On Tue, 17 Jan 2012, Nathan wrote:
There are so many good candidates, in fact, we will need some way of narrowing them down. A SOPA protest fits a somewhat narrow range - a United States law that could effect a Wikimedia project.
There you go. I don't see the point of coming up with a whole paragraph of obviously irrelevant examples when in your next paragraph you explain why they are irrelevant.
I can't imagine we would get much opposition to a protest against censorship and filtering in China...
I can. You're displaying the literal-mindedness that's too common on Wikipedia: everything has to be reduced down to a rule which something either passes or fails and there's no such thing as nuance. The correct answer is that while many things affect Wikipedia, not everything affects Wikipedia to an equal degree. How do you figure out if a particular law affects Wikipedia to a sufficient degree? It's hard--you discuss it and maybe take a poll--but one thing you don't do is have an absolute rule which insists that we must protest it if it passes the rule and we must ignore it if it fails the rule.