No access to the Uzbek Wikipedia in Uzbekistan - Wikimedia-l

23 Dec 2012


      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.