Differential privacy

Differential privacy (DP) is a wide-ranging paradigm for statistically-guaranteed data privacy. The Privacy Engineering Team at the Wikimedia Foundation is currently exploring various uses for DP at WMF. This page (and its subpages) intend to document project statuses, design decisions, and potential future directions.

A diagram of how global DP might work at WMF

Available datasets

Differentially private dataset	Date range / granularity	Download	Documentation
Pageviews	Historical (pre-2017)	Data download	README
Pageviews	Historical (9 Feb 2017 – 5 Feb 2023)	Data download	README
Pageviews	Current (6 Feb 2023 – present)	Data download	README
Geoeditors	Weekly	Data download	README
Geoeditors	Monthly	Data download	README

Docs and educational materials

Other materials relevant to differential privacy efforts at WMF, including statements of purpose, docs, and educational materials.

Docs

• DP error metrics
• Infrastructure and framework decision-making process
• Privacy budget accounting
• Rationale for using differential privacy on Wikimedia data

External documentation

• Is differential privacy the right fit for your problem?
• Tumult Labs development documentation

Code repositories

• Gitlab repository where most differential privacy work is taking place at WMF
• Gitlab repository where differential privacy scripts are productionized
• Gitlab repository where differential privacy work is automated

Educational materials

For a broad introduction to differential privacy as a concept, reading this series of blog posts on the subject is strongly recommended. Damien Desfontaines takes the reader through most of the need-to-know concepts of differential privacy.

Other presentations/educational materials are available below:

• WMF Diff blog post from 2023 June: "New Dataset Uncovers Wikipedia Browsing Habits While Protecting Users"
• Algorithmic approaches to privacy at WMF (2 June 2021)
• Differential privacy at WMF (18 May 2022)
• Differential privacy vs K-anonymity
• PEPR 2022 Differential Privacy Slides (23 June 2022)
• WMF Differential Privacy Webinar 1
• WMF Differential Privacy Webinar 2
• WMF Differential Privacy Webinar 3
• WMF Differential Privacy Webinar 4

Active DP projects

A list of DP projects that are actively being worked on, along with relevant documentation.

• CentralNotice
• CentralNotice/Feasibility report

Completed DP projects

A list of DP projects that have been completed and are currently being monitored for continued performance.

• Country-project-page
• Country-project-page-historical
• Country-project-page-historical/Problem statement
• Country-project-page/Problem statement
• Country-project-page/User filtering
• GDI Equity Dashboard
• GDI Equity Dashboard/Problem statement
• Geoeditors
• Geoeditors/Feasibility report
• Russian editor information (2022-23)

Proposed DP projects

A list of DP projects that may be worked on in the future.

• DP dataset release prioritization
• Future work (15 August 2022)