2008/12/12 Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net>et>:
IMO, the best approach would be to have a channel (a
phone number, an
email address, etc...) where governments can contact the WMF to
request that certain pages are blocked in certain countries. These
entries can then be publicly listed, so that people know that they
are censored, and when a censored page is requested a notice should
be displayed instead saying that the page is censored.
I really can't see this one flying.
I don't like the idea of censoring at all, but it
seems to be
required in today's world. We can't do much about that, but we can
deal with it in such a way that people know that it is being
censored, rather than just hiding it behind error 404 messages. It
also lets the rest of the world continue editing those pages, so that
they are there when they no longer need to be censored (and/or other
sites can distribute them to). Think of it as the digital version of
a black marker over text.
So far we've spotted it pretty readily. We could do this job by
maintaining a list of known blocked pages in given countries. This
page will of course be blocked by all the countries listed, but the
list will spread readily once it exists.
- d.