Publishing Wikipedia usage data with strong privacy guarantees
Abstract
For almost 20 years, the Wikimedia Foundation has been publishing statistics about how many people visited each Wikipedia page on each day. This data helps Wikipedia editors determine where to focus their efforts to improve the online encyclopedia, and enables academic research. In June 2023, the Wikimedia Foundation, helped by Tumult Labs, addressed a long-standing request from Wikipedia editors and academic researchers: it started publishing these statistics with finer granularity, including the country of origin in the daily counts of page views. This new data publication uses differential privacy to provide robust guarantees to people browsing or editing Wikipedia. This paper describes this data publication: its goals, the process followed from its inception to its deployment, the algorithms used to produce the data, and the outcomes of the data release.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2308.16298,
title = {Publishing Wikipedia usage data with strong privacy guarantees},
author = {Temilola Adeleye and Skye Berghel and Damien Desfontaines and Michael Hay and Isaac Johnson and Cléo Lemoisson and Ashwin Machanavajjhala and Tom Magerlein and Gabriele Modena and David Pujol and Daniel Simmons-Marengo and Hal Triedman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.16298},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
11 pages, 10 figures, Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy (TPDP) 2023