Well, this telecom company is the arm of the government to impose censorship in KSA. This is a poor excuse. In creating such a partnership, WMF is implicitely supporting the censorship by providing a moral caution, even if it is not directly involved in censorship.
I guess I can see your point there, Yan. But please let me ask you this question : What do you think is the best way to teach people what the word "freedom" means?
-- Ciphers Note : I have been following this list for a while, but this is the first time I feel like posting something here. Apologize in advance if my comments are not in the scope of this list, and I wish posting using my wiki username won`t bother anyone.
Message: 7 Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2012 09:56:35 +0530 From: Yann Forget yannfo@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Wikimedia Foundation and Saudi Telecom (STC) partner to provide access to Wikipedia free of mobile data charges in the Middle East Message-ID: CAKcJoPkc2n2xxORSciK2n9eeHT2Tr36yFNLcKcF_i7K5-pu1vQ@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
2012/10/16 Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com:
On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 10:35 PM, Yann Forget yannfo@gmail.com wrote:
Hello,
This announcement is worrying, to say the least. In other words, the Wikimedia Foundation is doing a partnership with one of the most retrograde government, which is also a regular censor on Internet content. How could you justify that?
Hi Yann
It's not a partnership with the government, it's with a telecom company to
Well, this telecom company is the arm of the government to impose censorship in KSA. This is a poor excuse. In creating such a partnership, WMF is implicitely supporting the censorship by providing a moral caution, even if it is not directly involved in censorship.
Yann
allow its subscriber in KSA (MENA region), free and easy access to Wikipedia. KSA is a big part of the middle-east region, the political reasons aside this helps the public get better access to Wikipedia. There is no reason why we should not increase availability for the general
public.
I'm not sure about the stance against this either, if a government is trying to censor and restrict access, we should do what? not help provide access to their citizens, not increase availability? how would that help the situation? This is a way of working with the current situation and perhaps around it, its about providing free access to people in the
region,
which is probably the best thing to do at the time.
Regards Theo _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l