[Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia

Mon Oct 10 20:59:23 UTC 2011

> Ilario writes:
>
> > We have two ways: to be passive or to be active. If we choose the
> > passivity, it means that we can only organize a system of proxies like
> > done in China or to organize some workarounds to make Wikipedia
> > available to the person living in totalitarism.
> >
> > The Italian community has demonstrated that they would be active: I live
> > in Switzerland, where Italian is a national language, and I can assure
> > that the Swiss users have understood the problem and approved the strike.
>

I live in Italy and I was among those one who worked on
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Comunicato_4_ottobre_2011/en .
I think it was the right choice because it was the most effective
action realistically able to save both Wikipedia integrity and
Wikipedia accessibility from Italy (in case law gets approved, if
wikipedia denies to amend the article in the requested way, police may
obscure it).  Now, after this experience, I think that, to avoid these
strikes to happen, we, WMF and language wikipedias shall provide more
informations about IP privacy policy and about proxies.  For example,
why dont translate http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tor and/or
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:No_open_proxies in more and more
languages to make people aware on how to edit freely wikipedia when it
isnt allowed by laws? Why dont allow Ip block exemptions for TOR when
wikipedians are strongly biased by local laws?
Nickanc