On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 10:28 PM, J.L.W.S. The Special One hildanknight@gmail.com wrote:
I am concerned by the "only the USA matters, screw the rest of the world" attitude displayed by some American Wikipedians.
Do we care more about fighting censorship or letting British users edit Wikipedia?
I don't think we care all that much about "fighting censorship": We're not really doing much fighting, we never have. We could do a lot: We could be promoting SSL and TOR, we could be evading the block, we could change Wikipedia to have a black background for censored users with a video from Jimmy explaining why the current situation is harmful. We could be litigating against the IWF and ISPs who are hijacking our traffic, even if we don't think we'd win. etc. We could make readers access to Wikipedia an all or nothing thing. These things would be fighting censorship.
Right now we're just talking politely. At best you can say we're not being instantly cowed by demands by some private organization, over material which as far as we can tell both contributes to our mission (in however minor a way) and which is not illegal. I think this is good because if we were to do otherwise there would be no clear place to stop.
The editing problems are purely from the technical incompetence in the manner in which the UK censorship is being performed, and not from the censorship itself. So long as the UK networks use censorship run in a technically broken way we can have no safety no matter what we host. Your dichotomy is a false one.
(1) The blocking should be changed to be the actual image, rather than the page text. This would remove most of the collateral damage (no more editing problems), and actually do better at accomplishing their goals. Right now the ISPs and IWF claim to be protecting people from a harmful image, yet they aren't doing that: Instead they are protecting people from the discussion of the controversy and not stopping the image at all.
(2) All of the proxies should be sending the XFF header to avoid the collateral damage. (a few did, and we we accept the header from them now)
We've requested both of these things for days now, because of the way the filtering is performed (with each ISP doing its own thing) (2) may take a while, but I see no technical reason why (1) couldn't be done right away.