Apparently, in the Sakha Republic in Eastern Russia, browsing sites connected to the republic's network is cheap or free according to the plan's the ISPs offers, while browsing sites outside the republic costs more. So people often choose to read local news and forums and request information from external sites only when necessary. This is actually quite good for developing the local culture and fostering the local language, but it may be detrimental for an international project like Wikimedia. Is anybody familiar with other places in which Internet access works like this? Would it make sense to create some kind of a local mirror of Wikimedia Projects to facilitate participate in such areas? Creating a data center in every such place would probably not be cost-effective, but maybe there's some clever networking trick that could help people overcome these costs, a proxy or some such? Or collaborating with local Universities, Free Software groups or ISPs to host mirrors of content in a language relevant to that area, that would be editable, too? -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬