" 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.
On 9/28/07, Monahon, Peter B. Peter.Monahon@uspto.gov wrote:
" 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
Wikipedia is not a government-owned institution; it is privately-owned and thus the laws concerning private property apply. The WMF reserves the right to reject contributions as it sees fit; the only real rights you have under the model we operate from are the right to leave, and the right to fork. Everything else is pretty much a privilege granted by the owners of the servers which host Wikipedia. In short, there is no right to freedom of speech on Wikipedia, just as there is no right for you to hold an animal rights rally in my living room or in a shopping centre.
(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.
Wikipedia is not a social project, not a democracy, not a soapbox, etc. We are here to write a free encyclopaedia, nothing more and nothing less. We should not be advocating certain social ideals; even the GFDL is only a means to an end - that of ensuring the sum of human knowledge is available to everyone.
Johnleemk
On 9/28/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia is not a social project, not a democracy, not a soapbox, etc. We are here to write a free encyclopaedia, nothing more and nothing less. We should not be advocating certain social ideals; even the GFDL is only a means to an end - that of ensuring the sum of human knowledge is available to everyone.
The sum of human knowledge isn't available to people are oppressed, nor can it do them good if they are censored.
We need to hold the firm position that we are not fundamentally focused on these other things, For example, we are not a human rights organization, we are not a free software organization, etc.
But it is also very important for us to recognize that there sometimes exist important overlaps and opportunities.
I suspect that most of the people who come to edit the larger Wikipedias are not people who are passionate about building an encyclopedia or even about free content... Rather, many people edit because they are interested in a subject, because they want to show how smart they are, or even because they want to make sure their POV is well presented in a popular website. ... and that is perfectly fine. When our missions align we can and should work together with people who have differing missions.
I think that issues of censorship frequently overlap with our mission, perhaps more so than many other tangential outside interests. We can achieve the most if we recognize our proper and most effective role in those issues and we work with others to achieve more.
"Monahon, Peter B." Peter.Monahon@uspto.gov wrote:
Personally I think we - Wikipedia - should stand up for Tor operators who get abused.
I don't agree. At least not directly. I think we should instead make sure the world knows about the positive uses of Tor which intersect our actives.
Tor enables some people who are behind censoring filters to read Wikipedia. It's good and important and if it and tools like it didn't exist and didn't have brave exit operators who are willing to risk some false accusations then the world would be a less free and more censored place.
As Wikipedians I think it would only be fair of us to make a statement like that since it's the truth. ... but saying that is a long way for mounting an all out defense.