Hi Erdal,
Such cases of linguistic opression (yes, that is what this is) and violations of human rights always pain me to hear about.
Another case, which is much worse, though not particularly relevant to WP: any books published in Burma have to be in either Burmese or English. If they're in another language, a translation must be provided so the government censors can read it.
In poor and conflict-ridden areas, where the native languages are including Shan, Karen, Chin, Jingpho, Mon, Yangbye, Wa... etc, there is no budget for anybody to pay for translations for every book or magazine. Thus, since the authoritarian regime came into power, there has been a severe decline of publication in these languages, some of which once had a flourishing literary tradition.
Most publications in these languages now were published illegally.
Mark
On 10/11/05, Erdal Ronahi erdal.ronahi@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
my friend in Iran confirmed that at least two ISP in Teheran block the Kurdish Wikipedia (http://ku.wikipedia.org). The identical message on both is:
Access Denied!
This page will not be accessible for the reason that in our database it has been assinged to the category of blocked contents .
In the event the URL does not contain materials that are forbidden by laws, please fill this form out then hit send.
However, one user from another part of Iran was able to reach it. The mentioned form has meanwhile been filled and sent, but there is no reaction yet.
I think that even a partial censoship against Wikipedia is of interest for the community. The Kurdish Wikipedia is frequently attacked by political vandalizm of Turkish writing users, who want to see all Kurds "wiped out", but this is relatively easy to handle. There have been reports before that Internet Cafe owners in Turkey are forced to install software that blocks Kurdish content, including Wikipedia. This is the first time we hear about such an incident from Iran.
Regards, Erdal _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
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