My school has a very ruthless blocking system by 8e6
technologies installed on their outgoing proxy. They
block any page that might be offensive without
considering the consequences. Once they even blocked
the Science Olympiad home page shortly before
Nationals - presumably because Geocities hosted it and
also some other offensive site, and they blocked the
IP. They occasionally packet-sniff the internet
connection to find offensive sites. They block
everything - even online games and the like. If
Wikipedia starts showing offensive content it'll be
the last day we see it at our school. There is a
difference here between offensive-inappropriate and
offensive-unpopular. The only ones of the latter they
might block is 2600 or Join Al Qaeda
Now.com.
I propose a new domain, set up like an international
Wikipedia,
uncensored.wikipedia.org, to contain all
questionable material - pages France doesn't like,
pages China doesn't like, pages filtering software
doesn't like, etc. All questionable content can have
the link '''An uncensored version of this page is
available [[u:This page|here]].''' at the bottom, and
pictures should be available by either
[[u:Image:offensivepicture.png]] or
[[Image:u:offensivepicture.png]] (whichever is easier
for the software). Blocking programs/governments will
see the rendered HTML link to <img
src="http://uncensored.wikipedia.org/..."> or <a
href="http://uncensored.wikipedia.org/..."> and block
_that_ domain, not
www.wikipedia.org (or fr., or zh.,
etc.). If we know some governments/schools proxy IPs,
we could even filter all u: links out to save
Wikipedia, and sensitive users (anonymous too, by
default, if wanted) can check an option in preferences
for either "Disable uncensored links" or "Do not
display uncensored pictures" - the latter would give a
mere link to the picture.
On a side note, do we actually need to upload pictures
to every Wikipedia, or can we save disk space by,
e.g., letting other language Wikipedias link to
[[en:Image:logo.png]]? If we can, the u: would be an
obvious solution - as easy as setting up another
language. If not, and this is too hard to set up, u's
Image namespace (linked to [[u:Image:]]) can instead
be required to have [[Image:]] links to itself, and
all users would act as if "Do not display" were
checked. (See the Image page for the picture on
[[Kitten]] for an example.)
Also, this server should be run on a different IP -
either that one Bomis said it had (didn't it?), on
Pliny when Larousse becomes the absolute server, or on
ibiblio. IP blocking is as common as domain blocking,
so a virtual host might not suffice. (Maybe you could
just get another $15 Ethernet card into a server, let
that take another IP, and only serve uncensored on
that IP?)
--[[User:Geoffrey]]
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