To be more constructive: if you need data, ask your users to enable telemetry (or in this case, provenance parameters). Some will understand what you need, and you'll get a usable sample from those users.
People label a number of different things, some bad and some good, under the general umbrella of "tracking". I'm not sure that name conveys enough nuance.
Wikipedia wants to evaluate how effective a particular feature is and so they are slightly modifying a URL to do this. It's not tracking you, your family or your dog. It's basically appending "&source=ios".
I'd think that is perfectly fine to any reasonable person.
> I'd think that is perfectly fine to any reasonable person.
I reject the assertion that I'm not a reasonable person. Please avoid arguments of this form, as it essentially says "if you don't agree with me, you're an idiot/wrong/defective", which is not productive way to argue your point. (I know I'm guilty of doing this on occasion as well, but I'm trying to get myself to stop.)
Instead its everywhere and for what? What is the actionable information?
They are trying to evaluate the effectiveness of the social sharing features in their various projects. There are any number of reasons to do this - maybe nobody uses these features and they can remove them, or maybe "New Readers video in Hindi distribution on Facebook" has an insane click through rate that might have an impact on the allocation of resources in the future/feed into other products being developed.
You know, stuff you need to do when you run one of the worlds largest websites.
It's also quite clearly spelled out in the linked page, the mailing list thread[1] and the implementation.
If you can think of a better way to get this kind of data that fits more comfortably within your strong personal feelings about the contents of URLs then I'm sure the "insecure middle management type" that proposed it[2] would love to hear your counter-proposal.
1. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/analytics/2015-Februar...
This is not just about defaults. When sharing from the Wikipedia Android app, I cannot use the settings to disable this tracking tag from being appended. I have to delete it by hand every time.