Now that we have taken the necessary first step to regard the English
Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects as high-profile platforms for
political statements, we ought to consider what other critical humanitarian
problems we could use our considerable visibility and reputation to
address. We could draw attention to the crises in Sudan or Nigeria, drone
attacks against civilians in Afghanistan, the permanent occupation of the
Palestinian territories, the Iranian effort to develop nuclear
capabilities, police misconduct in virtually any country, the treatment of
women and women's rights in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and the list could
go on and on.
There are so many good candidates, in fact, we will need some way of
narrowing them down. A SOPA protest fits a somewhat narrow range - a United
States law that could effect a Wikimedia project. We could protest against
the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping laws, national security letters,
unpublicized cooperation between major ISPs and national intelligence
agencies, laws that allow speech online to be deemed "material support and
comfort" of a terrorist group, etc. etc.
Of course, there is no articulated reason to limit ourselves this way.
Surely a large portion of our voting community would be against pending
attempts to restrict free speech on the Internet in India (a nation with
many English speakers and many Wikimedians, and an office of the WMF). I
can't imagine we would get much opposition to a protest against censorship
and filtering in China, which has more Internet users than any other nation
and represents a vast untapped resource for the open source and open
knowledge community. Many other countries filter or block our content to
the detriment of their citizens, and we could surely add pressure and
attention to these important issues.
The possibilities are, quite unfortunately, nearly endless. Obviously we
can't keep Wikipedia offline and just rotate the protest message; perhaps
we should consider creating a Campaign of the Week (or Month?) to highlight
humanitarian problems. All we need are volunteers to set up a
Wikipedia:CotW and get it rolling, and we can start to make a real
difference.
Nathan
Hey guys
We'll be holding another AFT office hours session at 19:00 tomorrow, in
#wikimedia-office; hope to see a lot of you there :). If you can't make it,
drop me an email and I'll send you the logs.
Thanks!
--
Oliver Keyes
Community Liaison, Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation
-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Copyrights#RfC:_What_to_do_with…
There seems to be a belief that images that are not copyrighted in their
own country in the absence of a copyright law OR in the absence
of agreements between the said country and the US that all works are in the
public domain. My attempt to explain anything here probably will not do
justice to any side of the argument so please read the linked page.
I merely feel the community is underrepresented as for a discussion of
this magnitude there are very few people commenting. Feel free to comment.
-- とある白い猫 (To Aru Shiroi Neko)
On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:34:49 -0500, Anthony wrote:
> Put 184.172.174.94 for wikipediareview.com in your hosts file.
> (Fortunately, as SOPA has not passed, this is legal :)).
Like I'm gonna go reconfiguring my own system just to get around the
fact that those guys can't keep their act together well enough to
properly manage their domain registration?
It appears that wikipediareview.org also belongs to them and has not
yet expired, but unfortunately they have it set up to redirect to the
nonfunctional .com domain. (I personally would have done the
redirection the opposite way, since it's a noncommercial criticism
and discussion site, more logically done as a .org rather than
implying commerciality with .com; Wikipedia itself switched from .com
to .org when it went noncommercial.) They could easily make their
site accessible again simply by setting up the .org domain to point
directly at the site instead of redirecting, but probably that
configuration is in the hands of the same person who failed to renew
the other domain, maybe a different person than whoever manages the
web hosting itself. I could never untangle the details of the
ownership/management of that site, which has sometimes been in heated
dispute.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
[crossposted to Foundation-l and WikiEN-l]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CongressLookup
Can someone please change "zip code" to "ZIP code" again? (This error
was corrected in the blackout notice yesterday.) I haven't managed to
get anyone's attention via the IRC channels. Thanks!
David Levy
On the day that Wikipedia is temporarily blacked out, it seems like
one of its most prominent groups of critics has had a possibly more
permanent "blackout" of its own... the infamous BADSITE, Wikipedia
Review, might be dead. Going to its site today yields a GoDaddy
parking page saying that its domain is expired.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
Today's "Now I Know" by Dan Lewis discusses copyright and involves several
links to Wikipedia.
http://dlewis.net/nik-archives/no-copying-grandma/
Sent from my Droid2
Elias Friedman A.S., CCEMT-P
אליהו מתתיהו בן צבי
elipongo(a)gmail.com
On Jan 18, 2012 5:58 AM, "Carcharoth" <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 6:55 AM, Jeraphine Gryphon <jeraphine(a)gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Wikipedia should do these complete edit locks more often, TBH. For the
> > sake of Wikipediholics like me, and so admins can catch up with
> > reports and backlogs in peace.
>
> Point of order. This is not an edit-lock. You are thinking from the
> perspective of an editor. This is a reader lock-out as well (though
> really, those that know enough to use mirrors or caches or disable
> javascript are not missing out on reading articles, and that may get
> mis-reported in the press as those in the know not being
> inconvenienced but everyone else being locked out from reading
> Wikipedia).
>
> > Not sure if it's a serious suggestion but it's just a thought I had.
>
> It's a nice idea, but there are several problems with that. Firstly,
> how to handle urgent edits that still need to be made. Secondly, how
> to restrict editing disablement to just article namespace (which is
> what would be needed to allow other stuff to carry on as normal). I
> don't think it would ever really happen.
>
> Carcharoth
>
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