[Foundation-l] and what if...

Fri Dec 12 19:55:48 UTC 2008

2008/12/12 Michael Peel <email at mikepeel.net>:

> 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 really can't see this one flying.

> 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.

So far we've spotted it pretty readily. We could do this job by
maintaining a list of known blocked pages in given countries. This
page will of course be blocked by all the countries listed, but the
list will spread readily once it exists.

- d.