On 10/06/11 6:33 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
Thomas Morton, 05/10/2011 12:31:
On 5 October 2011 11:20, church.of.emacs.ml
Are you seriously comparing that italien law to
the proposed image filter?
Are you aware of the principle of proportionality? What might be okay to
do against a law that would kill Wikipedia is different from what is
okay to do against piece of software that would most likely have only
minor effects for the reader.
A quote:
The problem, of course, with the principle of proportionality is that
usually it is invoked by one of the stakeholders, who blithely misses the
issue - which is that they are disagreeing over the consequences.
The point being; for these hypothetical Wikipedians running such a protest
the consequence of an image filter may not match your own view...
I agree with
Tobias that this is a red herring.
I'd like to add that despite the "us vs. them" feeling (WMF against the
community and so on), I don't think anoyone can miss the difference
between a "foreign" organization part of your own movement (and which
runs your website) and the government of your country, with regard to
effective actions required.
We also have a small precedent, ace.wiki asking readers to boycott
Wikipedia, an obvious absurd reverted by the global community (long
story short).
I'm happy that the Italian language Wikipedia is back in business, and I
hope that in the future projects will find better ways to protest than
suicide strategies. The key point is that Wikipedias are based on
languages, not countries. For Italian there is a high correlation
between language and country, but that does not mean that there are no
readers in neighboring countries nor in the larger Italian diaspora.
Other major languages are official in several important countries, and
it would not do to shut one of them down in response to a bad proposed
law in only one country.
Protesting bad laws should be a responsibility that belongs at the
chapter level, under the assumption that it is the chapter that is most
familiar with the laws of its country, and what can be done with the
least harm to those around them.
Ray