On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 8:04 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
Erik Moeller wrote:
In general, though, I'd prefer for WMF to move
away from what could be
characterized as appeasement and towards actively resisting censorship
and monitoring.
I agree with you and I imagine most developers would agree with you. But
the question remains: do most Wikimedians?
I think for most Wikimedians, but particularly for Wikimedians in areas
where HTTPS access is restricted, I think there's a general view that
having insecure access over HTTP trumps requiring HTTPS and cutting off
access altogether. While we hope that this situation is inapplicable to
most users, we have to recognize that it's applicable to some percent of
our users. It'd be good to get numbers about how many users we're talking
about and try to better understand what the Wikimedia community thinks is
the best path forward, given the various constraints and consequences.
There's not a lot of great options for us to actively bypass censorship
methods and anything we do will likely result in us being completely
blocked by doing it.
Maybe what we're doing is appeasement, but realistically we have no
political power against China. The editors from mainland China had a
discussion with some of us at Wikimania and they said that Wikipedia is
basically unknown in China because Baidupedia is what shows up in the
search results and Wikipedia does not. They actually spend a great deal of
time trying to make Wikipedia known to readers in hopes of strengthening
the editing community. If we were fully blocked again in China, it wouldn't
cause any political fuss.
- Ryan