Apologies if you've already seen this -- looks like it was mentioned in the
media report but I haven't seen it posted otherwise. There is a new report
out from the Internet Monitor project at the Berkman Klein center that may
be of general interest:
"Analyzing Accessibility of Wikipedia Projects Around the World"
https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2017/04/WikipediaCensorship
Abstract:
This study, conducted by the Internet Monitor project at the Berkman Klein
Center for Internet & Society, analyzes the scope of government-sponsored
censorship of Wikimedia sites around the world. The study finds that, as of
June 2016, China was likely censoring the Chinese language Wikipedia
project, and Thailand and Uzbekistan were likely interfering intermittently
with specific language projects of Wikipedia as well.
However, considering the widespread use of filtering technologies and the
vast coverage of Wikipedia, our study finds that, as of June 2016, there
was relatively little censorship of Wikipedia globally. In fact, our study
finds there was less censorship in June 2016 than before Wikipedia’s
transition to HTTPS-only content delivery in June 2015. HTTPS prevents
censors from seeing which page a user is viewing, which means censors must
choose between blocking the entire site and allowing access to all
articles. This finding suggests that the shift to HTTPS has been a good one
in terms of ensuring accessibility to knowledge.
The study identifies and documents the blocking of Wikipedia content using
two complementary data collection and analysis strategies: a client-side
system that collects data from the perspective of users around the globe
and a server-side tool to analyze traffic coming in to Wikipedia servers.
Both client- and server-side methods detected events that we consider
likely related to censorship, in addition to a large number of suspicious
events that remain unexplained. The report features results of our data
analysis and insights into the state of access to Wikipedia content in 15
select countries.
-- Phoebe
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