Thanks for the explanation, James!
On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 10:06 AM, James Hare jhare@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 12:55 AM, David Cuenca Tudela dacuetu@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Eileen,
Thanks for the follow up and for the nice letter that you wrote to the Turkish Minister. There is something I do not understand about Turkey's block and maybe you (or somebody else) could offer some insights about
it.
Apparently the ban was issued because it was felt that Turkey was misrepresented in some articles. My question is, why didn't they block
only
the offending articles (as they did in the past with other articles) instead of the whole site?
Regards, David
One of the effects of Wikipedia's HTTPS-only policy is that ISPs, the Turkish government, and other parties who may be monitoring traffic can't see the contents of the traffic – they can only see a connection between your machine and "wikipedia.org". The option to selectively block traffic doesn't exist because they can't see what that traffic even is.
So why not allow HTTP-only connections if it gives the Turkish government the option to block the articles it wants and letting the others through? Political implications of that aside, the result is that a user couldn't really guarantee what they were reading was Wikipedia. Which is to say, the policy of only allowing access to Wikipedia over a secure connection is how Wikipedia guarantees that you are actually reading Wikipedia and not Wikipedia plus injected propaganda or injected advertisements or what have you.
James Hare Associate Product Manager Wikimedia Foundation https://wikimediafoundation.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe