[Foundation-l] and what if...

Fri Dec 12 19:23:28 UTC 2008

On 12 Dec 2008, at 10:52, Florence Devouard wrote:

> 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 ?
>
> 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.

If you can't read the article on Wikipedia, then you can't edit it.  
If an article doesn't exist on Wikipedia, then it can't be  
distributed by other people.

IMO, the best approach would be to have a channel (a phone number, an  
email address, etc...) where governments can contact the WMF to  
request that certain pages are blocked in certain countries. These  
entries can then be publicly listed, so that people know that they  
are censored, and when a censored page is requested a notice should  
be displayed instead saying that the page is censored.

I don't like the idea of censoring at all, but it seems to be  
required in today's world. We can't do much about that, but we can  
deal with it in such a way that people know that it is being  
censored, rather than just hiding it behind error 404 messages. It  
also lets the rest of the world continue editing those pages, so that  
they are there when they no longer need to be censored (and/or other  
sites can distribute them to). Think of it as the digital version of  
a black marker over text.

Mike