On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 3:05 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
Now that we have taken the necessary first step to regard the English Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects as high-profile platforms for political statements, we ought to consider what other critical humanitarian problems we could use our considerable visibility and reputation to address.
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"considerable visibility and reputation" is the key point here. The visibility is unlikely to be much affected, but the blackout and activism may well affect the reputation, or the mental image many people have of Wikipedia, especially if it becomes a regular occurrence. More comments below.
Of course, there is no articulated reason to limit ourselves this way. Surely a large portion of our voting community would be against
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"voting community" is the key point there. This community changes and will be greatly affected by these developments, especially if black-outs become a regular event. Some will leave, others will arrive. The make-up of the community will change. I also predict that those who previously stayed silent will start to speak up, and more than just those who are naturally activist and/or political will start to speak up.
The possibilities are, quite unfortunately, nearly endless. Obviously we can't keep Wikipedia offline and just rotate the protest message; perhaps we should consider creating a Campaign of the Week (or Month?) to highlight humanitarian problems. All we need are volunteers to set up a Wikipedia:CotW and get it rolling, and we can start to make a real difference.
I wasn't entirely sure if you were being sarcastic here and elsewhere in the post.
A couple of objections.
(1) Many (hopefully most) Wikipedians are here to write an online encyclopedia, not to be part of an activist community (though there are elements of that in the parts of the free licensing movement who actively promote copyleft and work to (legitimately) reduce as much as possible the restrictions produced by copyright legislation, which is pertinent given the SOPA element here).
(2) Many Wikipedians are quite happy to be activist elsewhere and to make protests in person at demonstrations, and to sign petitions, and help run activist and/or political organisations, but are happy to do this as something completely separate from Wikipedia. It tends to be a question of balancing different interests and not letting one dominate the others, and keeping interests that might conflict apart. Some will say you shouldn't keep things like this separate, others will say you should. There are valid points for both arguments.
As I said above, the main result of all this, especially if it continues, will be to shift the public perception of Wikipedia from a user-edited resource that is moderately reliable if used with caution (sometimes very unreliable if used without caution) to an activist platform. That could be disastrous for its reputation. Consider if a rival was started or was around that pledged it would never use its visibility and reputation to make points like this.
A one-off black-out, yes. Repeated black-outs, no. I would hope most Wikipedians would oppose anything like this happening again in the near future, if only because this strategy becomes less effective the more it is used.
Carcharoth