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Update Documentation and Process for Access to Search Consoles
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Description

As we're trying to become more aware and conscious of our ecosystem, we'd like to keep an eye on how we do on search platforms outside of Google. To that end, there are folks in the Foundation who'd like to have access to Bing and Yandex search / webmaster consoles, analogous to the Google Search Console whose data we already heavily use.

We need to have a (lightweight) process for ensuring that:

  1. people who need access to this data understand what it's for
  2. people who need access to this data can get it
  3. there's some record of who has access to this data and for what reason (given that it's sensitive)

We've already got this: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Console_access

This should be revisited and probably generalized to also be applicable to Bing, Yandex, and others that may follow.

Event Timeline

@Aklapper we recently discussed all of that on recent meeting. I will take care of the SRE clean up and help @SCherukuwada with the changes :-) (I am admin at wikitech and will be able to delete and move pages, if needed). But we need the tag to document the final status first.

Feel free to change "You will not be granted access to all of the (hundreds of) Wikimedia-managed domains but only a subset thereof that you have a business case for." with something summarizing your talks with legal- but also additional wording bringing attention to requesters of the sensitivity of the data- specially that normally only read only access will be granted.

Regarding the autofilled form, I miss a "What do you need access to?" - if the access if for Google, Bing, and which projects- needed to for you to provide the access. Clarity is super important when requesting access- or requesters will not provide that data.

jcrespo triaged this task as Medium priority.Apr 20 2022, 11:24 AM

@SCherukuwada I've asked some of the people in charge of operational security at SRE and they advised that the easiest way to handle expiration is to move all reminders to a calendar you own (e.g. maybe create a shared calendar among he people that have admin access or anything that works for you, the details are up to you), so you are free to handle them as you wish. I will double check in case there is some pending expiration in the current calendar, but basically I change the old reference and point instead to the page you created, and you can there document/link to your calendar if you want.

I will double check in case there is some pending expiration in the current calendar,

These are the ones that should have been acted on (probably you saw that already when reviewing current access):
T240501
T252705
T192893

And this is pending to be added to your calendar (and then I can remove it from ours):
T304502

The final[sic] (there is always room for improvements) wording on SRE side has been documented at: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/SRE/Clinic_Duty/Access_requests#Google_&_Bing_search_console_access I will announce it at the next SRE meeting on Monday for other SREs to be aware of the owneship.

I believe further changes might be needed on the main doc page for this issue for Core Experiences: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Console_access For those, I am offering help for clarifying but standing by, as it is now for requesters and admins to decide on further clarifications, as we agreed on our meeting.

I'm comfortable closing this task as resolved given that I've been getting search console requests from people following the process as documented and have been resolving them.