08/09/2021 02:42 Cookie statement - Wikimedia Foundation Governance Wiki

Cookie statement
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As stated in our Privacy Policy, Wikimedia believes strongly in the values of privacy and
transparency. To that end, we’ve created this Cookie Statement as a clear reference guide to the
use of cookies on Wikimedia Sites. This Cookie Statement explains how we use cookies (and other
locally stored data technologies), how we use third-party cookies, and how you can manage your
cookie options. For more information on our privacy practices, please visit our Privacy Policy.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that hosts the Wikimedia Sites, actively
collects some types of information with a variety of commonly-used technologies. These generally
include tracking pixels, JavaScript, and a variety of "locally stored data" technologies, such as
cookies and local storage.

Contents
What is a cookie?
What types of cookies does Wikimedia use and for what purposes?
What are my cookie options?
Where can I find more information?

What is a cookie?
A “cookie” is a tiny data file that we transfer onto your computer, mobile phone, or any other
device that you use to access the Wikimedia Sites, and is generally used for authentication and
tracking. Every cookie expires after a certain period of time, but that period varies depending on
what the cookie is used for and how your browser is configured.

Cookies are often categorized based on how long they remain active before they expire. A “session”
cookie is one that generally expires when you close your web browser or mobile application. A
“persistent” cookie is one that remains in your device, even after you close your browser or mobile
application.  A persistent cookie expires according to the duration set by us, or when you delete it
manually. You can learn more about cookies on Wikipedia.

You may remove or disable cookies through your browser settings. For more information on how
to manage your cookie options, please see Section 3 of this Cookie Statement below.

For more information on this and other key terms that may be relevant, please read through our
Privacy Policy Glossary.

What types of cookies does Wikimedia use and for what

purposes?

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Cookies are not required in order to read or edit the Wikimedia Sites. We use the information we
receive from cookies and other locally-stored data technologies to make your experience with the
Wikimedia Sites safer and better, to gain a greater understanding of user preferences and
interactions with the Wikimedia Sites, and to generally improve our services. Cookies are required
in order to login and for your edits to be associated to a user account; without cookies, your edits
will be anonymous and unassociated with an account.

We use cookies, JavaScript, tracking pixels, and other locally-stored data technologies to
accomplish different purposes. Below is a list of the categories of cookies we use and what they are
used for.

Functionality:

These cookies help the Wikimedia Sites work and are essential in order to enable you to move
around the Wikimedia site and use their features. These cookies are useful for remembering your
username in the login field, maintaining your session and remembering previous actions, keeping
you logged in (if selected), and more.

Here are a few examples:

Name Expires Category What does it do?

centralauth_Token
365 days, if the user
Provides ‘Keep me logged in’
{$wgCookiePrefix}* chooses ‘Keep me logged Functionality
functionality.
Token in’. Otherwise omitted.

365 days, if the user

{$wgCookiePrefix}* Helps identify you to the wiki, and
chooses ‘Keep me logged Functionality
UserID, UserName keeps you logged in.
in’. Otherwise 30 days.
Verifies that you are logging in from a
known device.

This affects the threshold for

loginnotify_prevlogins 180 days Functionality
how many unsuccessful login
attempts trigger a notification to
the user.

centralauth_Session
Manage sessions. Provides
{$wgCookiePrefix}* When user exits browser Functionality functionality such as logging in to
Session Wikimedia Projects.

Preferences:

These cookies store your preferences, so that they can be remembered the next time you use the
Wikimedia Sites, for a more customized experience.  These cookies are useful for recognizing and
maintaining your language preference, remembering changes you have made to text size, fonts and
other display preferences, so we can provide you with the look and feel that you want, and more.  

Here are a few examples:

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Name Expires Category What does it do?

Tells us not to redirect to the mobile
stopMobileRedirect 30 days Preferences
site if you don’t like that.
Local Allows you to set preferences for the
uls-preferences Storage, not Preferences Universal Language Selector
a cookie functionality.
hidewatchlistmessage-
[watchlistMessageId]
Allows a user to hide a watchlist
28 days Preferences
● where watchlistMessageld is the message.
Id of the message being hidden

Local
Keeps track of your preferred font
userFontSize Storage, not Preferences
size on the mobile site.
a cookie
Local
Keeps track of your preferred editor
preferredEditor Storage, not Preferences
on the mobile site.
a cookie

Performance and Analysis:

These cookies count the number of visitors and collect information about how you use the
Wikimedia Sites. This allows us to better understand your user experience on the Wikimedia Sites
and helps us improve them for you and other users — for instance, by making sure users are
finding what they need easily. Other examples include:

remembering pages visited, and actions taken on the Wikimedia sites so we can optimize the
pages;
remembering if users get error messages from web pages;
storing your most recently read articles directly on your device, so they can be retrieved
quickly;
remembering the topics searched so that we can optimize the search results we deliver to you;
remembering the list of articles you are following on your watchlist so that we can recommend
similar articles that you may be interested in.

Here are a few examples:

Name Expires Category What does it do?

Helps us understand the effectiveness of notices
Performance provided to users through the CentralNotice extension.
centralnotice_bucket 7 days
and Analysis For more details, see
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CentralNotice
Local
Storage, Performance
ext.popups.core.previewCount Helps us understand the effectiveness of Hovercards.
not a and Analysis
cookie
Helps us calculate Unique devices accessing our site.
Performance
WMF-Last-Access 30 days See: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/03/30/unique-
and Analysis
devices-dataset/

Third-Party:

We will never use third-party cookies on our wikis unless we get your permission to do so. These
cookies would allow us to render services provided by third parties, such as “like” and “share”
buttons. When a third party provides these kinds of services, they may require the use of a cookie
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in order to provide their services.

If you ever come across a third-party cookie transferred to your device during your access of the
Wikimedia wiki sites, where you did not take any action to authorize the use and/or transfer of
that cookie  (such as one that may have been mistakenly placed by another user or administrator),
please report that cookie to us at privacy@wikimedia.org (mailto:privacy@wikimedia.org).

A note about Wikimedia sites hosted by WordPress:

Some non-wiki Wikimedia Foundation sites are hosted by a third-party service provider,
WordPress VIP. These sites may have the WordPress Stats module enabled. Stats is a service that
allows us to understand how many visitors we get to our WordPress-hosted non-wiki sites, their
location by country, and which pages, posts and links are the most popular. Only the Wikimedia
Foundation and the service provider, Automattic/WordPress, have access to the raw Stats data,
which is retained for a maximum of 30 days. For more information about Stats, see WordPress’
support page on the module (https://en.support.wordpress.com/stats/).

What are my cookie options?

While this is not a comprehensive list, below are some of the things that you can do to limit use of
cookies and other locally-stored data technologies on your device. While cookies and other locally-
stored data technologies may not be necessary to use our sites, some features may not function
properly if you disable them.

You can:

remove or disable specific locally-stored data on your browser’s settings (you can reset your
web browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent);
use a browser that can block third-party cookies; or
install a plug-in to block locally-stored data, if one is available.

Turning off the browser’s cookies will prevent tracking pixels from tracking your specific activity. A
tracking pixel may still record an anonymous visit from your IP address, but unique information
will not be recorded. If you do not want to receive tracking pixels, you will need to disable HTML
images in your browser-based email client, and that may affect your ability to view images in other
emails that you receive.

Where can I find more information?

Please read through our Privacy Policy for more information. If you have any further questions,
contact privacy wikimedia.org.

Thanks!

Please note that in the event of any differences in meaning or interpretation between
the original English version of this document and a translation, the original English
version takes precedence.

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This page was last edited on 3 February 2021, at 19:45.

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