Hello,
in the last few months and years the Uzbek Wikipedia has shown promising growth, and it is turning into a potentially relevant source of knowledge for the Uzbek people.
But due to a technical 'glitch', access to the Uzbek Wikipedia in Uzbekistan via the HTTP protocol is for some reason redirected to msn.com.
The same is not true for the HTTPS protocol, and also for all other language editions.
The glitch is not with the WMF infrastructure, but with providers in Uzbekistan. Requests by community members to the providers and official agencies have been met only with silence, there is no official statement or recognition about this.
We discussed both with search engine providers and Wikimedia developers if there is a way to resolve this issue, and there is: by making the HTTPS version of the Uzbek Wikipedia canonical the search engines would list the HTTPS version in the search results, thus circumventing the glitch. As far as I understood the technical folks at Wikimedia this can be done with a small amount of effort.
Using HTTPS would have the additional advantage of a higher level of anonymity and privacy of Wikipedia editors from inside Uzbekistan.
There is a risk with that, though: it could be that the glitch will suddenly extend to HTTPS too, and this would cover all language editions of Wikipedia, not only the Uzbek one. This would raise the issue to more visibility too, and one could hope that it would get resolved then. But just to make it obvious: the action proposed here could escalate the issue. It could resolve it, but this is not necessarily the case.
There have been some discussions within the Uzbek Wikipedia community, and as far as I can tell there is consensus that the step suggested here should be taken, but there is no visible account of this consensus that I can link to, and that is probably to the better for those involved. The Foundation asked to have this discussion on this mailing list, and to reach a decision here about this step.
The question this list would need to find agreement on is: should the Uzbek Wikipedia be set up in a way that makes access via the HTTPS protocol the canonical one?
For Uzbeks at home it is not possible to access Wikipedia in their native language. Whereas in the big cities that is not so much of an issue, as most people speak Russian, this is decreasingly true for the towns and villages of the country. I think it is fair to say that it is part of our mission as the Wikimedia movement to provide these people with access to the sum of human knowledge too.
Warmest regards.
P.S.: Yes, this is a sock puppet mail account, as I prefer my name not be widely visibly associated with this measure due to private reasons. For the same reasons I might have slipped in an euphemism or two in this mail.