" Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." - Article 19, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Adopted and proclaimed by General Assembly resolution 217 A (III) of 10 December 1948
(was Re: The price of providing privacy and free speech)
Please take discussions of this sort to a mailing list where it is on-topic.
Hmm ... regarding "...discussions of this sort...", which I see as "Wikipedia policy towards anonymous contributions and contributors" or the use of http://tor.eff.org/ versus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_open_proxies, do you have a suggestion of a better place?
Personally I think we - Wikipedia - should stand up for Tor operators who get abused. We - Wikipedia - should at least understand the difference between our own policy against anonymous contributions or contributors on Wikipedia (a prohibition with which I disagree), versus totally unrelated features and benefits of Internet anonymity (though I think these issues are totally related to Wikipedia). Just because we may block anonymous contributions and contributors shouldn't mean we think anonymity itself is always bad or that we are neutral to it.
In fact, we - Wikipedia - have many layers of protection to allow people to remain anonymous to everyone but ourselves (our admins, webmasters, sysops know who you are!), so we should be very, very sympathetic to such stories as http://committeetoprotectbloggers.org/2007/09/17/german-tor-administrato r-arrested/
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Apologies - I've now seen the thread about AB being put on moderation. In future, I'll queue posts for batch replying after having checked out newer threads. Thank you to the moderators.
I don't mind your goof. I think we all contribute posts that we might later want to rescind or edit afterwards. I also don't mind what I believe is your misunderstanding of what I believe is the very on-topic nature of the previous posts. However, I like your solicitation and consideration of others here, and I wish we all were as forgiving of each other's on- or off-point, accurate- or inaccurate-posts, as you as ask to be towards you.