Theosophy Wiki:Privacy policy

TS Wiki is committed to respecting and protecting the privacy of its users and editors.

Visitors to the wiki

TS Wiki will set a temporary session cookie whenever you visit the site, but that cookie will be deleted when you close your browser session. Other users and adminstrators will not be able to see which pages you visited.

Editors

Authors and editors of articles cannot be anonymous in TS Wiki under its policy of openness and transparency. You give up a measure of privacy when you take on the responsibility of becoming a TS Wiki editor. Editing is a public activity, and submissions by editors are voluntary.

Changes to articles are tracked automatically by the Mediawiki software, with the editor's user ID and a timestamp listed in the History for the article. History can be viewed by anyone, using the “View history” tab at the top of the article. To avoid a messy edit history, we recommend use of the "Show preview" feature and an individual sandbox.

A "persistent" cookie is set when you first log in, to store your user name so that it will be remembered for your next visit, saving you keystrokes. These cookies last up to 30 days, but can be cleared easily.

More about cookies

Use of cookies is extremely common in the Internet, because they facilitate navigation and help to customize the user's Web experience. Cookies are small data files that Web sites write to your hard drive. A cookie file can contain information such as a user ID that the site uses to track the pages you visited, but the only personal information a cookie can contain is information you supply yourself. Adding a cookie to your computer does not give TS Wiki access to any part of your computer (except the cookie itself), or to personal information stored in other Websites' cookies.

Clearing cookies

You can clear cookies by clearing the browser cache. Here is how to do this for several popular browsers:

• Internet Explorer – click Tools on Menu Bar; then Delete browsing history.
• Chrome – click wrench icon; select Tools, then Clear browsing data.
• Firefox – click Tools on Menu Bar; then Clear Recent History.
• Safari – click gear icon; then Reset Safari.
• Opera – click on “O” tab; then Settings, then Delete Private Data.

Passwords

Editors are encouraged to establish strong passwords. Passwords should never be shared. It is important to the integrity of the wiki for each editor to be identified individually and to accept responsibility for the editing that is done using their user ID and password. If you forget your password, contact one of the administrators.

E-mail addresses of editors

A valid e-mail address is needed for each editor. Occasionally the administrators may need to may an announcement to all editors by e-mail, but addresses will be blind-copied to keep them from being revealed to other editors. E-mail addresses will not be used in any other kind of mailing list or revealed to anyone without permission.

Other logged-in users may send e-mail to you through the wiki, unless you disable this in your Preferences. Your address will not be revealed to them unless you respond, or possibly if the email bounces.

Deletion of content

Deleting text from Mediawiki articles does not delete it from History. In normal articles, anyone can look at a previous version and see what was there. Only administrators can delete articles, and even then it is possible for people with “sysop” rights to view the deleted articles.

Use of statistics

The administrators may need to study user traffic patterns from time to time, in order to optimize system performance. We do not intend to correlate this information with data about individual users, except in the case of malicious attacks on the system.