

WikiEducator considers it the responsibility of the parents and school to monitor the activities of minors as they contribute to WikiEducator. It is important for institutions to follow their local, regional and national policies in the protection of minors while engaged in online activities. The consent form is one way to communicate these policies. To protect minors it is suggested the parents and/or teachers use one of the following methods to conceal the identity of minors;

  1. Parent created id's
  2. Teacher created and assigned id's
  3. Shared institution or project id's

References

This privacy policy was created by reviewing and / or making reference to the following sites;

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