[Foundation-l] and what if...

Fri Dec 12 11:39:37 UTC 2008

2008/12/12 Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com>:
> Now, seriously, what is more important right now ?
> That citizens can not read one article ?
> Or that all the citizens of a country can not edit all articles any more ?

It isn't an either or.

> I would argue that the content of Wikipedia can be copied and
> distributed by anyone, so preventing reading our site is not such a bid
> deal.
> However, editing can only be done on our site, so the impact of blocking
> in editing is quite dramatic.
>
> My point is not to bend on local laws at all.
> But I'd like to see people change their minds about the traditional
> route we used to think we could be blocked in "democratic" countries
> (legal route, with local then international tribunal).
> And I'd like to see people think about the "worst cases", and then work
> on how to decrease the impact (or prevent entirely) these worst cases.
> Scenario planning in short.
>
> If tomorrow, a really illegal-in-UK image is reported to the IWF, they
> will block it for real. And they will block again editing. Is that a
> concern ? Can it happen again ? What's the risk of it happening again ?
> If it does, what do we do ? Which discussions should we start to avoid
> the entire edit-blocking again ?

The risk is limited until the new year. Then it will depend on exactly
how the Extreme pornography law is interpreted.

The damage to editing will be more limited since at least some
companies now have XFF headers in place and we recognize them. Just a
matter of getting the rest on board.

> And... beyond UK, what do we know about the censorship-systems the
> countries are setting into place ? I understood that Australia was
> setting up the same system than UK,

The Australian system is almost certainly wider in its approach than
the UK. Technical details are limited however. For the time being the
ISPs are not cooperating however so hard to predict the outcome.

>Should not we get to know and understand better what
> governments are planning ?

Ideally yes but there is the language barrier and of course a lot of
the details are non public. We probably now know more about the
operation of the IWF/cleanfeed system than was publicly available at
the beginning of the week.

> Should we try to lobby them to adopt certains
> choices or not ? Should we help them adopt wise practices ?

If they are going to use proxies we want them to tell us and to use
XFF headers. Beyond that I'm not sure if we actually want to become a
free speech campaigning organisation.

> Or should we just wait to see what's next ?

In the end there is always going to be an element of that.

-- 
geni