On 12 Dec 2008, at 10:52, Florence Devouard wrote:
Now, seriously, what is more important right now ?
That citizens can not read one article ?
Or that all the citizens of a country can not edit all articles any
more ?
I would argue that the content of Wikipedia can be copied and
distributed by anyone, so preventing reading our site is not such a
bid
deal.
However, editing can only be done on our site, so the impact of
blocking
in editing is quite dramatic.
If you can't read the article on Wikipedia, then you can't edit it.
If an article doesn't exist on Wikipedia, then it can't be
distributed by other people.
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 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.
Mike