[Foundation-l] and what if...

Fri Dec 12 14:24:08 UTC 2008

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 9:01 AM, Judson Dunn <cohesion at sleepyhead.org> wrote:
> Not a response to your email, but the reaction in general strikes me
> as very inconsistent. With China they have been censored, they try and
> use TOR, and we block them, and say for years that there is
> regrettably nothing we can do about this situation. UK gets blocked
> for a day and we are talking about changing our IP based block
> systems? I know the technical details of the block are a little
> different, but not *that* different. Maybe the people that are saying
> this though have always opposed this system, and this is just more
> reason in their minds. I hope that's the case. :)

I agree that there is a certain incongruity here, but the UK is not a
focused source of spam and vandalism in the same way that anonymized
TOR nodes are. It's very unfortunate that the majority of Chinese
citizens are blocked from editing Wikipedia, but opening up a few back
channels for them to use at the expense of increasing our flow of spam
and vandalism is really not a great solution to any problems.

--Andrew Whitworth