On Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 3:56 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, We are discussing a tool that is to be implemented WMF wide. There are projects that are utterly different, there are languages spoken in countries where the sheer audacity of printing the historic election communiques of the ruling government can get you killed. They are largely the less and least resourced languages and consequently these projects are comparatively tiny.
There are people I am aware off who want to contribute to Wikinews but it is EXACTLY their need to be outside of their country and to be anonymous that may give them the courage to start doing a journalistic job.. We all now how great our community is at keeping secrets, there are people who insist that everything should be available to them. I am fearful that removing the option for these people to use TOR will kill off what is essential to our goal; bring information to our public..
Even our public figures, people living in the "free world" are harassed, stalked, threatened...Rape, murder, the use of sulphuric acid they are the kind of threats that are issued. This is in my opinion the greatest threat that we face. This threatens our NPOV. For some people safety exists in anonymity but there are people who are loose lipped, who think that the issue is not that dire and who as a consequence will carelessly endanger their fellow wikimedians.
There is a balance between on the one hand the vandals, the sock puppeteers, the insane and on the other hand the people who need the anonymity that TOR can offer. At this moment I am afraid that only one side of the picture has been considered.
Ah, but which side? As far as I know, the proposal was to unilaterally implement a change in *all* wikis which would *force* TOR exit nodes to be soft blocked, regardless of Foundation policy, or of local wiki policy. A number of wiki-en CheckUsers found out about this and objected, stating that, on wiki-en at least, the damage would far outweigh any benefit.
And here we are.