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.
Thanks,
GerardM
On Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 7:58 PM, jayjg <jayjg99(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 8:06 PM, Marco Schuster
<marco(a)harddisk.is-a-geek.org> wrote:
jayjg schrieb:
I appreciate why someone in China would want to
use tor. Would any of
that apply to someone in a Western democracy?
Living in a Western democracy
doesn't necessarily mean that you can surf
the web or use internet services freely, look at all those blocks for
Bittorrent, the dozens of blocks for Nazi hosters, and especially the
German court decision about YouPorn, which actually led to >2 million
websites being invisible by Arcor customers; they can only be helped
through proxys (though I don't think watching porn via proxys is good).
As has been pointed out, while porn sites may be blocked, Wikipedia
rarely (if ever) is, so the analogy fails.
And please also do not forget that some people
indeed care about their
privacy - what many people unfortunately do not, and so freedom passes
more and more away.
Wikipedia is an on-line encyclopedia, not an experiment in internet
anonymity. If it were, then we would discard all checkuser logs
immediately. We give editors a reasonable level of anonymity, a
balance that provides the most net benefit to *Wikipedia*. Allowing
TOR open proxies to edit (why TOR and no others, I wonder?) has an
overall net dis-benefit to Wikipedia.
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