On Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 3:56 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
We are discussing a tool that is to be implemented WMF wide. There are
projects that are utterly different, there are languages spoken in countries
where the sheer audacity of printing the historic election communiques of
the ruling government can get you killed. They are largely the less and
least resourced languages and consequently these projects are comparatively
tiny.
There are people I am aware off who want to contribute to Wikinews but it is
EXACTLY their need to be outside of their country and to be anonymous that
may give them the courage to start doing a journalistic job.. We all now
how great our community is at keeping secrets, there are people who insist
that everything should be available to them. I am fearful that removing the
option for these people to use TOR will kill off what is essential to our
goal; bring information to our public..
Even our public figures, people living in the "free world" are harassed,
stalked, threatened...Rape, murder, the use of sulphuric acid they are the
kind of threats that are issued. This is in my opinion the greatest threat
that we face. This threatens our NPOV. For some people safety exists in
anonymity but there are people who are loose lipped, who think that the
issue is not that dire and who as a consequence will carelessly endanger
their fellow wikimedians.
There is a balance between on the one hand the vandals, the sock puppeteers,
the insane and on the other hand the people who need the anonymity that TOR
can offer. At this moment I am afraid that only one side of the picture has
been considered.
Ah, but which side? As far as I know, the proposal was to unilaterally
implement a change in *all* wikis which would *force* TOR exit nodes
to be soft blocked, regardless of Foundation policy, or of local wiki
policy. A number of wiki-en CheckUsers found out about this and
objected, stating that, on wiki-en at least, the damage would far
outweigh any benefit.
And here we are.