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. We could draw attention to the crises in Sudan or Nigeria, drone attacks against civilians in Afghanistan, the permanent occupation of the Palestinian territories, the Iranian effort to develop nuclear capabilities, police misconduct in virtually any country, the treatment of women and women's rights in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and the list could go on and on.
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. We could protest against the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping laws, national security letters, unpublicized cooperation between major ISPs and national intelligence agencies, laws that allow speech online to be deemed "material support and comfort" of a terrorist group, etc. etc.
Of course, there is no articulated reason to limit ourselves this way. Surely a large portion of our voting community would be against pending attempts to restrict free speech on the Internet in India (a nation with many English speakers and many Wikimedians, and an office of the WMF). I can't imagine we would get much opposition to a protest against censorship and filtering in China, which has more Internet users than any other nation and represents a vast untapped resource for the open source and open knowledge community. Many other countries filter or block our content to the detriment of their citizens, and we could surely add pressure and attention to these important issues.
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.
Nathan
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.
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.
I appreciate the psychoanalysis, but I have to disagree. While "a U.S. law that affects Wikipedia" is certainly a narrow category, there's no clearly articulated reason for why this should be the limit to our political advocacy. It's hard to argue that a proposed law like SOPA -- which only theoretically might affect Wikipedia if it were passed, and only if we ignore the political realities behind enforcement decision-making -- is more important to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia mission than the permanent or intermittent blocking of Wikipedia in nations around the world. The general notion of free speech and free access to information is *the* core ideological underpinning of the Wikimedia movement (as clearly demonstrated by the SOPA protest), and there are certainly many opportunities for advocacy in this area once we accept that advocacy by the projects directly is a Good Thing.
More broadly, I disagree that it is nit-picking narrow-mindedness to mark an important distinction between a project that does not engage in political advocacy (or take any positions at all, as a project) and one that does. First, it's not a one-off - like anything, once we've done it once, it becomes easier to do it again... and as I've tried to demonstrate, it's not difficult to argue that there are any number of other worthy problems we might decide to similarly address. If you disagree, just look at recent history. A year ago, no one would have predicted we'd take the whole project offline to protest a proposed American law. But just a short time after the Italians surprised us all, we've followed suit. Some (see the e-mail from Delphine) are even thanking them for making it possible. Second, it's not a minor philosophical difference, particularly not when we go from having literally no voice as an entity to undertaking an aggressive lobbying effort. The benefit of not speaking with the Voice of Wikipedia is that we have the formality of no organizational opinion to protect us from accusations of intentional bias. Once we surrender that formality, we also are no longer insulated from alienating contributors who object to (or argue fruitlessly for) specific positions.
Nathan
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.
All that prevents us from sharing knowledge should be protested.
After SOPA/PIPA/OPEN we should protest agains ACTA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=citzRjwk-sQ
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.
<snip>
"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
<snip>
"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
On 18 January 2012 08:15, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
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.
Yep. Personally, I'd like this to be really rare.
- d.
On 01/18/12 12:54 AM, David Gerard wrote:
On 18 January 2012 08:15, Carcharothcarcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
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.
Yep. Personally, I'd like this to be really rare.
Saying "Fuck off" is always more effective when expressed by someone who very rarely speaks so bluntly.
Ray
2012/1/18 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
On 18 January 2012 08:15, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
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.
Yep. Personally, I'd like this to be really rare.
There's a number of reasons why it would be a terrible idea to start using Wikipedia as a political platform, but even ignoring them: don't imagine you'd get the same kind of attention for this kind of action for another ten years or so. English Wikipedia going black was world news, but one of the main reasons it was world news was that we'd *never* taken such a stance before. Next time the reaction would be something along the lines of "again?" rather than what we saw during the SOPA/PIPA blackout. And the users would soon stop caring about the message.
//Johan Jönsson -- http://kontrast2012.se